When she gets to class, she doesn’t say she was with Mr. Brannen.
She’d rather take the tardy than give everyone something else to gossip about.
4.
It’s almost time for David to come home, and Chelsea wonders the same thing she does every day about this time: Will they have a good night, or a bad night?
She never feels small until her husband walks in the door. It’s not that he’s a big man—he’s of average height and resents that fact—but he works out all the time, and there’s just something about his presence that makes her shrink down.
Her job, on the surface, should be simple: Be a good wife, a great mom, a loving partner. But there are so many intricate rules she’s had to learn over the years. It’s like walking through a minefield every night, knowing full well where several old pitfalls lie in wait but also aware that there are new dangers to be discovered. He was such a sweet boyfriend in high school, and then they got married far too early because she had to get away from her mom, and he decided to go to college and bring her along, and her entire life shrank down to being pregnant in student housing and learning how to cook his favorite meals in their tiny cinder-block kitchen without setting off the smoke alarm.
Now, every weeknight, in the time between the garage door grumbling and the kitchen door opening, she wonders if it was a trap all along or just a natural progression that happened so gradually she didn’t notice, if she’s the frog in water slowly building to a boil.
His car door closes, and Chelsea stands where he can see her the moment he’s in the house.
“Girls!” she calls. “Dad’s home!”
The only answer from upstairs is rhythmic thumping, punctuated with shrieks of laughter. Brooklyn just got the new dance game for her fifth birthday, and it’s so rare the girls play together these days that Chelsea didn’t want to disturb them. David prefers it when all three of them greet him at the door, respectful and attentive and polite, lined up like golden retrievers, but…well, Chelsea doesn’t really want them down here. Not when he finds the letter and sees that their bank account is somehow, impossibly, overdrawn.
The door opens, and David’s smile sours. Instead of greeting Chelsea with a kiss, he takes off his blazer and carefully folds it over a chair.
“The welcome wagon’s quiet tonight.”
“There was an update to their favorite game,” Chelsea says, hating how meek and apologetic she sounds. “They’re playing together so nicely.” She goes up on tiptoe and wraps her arms around his neck, and he drags his nose along her jaw, breathing in the perfume he buys her every Christmas whether she’s run out or not. Beautiful, it’s called, the same one his mother used to wear. She tried a different one once, something she picked out herself, and he told her she smelled like burned sugar, not at all how a woman should be.
“My day was good,” he says, a reminder.
Her arms uncurl from his neck, and she drops down from her tiptoes and steps back. The look on his face is gentle and reprimanding but also somehow pleased to see her mess up. It’s the look her mother gave her when she was five and got sent outside to get a switch, as if it was a relief to have a reason to punish her. It makes Chelsea want to make things right, and she hates that. She’s always supposed to ask him about his day, but he never asks her about her day unless he’s trying to butter her up.
“I’m glad,” she answers, aiming for perky. “How’s the Hartford account going?”
His frown deepens. She asked the wrong question.
“Not well.” He looks around the kitchen, suspicious. “What’s for dinner?”
“Chicken Caesar salad.” She points to the fridge.
“Rotisserie leftovers?”
Chelsea flinches. “I tried to go to the store today, but it was all roped off. Something happened in the parking lot. Police everywhere, ambulances, yellow caution tape. Probably another shooting.”
“If it was a shooting, we would’ve heard about it already.”
God, he sounds like a tired kindergarten teacher when he talks to her like that, like everything she says is juvenile and stupid and disappointing, and she struggles to pick up her line of thought.
“Well, whatever it was, by the time I got out of the parking lot and through traffic to pick up Brooklyn, it was too late to cook. You said you don’t mind rotisserie over my Caesar.”
He makes a little noise, not quite an agreement, but more of an acknowledgment that perhaps he said that one day to make her feel better when she was gearing up for a pity cry, but they both know the truth.
“I’ll have a beer, then.”
She grabs a frosty bottle out of the freezer, where she’s supposed to put a few at four-thirty every day, and pops off the top. Sipping it, he heads upstairs to the spare room he considers his own private space and goes through his ritual of divestiture, the same one he’s observed since college, when they lived in that tiny one-bedroom. His blazer, hung up according to color. His shirt, tossed in the dry-cleaning bag. His slacks, clipped up by the hems to keep them from developing that telltale wrinkle at the knee. His shoes, on the shelf. Everything just so. No one sets foot in that room. No one. The gun safe is in there. His filing cabinets are there, every year’s taxes tidily tucked away. After she lost a diamond stud, he even brought up Chelsea’s jewelry safe so that he can keep better track of her jewelry wardrobe, offering her the embarrassing process of checking her own things in and out like a librarian until she, as he puts it, learns to act like a goddamn grown-up.
By the time he’s back downstairs in sweatpants and his undershirt, the beer bottle is ready to be recycled and Chelsea has caught up to where she should be in his preferred evening ritual. The girls are setting the table, and she’s smiling as she puts a new bottle in his hand, the glass perfectly chilled, just the way he likes it. The kitchen is almost silent, and he tells Alexa to play classic rock and sighs as Pink Floyd fills the airy room. Chelsea’s body goes tense the moment she hears it; she knows it does not bode well.
Dinner is a quiet affair. Brooklyn picks at her salad, and Chelsea knows that after she’s cleared the kitchen and David is safely out of the way, she’ll microwave some chicken nuggets and cut up an apple because of course five-year-olds don’t want to eat salad.