She finally looked up at me. “It’s okay.”
“I should have thought of it.”
“No, really, Peter.” Mary sat up straighter as someone came and quietly put the dessert on the table between us. “Babies haven’t been on my mind lately.”
“That’s too bad. After this I wanted to go park the car somewhere and neck. Or more.” I winked at her. She said nothing so I continued, hopeful.
“It feels like we’re back in the dorms again. Waiting for our roommates to leave, or finding a quiet park. Remember the second floor of the Fourth Street ramp? The side where the lights didn’t work?”
She took a spoonful of chocolate and shook her head. “We have to get back. We’ve already been gone too long.”
“Elsa’s done fine on her own for seventy-three years. She’ll make it through another hour.”
Mary took another bite, ignoring me. Then she abruptly set the spoon down and crossed her arms.
“What is it?”
“Ten dollars for chocolate mousse. That’s crazy.”
“Well, it’s even crazier to order it and not eat it then.” I dug in. It was damn good. Light and rich and not too sweet.
“Try another bite. This one’s the ten-dollar bite.” I hovered a spoonful in front of her face and she sighed before taking it.
She started eating again, but quietly, unwilling to engage. I drank the rest of my coffee and tried to draw her out. Nothing worked.
When the bill came, Mary immediately grabbed it. She paid the waiter and picked up her purse. “Are you ready?”
“Elsa’s fine,” I said, rubbing her arm as we walked to the car.
“I know,” she replied, even though we both knew her mother wasn’t fine.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Sixty-eight dollars for dinner, Peter. On top of twenty for the movie. Who do you think is going to pay for all that?”
“I’ve got a job. We’ll have money.” Her irritation was slowly seeping into me now, too.
“You haven’t even started working yet and you’re already spending it.”
“I just wanted us to go out and have a nice time,” I said over the car roof before we both got in and slammed the doors.
The road to Pine Valley was a dark, flat, two-lane highway lined with crop fields. Neither of us bothered with the radio. The evening seemed, unfortunately, past the point of salvation.
If I was going to be honest—which, with every passing mile of towering cornstalks, sounded like an increasingly reasonable idea—I still couldn’t quite figure out how I’d gotten here.
I was a Minneapolis kid. I grew up hanging out at uptown coffee shops, debating the cover art of my high school literary magazine over pasta at Figlio’s, and spending every weekend flipping through CDs at the Electric Fetus. I met Mary at the U and we got married the summer after graduation. We were probably too young, but Mary’s parents were old. She’d been a late-life baby, their ultimate surprise after years of infertility and relinquished dreams. They gave Mary every opportunity, lavished her with love and support, and in return she wanted to give them the gift of seeing her married and settled. I maxed out my credit card and put that diamond on Mary’s finger and we stood at the altar of her hometown church while Mary’s parents beamed from the front row. The wedding comforted both of us when, the very next spring, her father had a massive heart attack and died planting his soybean fields.
After the wedding, we found a Victorian one-bedroom rental on the bus line, and I started grad school while Mary got a job at one of the banks downtown.
And then congestive heart failure came along.
Elsa, Mary’s mother, started getting weaker and weaker. Mary began driving down once a month to check on her and help out around the farm. There was always some canning to do or an outbuilding to repair or doctor appointments to keep. I tried making jokes about my farmer wife, but Mary laughed less and less. Then she was making trips every weekend and since some of my classes were at night, I wouldn’t see her for days at a time. By the time I graduated and got my teaching license, Mary was spending three days a week in Pine Valley and working ten-hour days in the city to make up for it.
She was exhausted all the time. I tried to convince her that Elsa needed to sell the property, but she would grind her teeth every time I mentioned it, roll her eyes, and say, “Don’t you think I’ve tried that?”
We couldn’t find anyone to come help Elsa; the only qualified nurse who was willing to drive out to the farm wanted a thousand a week to check in on her and administer her meds.
I looked for a teaching job so Mary could quit the bank or at least scale back to part-time. I was trying to be a good husband. Isn’t that what good husbands do? Except I couldn’t find anything. The only openings were in elementary special ed and I had no experience with behavioral disorders. They wanted me to promise to go back to school for the specialty, but I wanted to teach literature, not social skills.
Then last March, Mary came home with a newspaper clipping. She showed me the ad—Pine Valley High School English teacher, the exact job I was qualified for—and told me that Elsa knew the principal personally and had put in a recommendation for me. The principal was waiting for my call.
God, I did not want to move to Pine Valley. But she looked so hopeful and tired, and I don’t know how it happened but two months later we moved in with her mother and I lost my entire life. Although she said it was only temporary, we both knew that meant we were staying until Elsa died, whether that took months or years. Lately, I hated to admit it, I’d been hoping for months.