I cock an eyebrow.
He sends me a flat, unimpressed stare. “It was fire, but it wasn’t…healthy. What you both had was fucking toxic.”
Reina and I had passion—loud fights, angry make-up sex. I missed her when she wasn’t around, and she missed me…well, she did until she started sleeping with that ex-singer cowboy who was now back where he belonged on a ranch in Texas hauling horse manure.
“It’s flat with Lucy.”
“Flat is not a bad thing,” he tells me. “Turbulence is not all that it’s cracked up to be, so?—”
“And how the fuck would you know?” I cut him off.
Percy doesn’t do relationships, so it’s rich of him to talk about mine.
I look past the window again, at the city, at the dogwoods in the plaza below doing their annual, indifferent blooming. I think about how to say the thing I’ve not been saying for almost two years, how to take it out of the place where I keep the things that are too precise to be comfortable and put it into words without it becoming something I can’t put back.
“I don’t love her. I don’t think I ever have.”
Percy shakes his head. “She’s good people, Fox.”
“I’m not saying she isn’t. I know she is.”
“So then what?—“
“Percy.” I pause to take a deep breath as I reveal the ugly inside of me. “I don’t love her. I don’t think I ever have. I married her because I’d gotten her pregnant, and that was the right thing to do.”
The right thing.
My father’s phrase—his highest category of action, the thing the Bennett men do instead of the thing they want to do, because want is considered a private matter and right is considered a public one.
May he rest in peace.
“And then after she lost it, I couldn’t exactly—” I stop because it’s hard to say the next words, because I know I have wronged my sweet wife. “I stayed out of guilt. That’s the honest answer.”
Percy doesn’t say anything for a moment. He has the good sense, occasionally, to understand when silence is more useful than words.
“That’s a hard thing to say out loud,” he says finally.
“Yes.”
“Does she know?”
“No.”
He nods slowly. “You’ve got to tell her now. She’s in love with you, and it’s not right to string her?—”
“I’m aware,” I interject in frustration.
Lucy’s face flashes in my mind. My kind and loving wife, who is probably at Dina’s right now, cooking with a smile on her face.
I am fond of her.
That sounds small, but I mean it largely—she is funny in a way that surprises me, dry and quick, intelligent.
She is curious about everything.
She reads constantly, eclectically, with no concern for what she’s supposed to be reading to seem erudite, and she talks about books the way she talks about food—with her whole body, with a kind of enthusiasm that takes up space and doesn’t apologize for it.
She is the best cook I have ever encountered, not as a compliment but as a fact, with the straightforward certainty of someone reporting a measurement. She can make a meal out of nothing and have it taste fucking great. She can walk into any kitchen and understand it within minutes, find its logic, and bend it to something better.
