Fine, thank you.
And the house?
Fine, thank you.
And the garden?
Fine, thank you.
Our dinners alone were also quiet.
Predictable.
He would talk, narrating his day, dissecting office politics or a colleague’s misstep. His voice filled the space between us. He would ask for my opinion, and for years, I believed that meant he valued my thoughts. I would offer them carefully.
But after I saw him with her, I understood.
He didn’t crave my perspective; he craved an echo. Briana’s thoughts must have aligned with his own ambitions; mine were just background noise. So I stopped giving them. I retreated into quiet nods and murmured agreements at the appropriate moments.
Now he never failed to ask about my day at the very end, a question that had become as automatic as breathing.
How was your day, Nora?
My answer was always the same: a brief, empty report of chores and errands.
Fine. I went to the store. I made dinner. I did the laundry.
He asked because that was what husbands did. I answered because that was what wives did.
That was the noise I knew. The bad kind. The kind that made me shrink.
This—Maeve’s enormous family crammed around a long table, voices colliding in the air, jokes volleying like a friendly sport—is something I’ve never seen.
I watch them. I listen. I try to learn.
They lean back. They sprawl. They drape their arms across the backs of neighboring chairs and kick their feet out under the table. Their bodies are loose, unguarded, the bodies of peoplewho have never learned that furniture can be a weapon, that a chair can be thrown, that a table can be flipped.
I perch on the very edge of my chair and try to relax. Try to become like them.Comfortable.
Someone shouts from the other end, “Uncle Mike, you stole my chair, you old thief!”
My body flinches.
The flinch is small. Almost invisible. A tightening of the shoulders, a quickening of the breath, a subtle shift of weight toward the door. No one notices. No one ever notices. But I feel it in every nerve, every muscle, every cell that still remembers the sound of my father’s voice rising before his hand did.
Disappointment floods through me. My nervous system hasn’t learned this new, beautiful language yet. It still translates every raised voice as a threat.
I’m still trying to find my footing in the noise when a teenage girl slides into the seat directly across from me, her eyes sparkling with playful challenge.
She appears out of nowhere. Dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail and a scattering of freckles across her nose. She plants her elbows on the table and leans forward, her chin resting on her interlaced fingers.
“Would you rather,” she announces, “have no phone for a year, or no electricity for a month?”
The question hangs in the air between us. I blink. I have never been asked a “would you rather” question. I have seen them on television, in movies.
I don’t hesitate.
“No phone,” I say.
