A shriek of fear whistled through me. All this time that I’d beenhoping Caleb’s parents would fix their son, they were hoping the same of me—and all the time I’d been wondering why they weren’t doing more, they were wondering the same of me.
“We want to help you, of course,” Doug said. “We’re a family now.”
“Absolutely.” Amelia reached for her glass of wine.“Teamwork.”She was very drunk.
My spirit buckled softly. I whispered, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, first things first: we’ve got to find Caleb a job, of course. A good, respectable job—but one he can actually handle.” Doug paused meaningfully, and in the silence I considered all the jobs Doug had probably gotten for his son over the years that hadn’t worked out. “Business school would’ve been ideal, a nice little time waster, if he hadn’t screwed up the interview.”
Interview. What interview? I bit down on my lip to keep my expression perfectly blank. I knew nothing of this business school plan. I wondered when the plan had formed, and when it had fallen apart. Doug was watching me closely now. Trying to see, no doubt, if I knew what he was talking about. “Well,” I said finally. “It wasn’t in God’s plan.”
Amelia tipped her glass toward me in a wobbly cheers. “A-men.Always been a dreamer, our Caleb. A gentle soul. He wrote a beautiful poem about the Garden of Eden when he was in grade school. I’m sure I still have it somewhere. Do you remember that poem, Dougie? How he rhymedEvewithbelieve?”
“He could be perfect for politics someday,” Doug said, ignoring his wife entirely. “It’s actually one of the few positions of power where it benefits you to underthink. If you don’t think too hard, you never get rattled.”
“Therewasthat one silly little debacle with the classroom rabbit,” Amelia went on, frowning mistily at no one. “But it was an accident. He didn’tmeanto.”
“I imagine him as a state senator …”
“… multiple eyewitnesses said the rabbit bit him first …”
I said nothing. I was having a hard time processing so much information at once. My husband, a former poet, a future politician, a convicted rabbit killer, a presently unemployable man.
“We’d put the right advisers around him, of course,” Doug said, sensing my panic and diagnosing it incorrectly. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Right now, I think we should just get him a stable job, keep him busy and working, and then we figure out something from there.” Here, Doug gave me a smile that was at once condescending and encouraging, and for a moment I felt myself in that booth again, a pair of sweating beers between us. I was a coal miner, a warehouse worker, a union man, and he was the man who would save my job, feed my family, resurrect my town. Then I blinked and remembered who I was, and the room tilted a degree. I placed a hand on the counter to steady myself. “What are you asking me to do, exactly?”
“Well, Natalie: For all intents and purposes, you are the man in the family right now.” Big sharky grin. “I can get him a job, sure, butyou’vegot to make him do it.” He paused, seemed to realize only then that I was standing while they were seated. “Would you like to get comfortable?”
I walked around the island and pulled out a stool, like the good little dog—I mean wife—that I was.Bark bark.
There was a vineyard down the road, apparently. Doug was good friends with the owner. There was a management position available for Caleb. Nothing special, but it would keep him busy all day long, and he would oversee the farmworkers on the property. If he got a job in business someday, he couldtechnicallydescribe this work as “management experience” on a bullet point, and if he opted for a political run, he could say he had experience working “alongside people from all walks of life.” If he got fired, well. No one would be the wiser.
As Doug went on, describing a position that basically amounted tovineyard janitor,I found myself nodding along like a bobblehead.It was the opposite of what I had hoped for, and still I heard myself say, as if Doug had popped a quarter into the back of my skull and cranked some hidden shaft: “What a perfect idea.”
When I came back upstairs with the laundry, Caleb was standing over the bassinet, staring down at our daughter in the darkness. I paused at the door threshold. Caleb gave me a thumbs-up,still asleep,and I sighed with relief. I set down the laundry by the bed and walked over to him.
“I wish there was a job for playing with babies,” Caleb whispered. “I’d be great at that.”
I didn’t say anything. The panic I’d felt earlier in the kitchen was gone now, replaced by a dull, sweet throbbing in my chest. Hewasgood at playing with babies. He never grew bored or irritated with Clementine. He found her endlessly entertaining. In fact, that was the problem, wasn’t it? He had no desire to do anything else.
My husband wanted too little from his life. And me? I wanted too much.
Suddenly it was so obvious: Caleb should’ve been born a woman, and I should’ve been born a man. A sad sickness turned my stomach. We were equally broken in that way.
“Listen,” Caleb said quietly. “I know this hasn’t been easy. I just need to figure out what my purpose is. What I want to be. And I will, Natalie. I promise.”
I looked up at my husband in the darkness. Then a miracle took place: the beauty of His divine will broke over me. It felt like the childhood game the girls in class had played with one another, but never with me:Crack an egg on your head, let the yolk dripdown—
I shivered, suddenly alive with His presence.
Marrying Caleb had not been a mistake, or an act of ignorance. No.Quite the contrary: it had been the beginning of adivine mission.We were put on this earth to teach each other how tobe.To give each other purpose. I would help Caleb become a better man, and he would help me become a better woman. Through my example, Caleb would grow stronger, more ambitious, and through hisexample, I’d grow softer, more loving with our children. Like a balancing of liquids: he would take, and I would give, until we met each other in the middle. It would be the job of a lifetime for both of us. We were a match made in Hell—I mean heaven. I could see it now.
I tilted my face upward toward him in the darkness, and for the first time since the baby was born, we kissed with tongue. “Make love to me,” I whispered bravely. We tumbled backward into our bed and had breathless, missionary, mushy-penised sex. Afterward, in the darkness while Caleb snored beside me, I cried silent tears at the beauty of the Lord’s bounty.
The next day, midafternoon, I woke Clementine up from her nap and brought her to Caleb. “I’m busy right now,” he said, holding our daughter in the air between us like she was a leaking food delivery bag.
“Not for the next hour, you’re not. You’re taking our daughter for a walk.”
I stood in the doorway, waving merrily at my husband as he pushed the stroller down the driveway. When he was far enough away, I shut the door and crossed the house to Doug’s study.
