He smiled. “I guess it did.”
The project was growing to a close and he told her he could probably finish up in the next day or two. “Oh,” she said. “Okay.” It was hard to miss the look of disappointment on her face, and Josh felt the first stirring of unease and something else.
Something that felt like yearning.
He’d be lying to himself if he said he didn’t enjoy seeing Nikki’s face light up every day when she opened the door. She often stopped to watch him work for a few minutes, and the conversations were enjoyable, easy. She was funny and she was smart, and she seemed like a woman who’d risen from a setback and would do fine on her own.
Later that day, when he was finishing up with the new subpanel he’d installed, she brought him a bottle of water. “Thought you might be thirsty,” she said.
“Thanks. I am.” He took off the cap and drank.
“Would you like to go out sometime?” she blurted.
He took a deep breath. “I would,” he said. “If I wasn’t married.”
“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. You’re not wearing a ring. I just thought … it seemed like we … Oh, God.”
“Most electricians don’t wear them on the job. It’s a safety hazard.”
“I’m absolutely mortified.”
“Seriously, it’s okay. I never said anything … You didn’t know. Please don’t be embarrassed.”
He’d driven home that night hoping to light a spark with the woman he was married to, but all he got for his effort was disappointment. He’d picked up dinner and taken Sasha to the park to give Kimmy some alone time, and later, when Sasha was asleep, he asked her to put down her phone and come to bed, which had always been their signal for “I need to connect with you.”
She barely looked up from her phone and said she’d be there soon. But he knew she wouldn’t. She would remain on her phone until long after Josh had given up and fallen asleep.
She was never without it. It was as if she had to be on high alert at all times in case there was some kind of political scandal that she needed to be aware of. But there were so many political scandals, he wondered how anyone could keep track of them anymore. Social media had changed the game and not in the positive way everyone had thought it might. Josh had little patience for social media himself. He had a Facebook profile that he set up mostly as an easy way to share pictures and information about Sasha with his family. But once he started using a smartphone, he could just as easily text that information to them—even his dad, who swore he’d never have time for any such thing and who now delighted in using that very same phone for a variety of helpful tools. Over the years, Josh’s Facebook profile had slowly grown dormant, and he no longer remembered the password. But Kimberly spent every waking moment on her phone getting into political fights with people on Facebook and Twitter.
“Why do you even bother?” he asked her once, because he was fed up with the sight of her nose buried in that tiny screen and he was tired of competing with it for her time.
“Because I care,” she said. “I don’t know why you don’t.”
“I do care. I’m informed and I vote, but I don’t have to go online and tell everybody how I feel about things to prove I care about them. You’re all just shouting into the void. You’re not going to change their minds and they’re sure as hell not going to change yours. It is a waste of time.”
“It’s what’s wrong with our political climate,” she yelled.
“Not burying my face in my phone and getting into arguments with complete strangers is what’s wrong with our political climate? This is what’s wrong with our entire world,” he shouted, pointing at her phone, every bit as angry as she was. “All anyone does anymore is fight. It has gotten us nowhere. We are a nation divided. Period.”
We are a husband and wife divided, he thought, and not just when it came to their level of political participation. He scrambled to think of one thing that unified them by then other than Sasha, and he couldn’t come up with one. They had no shared hobbies. Hell, they didn’t even have a shared TV show. He would always remember the two of them on that old, lumpy hand-me-down couch watching Lost with a bowl of popcorn between them and a blanket over their laps. Kimmy would sometimes fall asleep after the show when the next program came on, and he would look down at her head in his lap and be filled with peace.
The ennui of a long-term relationship that had been on life support for a couple of years already didn’t exactly provide the best environment for giving your spouse the attention they deserved, and it worked both ways. How many times had he tuned her out when she told him a story about the people she worked with, whom he couldn’t care less about? They had reached an impasse where no one was happy, and they were edging closer to miserable every day. But they were a family, and so he’d lowered his voice and so did she.
Politics was the only thing outside of Sasha that Kimmy seemed to care about, all anyone in her professional circle seemed to care about. Not long ago, they’d gone out to dinner with some of her work friends, and one of Kimmy’s male coworkers had made a snide remark when he asked Josh where he’d gone to college and Josh replied that he was an electrician and hadn’t gone to college. The man had winced slightly, as if Josh’s lack of a degree made him unfit to socialize with them. Josh had smiled and politely pointed out that it was nice not having any student-loan debt and that his first employer had paid for him to become an electrician. The man hadn’t said anything more after that.
Josh had remained loyal to his first employer right up until the day the company was bought out by a bigger company. Some of the forthcoming changes didn’t sound all that great to him, so he’d decided to go out on his own, and that had been one of the best decisions he’d ever made. He could have made even more money than he was currently making if he wanted to pursue some of the really lucrative opportunities he was qualified for. He didn’t, because that might mean not being as available to take care of Sasha, but he could if he wanted to.
He’d vented to Kimmy about her coworker on their way home. “Is that how you feel about my lack of a degree, Kimmy? Because my job, the one your coworker turned his nose up at, paid to put you through college so that you wouldn’t have student loans, either.”
“No,” she said. “Of course I don’t think that.”
“I hope not,” he said. But he could see that she was moving closer and closer to a world that wouldn’t welcome him and that he had no interest in being a part of anyway.
“I can’t believe you’d even think that I would,” she said, and she started crying. “And the truth is you make more than him. Much more.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, although there wasn’t anything to be sorry for other than that they were not the same people anymore and maybe the sorry was because he couldn’t fix it, and neither could she.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said.
* * *