“But here, here you can see the trees for what they really are. My whole life I watched them growing at the edges of the fields like cross-stitches holding a quilt together.” Her gaze focused on the pines behind the garage and her voice lost that hardened edge she’d acquired around me.
“They stand tall in windbreaks around the farms and you can really see them. You can trace their silhouettes, follow how their branches bend and curl. Some are craggy. Some are thick and strong. Some are stooped like old men against the wind. You can understand their nature here. I didn’t realize it until we moved back and I felt myself breathing again. I was walking home from Winifred’s one day and I just stopped and stood there studying the shapes of the trees on the horizon. They were like portraits, each one of them, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d seen. I knew then that I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t breathe in the city; I was suffocating more every day.”
“But we live in the city.” I felt compelled to make some stab at an argument. “Our lives are there. Our friends, your job. Your boss said you could come back anytime.”
Logic was all on my side. I knew it, could taste it on the words, but they felt hollow against Mary’s eloquence.
“And work in a beige, five-foot cubicle for ten hours a day? With no sunlight? Surrounded by stale air and browbeaten, angry people? No, Peter. I can’t spend my life like that. I’m going to terminate the lease on the front forty this year and buy more chickens next spring. I’m going to be a farmer, like my father, and his father. I’m going to sow my fate with the land.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. The weight of her decision blanketed the room, silencing both of us, forcing us to confront what we’d both known. Eventually she finished the dishes, hung the rag over the faucet to dry, and sat down across from me.
I looked at her, really looked for the first time in months. The transformation I’d sensed, and resented, in her was complete. The girl I’d married had long, glossy locks of blond hair streaming from beneath her veil. Her cheeks had been flushed as she walked up the aisle and her eyes glowed with tears and simple, untainted emotion. The woman in front of me sat practically emotionless, radiating only a calm confidence. All the romance had been carved from her like baby fat, making her strong, making her whole. Her description of the trees echoed through the air between us, plain poetry that could have graced the pages of any number of pastoral novels, and I realized how beautiful she was, and how insignificant I’d become to her.
“So this is it? It doesn’t matter what I want?”
“You’ll have to make your own choice. Whether you want to stay with me or not.”
“How am I with you now? We don’t talk to each other. We haven’t had sex since last fall. Christ, what happened to us, Mary?”
She was quiet for a minute, to the point where I thought she’d retreated into her silence again, but then she drew a breath and made a quiet admission.
“I think it was easier to be angry with you because you hated it here than be angry with myself because I hated the reason we were here.”
Before I could reply, Elsa shuffled into the kitchen, coughing weakly and asking about dinner. We went through the motions. I helped Elsa to her chair and Mary served something from the crockpot that I ate without tasting. By the time I went upstairs to stare out our bedroom window at the chicken barn, any ire I’d harbored toward Mary had turned inside out. Her honesty was contagious. I’d always assumed I was a good person—eating right, running, living consciously, whatever the fuck that meant—when the exact opposite was true. I was the guy who cheated on his wife while she took care of her dying mother. I was absolute slime.
I stripped off my clothes and was searching for pajamas when Mary came upstairs.
“Under the sheets in the basket,” she murmured and brushed by me, changing into her own.
We both climbed into bed and lay there for a minute. Mary turned on her side and I felt her looking at me. Jesus, she would have been better off with anyone else. Maybe that guy, that window guy, had a crush on Mary in high school. They could have had three kids and a chicken farm dynasty by now. Instead she had a dead father, a dying mother, no children, and a selfish, asshole husband. She deserved so much more.
“You’re right about the windows,” I said.
“I know.”
Another minute passed while I stared at the ceiling and neither of us pretended to fall asleep. Then she propped herself up on one elbow.
“Will you stay?” she asked. “I know things haven’t been good, but that can change, can’t it?”
What changed was that her hand moved under the covers, snaking over my chest.
“Mary.” Everything I couldn’t say was wrapped up in the two syllables of her name. No, Mary. It’s too late, Mary. When you shut me out I didn’t wait for you, Mary.
Her lips touched my neck and I closed my eyes. Inhaled. Her hand slipped down my stomach and I caught it, holding her off.
“This isn’t a good idea.”