Page 33 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

* * *

Sunday at six, Carol’s car pulls in, and the house gets loud in the best way. Teddy comes through the door already telling three stories at once — there was a dog, the dog’s name was also Gus, this is the greatest fact he has ever owned. Margot comes in reading, coat still on, and detours past the windowsill where her volcano sits before she goes up, which she thinks nobody notices. Everybody notices. Nobody says anything.

Dinner is normal. That’s the astonishing thing — how normal it is. Pot roast, Teddy’s dog saga in seven installments, Margot deciding “also-Gus” is an acceptable name for a dog, which for her is a rave. Gus carves. I pass plates. Our hands don’t touch once, because we’re being careful, and every time they don’t touch, the not-touching is the loudest thing at the table.

He catches my eye exactly once, over Teddy’s head, the same way he did two months ago across a plate of wall-ball rules. Two months ago I got up for the water pitcher so nobody would see my face.

This time I look away first.

Four people at this table. Two secrets. Both of them mine, and one of them is his too, and he doesn’t know they’re related. Someday, some way, something is going to come out. I clear the plates. Teddy hands me his fork handle first, the way his father taught him. Two months ago, a secret this size would have had me half-packed by morning. Instead I stand at the sink and decide, again, to stay.

Someday isn’t tonight.

Gus

Here is what careful looks like, three weeks in.

We don’t touch in the kitchen before eight-thirty, because Teddy materializes without warning, silent as fog, usually wanting cereal. We don’t touch in the kitchen after seven, because Margot reads in the big chair, which has a clear view of the entire kitchen. Doors stay open when kids are awake. Her room after eleven, some nights — the nights the wanting wins. I’m back in my own bed before the furnace kicks on at five, carrying my shoes like a teenager in a house I own outright.

I’m forty-nine years old. I have a business card that says AMBASSADOR on it. I spent last Tuesday hiding in my own pantry for ninety seconds, holding a woman against the shelf she alphabetized. Both of us were shaking with laughter you can’t let out. Teddy had come downstairs to report — to the empty kitchen, urgently — that his sock had a hole in it.

She grabbed the rice off the shelf as cover. We ate rice that night. It was excellent, and I couldn’t look at it.

Thanksgiving came and went, and the third pie came out perfect, exactly as rehearsed. Carol carved out her usual seat and her usual observations. The turkey was a little dry, Teddy needed a haircut, June had done something different with the stuffing — all of it noted flatly, for later. June, across the table, thanked her and passed the beans like a professional. Under the table, nowhere near anyone, our feet did not touch. That’s the game now. Whole evenings built out of things that don’t happen.

The agony isn’t the hiding. I’d hide anything to keep this. The agony is what the hiding says while it’s working — every closed door repeats it, quietly, all day. She deserves a man who walks her through the front of his life. What she’s got is a man who listens for the furnace and knows which stair creaks loud enough to wake the house.

The fourth one from the bottom. Every night, on my way to her and back, I step over it.

The comedy, though. Nobody warns you about the comedy. We have developed, without one word of planning, a full system of signals that would embarrass a spy agency. Two taps on the counter means kids incoming. The word “inventory” — her joke, once, whispered — means meet me in the laundry room if you can invent a reason. There is no dignified way to invent a reason to be in your own laundry room at two on a Saturday. I have invented eleven.

And I still cook five portions. Nora’s extra, into the fridge with the others — some habits I’m not ready to look at, even now. Except now June eats at my elbow instead of across the table, hip against the counter, stealing off my plate like it’s her legal right, and for the first time in four years the leftovers actually get eaten.

* * *

The second Friday of December, both kids go down early, flattened by the last week of school before break. Soon the house is dark except the stove light. June is at the counter writing the week’s grid for the fridge, wearing my sweatshirt. That’s a thing now, my sweatshirt, and I have elected not to examine what seeing her in it does to me.

I come up behind her and put my mouth on the back of her neck, and the marker stops mid-word.

“I’m doing the schedule,” she says, not meaning it.

“Wednesday’s wrong.” It isn’t. She turns around anyway, arms already up and around my neck. The kiss goes from hello to urgent in about four seconds, three weeks of not-touching-before-eight-thirty arriving all at once.

This is the other thing nobody tells you about careful. It compresses. Everything you didn’t do all week is still in there, stored, waiting, and when a door finally closes it all comes out at once. Her hands are under my shirt. My hand comes down flat on the schedule, smearing Wednesday. We’re not going to make it upstairs, and I’m about to say so.

“Laundry room,” she breathes. “The door locks.”

The door locks. Inside, the dryer is running — she planned that, warm dark room and cover noise, one more piece of evidence that I am dealing with a professional. I get the sweatshirt over her head. Nothing under it but her, which she watches me discover, delighted with herself, and then there’s no more planning anywhere in the building. Her jeans, gone. My shirt, somewhere. She’s up on the dryer with her heels hooked behind me and her mouth at my jaw, and it’s fast and greedy and completely without ceremony.

“Three weeks of watching you butter toast,” she whispers, working my belt with both hands. “Do you know what you look like buttering toast?”

“Tell me later.” My hand is between her legs and she’s already soaked, already rocking against my fingers, and the sound she starts to make gets bitten off against my shoulder. I work her slow just to feel her fight the quiet. Two fingers in her, thumb on her clit, her teeth at my collarbone, her whole body one long argument with silence. When I take my thumb away she growls. When I put it back she forgives me, and the forgiveness has her nails in it.

“Gus.” Barely sound at all. “Now. We have maybe ten minutes of dryer.”

“Then stop wasting them arguing.” I pull her to the dryer’s edge and push into her in one smooth stroke, and her spine arcs. The machine hums warm under her and I stop hearing the machine. There’s no slow tonight. There’s her hands fisted in my hair and my name whispered against my ear like a swear word. We move hard and quiet, the whole conversation we can’t let the house hear happening some other way. Her heels dig in. She pulls my mouth down to hers and takes the sounds straight off my lips before they can get loose in the house. I drive into her hard enough that the dryer knocks the wall once, twice, keeping our secret badly. She’s close fast — the flutter, the pull. I bend to get my mouth on her breast and take her right up to the edge of it—

The doorbell rings.