The therapist’s name was Dr. Lydia Warren, and she had that particular gift of saying very little but making you say everything. Her office was in a small building in Beaufort, on the second floor, with a window that looked out over the live oaks lining the sidewalk. The room was painted a soft, calming blue, calming or depressing, depending on Claire’s mood. There was a couch with two chairs and a box of tissues on the end table, a clock on the wall that ticked quietly, counting down the fifty minutes Claire and Greg spent here every Thursday at four o’clock.
They sat at opposite ends of the couch, like strangers on a bus. They were on session six, and it was not going well. It was not going badly; it was just going the way the therapist had warned it would go, slowly, painfully, with lots of silence.
Greg handled the silence better than Claire expected. He sat on his end of the couch, hands on his knees, and answered all the doctor’s questions with careful deliberation. This was the first time in his adult life he had been asked to examine the inner workings of his mind, and he seemed to find the process unfamiliar, but he didn’t deflect. He didn’t make jokes. He just sat there and tried.
On Greg, trying looked like a man learning a language he should have learned twenty years earlier, slowly sounding out all the words and getting some of them wrong, but he still showed up every week.
Claire had learned that their marriage hadn’t gotten into this mess without her making some mistakes along the way, too. And it was hard to change ingrained patterns, but she was trying.
Today, Dr. Warren asked each of them to describe what they wanted the marriage to look like a year from now.
Greg had gone first. He’d stared at the carpet for a long time, and Claire had watched the side of his face, trying to process in his brain something he’d never been asked to do before.
“I want to eat dinner together,” he’d finally said, “at the table, not with me in the den and her in the kitchen, but together. And I want to know what she’s thinking about while we eat.”
Dr. Warren looked at Claire. “And you?”
Claire had looked at Greg, at his hands on his knees, at the gray around his temples and the lines around his eyes. He was wearing a College of Charleston T-shirt, the same one he’d worn to her birthday dinner almost a year ago, which she now realized was just probably his favorite shirt, and she’d never even asked him about it.
“I want to be surprised,” she had said. “I want him to surprise me, not with a gift, just with a question I don’t expect or a thought he hasn’t shared. I want to sit across from my husband and discover something about him that I didn’t know.”
Dr. Warren let the silence sit. The clock ticked in the background.
“You know what’s funny?” Greg said, still looking at the carpet. “I’ve been watching the Braves since 1995. Almost thirty years, same team, same replay, same highlight reels. I just realized I’ve been doing the same thing with our marriage, watching the replay, just running the same plays, never looking up to see if the game has changed.”
Claire had stared at him. In twenty-six years, Greg had never once used a sports metaphor to describe their relationship. It wasn’t poetry, but it was Greg, and Greg was trying to articulate his inner life through baseball, which was actually the most romantic thing he’d done in many years.
“The game has changed,” Claire said.
“Yeah,” Greg said, smiling slightly. “I’m starting to see that.”
Then they had driven home separately, as they always did after therapy. Claire needed those twenty minutes in the car alone to process what had happened. She thought Greg probably did, too.
When she got home, Greg was in the kitchen, not in the den. He was standing at the stove, looking confused. The air smelled like burning garlic or something that he might have been attempting to stir-fry.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked.
“Cooking,” Greg said. He was holding a spatula, but had a look on his face as if he had only held one, maybe three times in his life.
“The garlic is burning.”
“I know. How do I make it stop burning?”
“Well, the first thing would be to turn the heat down.”
He turned the heat down, but the garlic kept smoking.
Greg stared at the pan, then looked at Claire, then back at the pan. And then his face did something she hadn’t seen in decades, decades. He looked actually sheepish, but endearingly so, like a man who had just discovered that cooking was harder than it looked and was very embarrassed to be discovering it at 52 years old.
“I watched a video,” he said, “on my phone. It said stir-fry was easy.”
“Who said stir-fry was easy?”
“I don’t know, a man on YouTube who had a very convincing voice.”
Claire looked at the stove. The garlic was basically charcoal. The chicken was completely raw, and the vegetables were sitting on the counter in a bag, still uncut. The rice cooker wasn’t plugged in. It was, by every measurable standard, a complete disaster.
She started laughing. It wasn’t the polite laugh that she’d perfected over years of parent-teacher conferences or the careful laugh she used when Greg said something that wasn’t funny but needed to be acknowledged. It was a real laugh from her belly, the kind that made her bend over and made her eyes water, because here was her husband, who hadn’t cooked a meal in their twenty-six-year marriage, standing at the stove with burnt garlic and a YouTube education and a baffled expression of a man who had decided at least to try.
