Page 45 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Winston….” She said my name the way she says it when she already knows the answer and just wants to hear me say it anyway, like a woman setting a trap with cheese she already bought. “You told a man who just lost a child to suck it up.”

“I told a man who’s been walking around here for weeks like somebody let the air out of him that grieving is fine on your own time, but it can’t come to my meetings. There’s a difference.”

“There ain’t much of one, the way you tell it.”

“Well, I wasn’t looking for your review.” I said it with a little teeth in it, the way I generally did, and she gave me a look that told me she heard the teeth and didn’t care.

“You never are,” she said. “Don’t stop me from giving it.”

I let that sit, because arguing with Odette about whether she was gon’ say her piece was like arguing with weather. You don’t win. You just wait for it to pass and hope you didn’t leave the windows open.

On the television, the next family came up, and the host asked something about the worst place to get a phone call from your boss.

“The toilet,” a woman shouted, and the whole audience lost it. Even I felt my mouth twitch, though I wasn’t about to give Odette the satisfaction of seeing it.

“See, now that’s just true,” Odette said. “Ain’t nothing worse than that.”

“Woman, focus. We’re talking about our son.”

“We’re talking about Kaisen because you want to be talked out of feeling bad for saying something cold to him, and I ain’t in the business of doing that for you no more.” She picked up her tea, took a sip, and set it back exactly where the ring already was. “You want absolution, go find a priest. I already used mine up thirty years ago marrying you.”

“That supposed to be a joke?”

“Supposed to be the truth wearing a joke’s clothes. Same as you do half the time.”

I grunted because there wasn’t a clean way to argue that one, and turned my attention to the game show like it might rescue me, which it did not. The next question was something about things a husband forgets, and I was not in the mood to hear America’s opinion on that particular subject with my wife sitting six inches away, holding a remote like a gavel.

“How’s the leg?” she asked after a minute, and her voice had shifted some—not soft, exactly. Odette don’t do soft the way some women do, all melting and syrupy, but lower. Steadier. The voice she used when she was actually asking instead of performing the asking.

“It’s healing.”

“That ain’t what I asked.”

“It hurts,” I said, because there wasn’t no use lying to a woman who’d changed my bandages more times than I could count over the course of our marriage, for this and worse. “Hurts different from a week ago. Less like it’s on fire, more like somebody’s standing on it.”

“That’s progress, then.”

“That’s a low bar, but I’ll take it.”

She got up off the couch without another word, and I watched her go, that robe swishing around her ankles, house shoes scuffing against the hardwood in that particular rhythm I’d know blindfolded after all these years. She went toward the kitchen, and I settled back into the couch cushions and let my eyes go half-closed, listening to the cabinet doors open and close, the refrigerator seal give its little suck of a sound, and water running for a second and shutting off.

I want to say something plain here, because I don’t say it much, and I ain’t in the habit of saying it to nobody but myself. There is a particular peace that comes from being an old man in his own house, wounded but not dying, listening to his wife move through the kitchen, doing something for him. I built a life where very few people get to see me need anything. Odette was the only one who’d ever gotten to see the whole of it—the parts that bleed, the parts that limp, the parts that sit on a couch too tired to argue about a game show. There is something in that history, that accumulation of thirty-some years of her seeing me at my worst and staying anyway, that I have never once said out loud because saying it makes it sound like weakness, and I have spent my entire life making sure nobody mistakes me for weak.

She came back with a tray. An actual tray, the wooden one with the little raised edges that usually only came out for company or for Sunday breakfast when she was feeling ambitious. On it was a mug of something steaming that smelled like ginger and honey, a plate with a sandwich cut corner to corner the way she’d been cutting my sandwiches since before Amai was in diapers, and a small white pill dish with three capsules lined up in a row like soldiers waiting on orders.

“What’s all this?” I said, sitting up.

“This is you eating something and taking your medicine like a grown man instead of a stubborn one.” She set the tray on my lap carefully, mindful of the hip, and pulled a folding TV table out from beside the couch and set it up in front of me anyway. Because Odette does not trust a tray on a lap to stay level, not after thirty years of watching me shift and fidget through every meal like a child who never learned to sit still. “Drink the tea first. It’ll help your stomach before the pills hit it.”

“I don’t need help. I need my hip to stop feeling like somebody’s grinding it in a mortar.”

“And the pills’ll do that if you take ’em on time and don’t skip ’em like you did Tuesday.”

“I didn’t skip nothing Tuesday.”

“Winston.” Just my name again, that particular flat delivery, and I knew there wasn’t a lie in this house that survived past the sound of her saying my name that exact way. She’d caught me in enough of them over the years to have built up an instinct for it, like a bloodhound that had smelled the same cologne one too many times.

“Alright. I skipped the noon one Tuesday. I was in a meeting.”