9. Marnie
Marnie
My husband, Keith Hennigan hands me his phone across the counter in the morning with the thread open, unlocked, scrolled to the top, before I've asked a single question.
"You must have seen it light up last night," he says. "You didn't sleep. Just read it."
So I read it.
I'm sorry, I know it's late. I can't stop thinking about what April said at lunch about the candle thing. I don't have the right to be upset, I know that. I keep telling myself that but then I get in the car and I can’t stop crying.
The candle thing is a unity candle. April's not doing one. She and Drew decided in March to skip it because it takes four minutes and April said it makes weddings feel like a school assembly, and so there is no candle, and so no mother of the bride is lighting anything.
Sherry found out at lunch that there was a tradition, and that it had been cancelled, and she went home and lay in the dark and worked out that even the traditions she'd never known about had already closed without her.
Keith's replies are underneath.
You do have the right. You just don't know what to do about it, or how to assert it.
That's the sentence. That's the one that puts a hand around my throat at ten to seven in the morning while my husband makes toast.
You do have the right.
It's good. It's very good. It's exactly the kind of thing Keith says when he's being the best version of himself, and he said it to her early in the morning while I was lying on my back in our bed with my eyes open.
I scroll.
There are thirty or forty messages going back to late August. Most of them are logistics. April's ring size. What time the rehearsal is. Whether the venue has an elevator, because Sherry's knee.
Some of them aren't.
Sherry: She's a good kid because somebody raised her that way. I'm not going to pretend that was me.
Keith: I know. Give it time.
Sherry: Thank you for being kind to me. I didn't expect it and I don't deserve it.
"Okay," I say, and hand it back.
"That's it?"
"What do you want, Keith?"
"I don't know. Something. You've been carrying around this idea that I'm hiding something and there's the whole thing, there's every word. None of it hidden.”
"I know."
"So?"
I look at my husband, at his hair sticking up on the left, at the toast he's about to burn because he never once in his life has adjusted that setting.
"Why is talking to you about all her problems?” I ask.
"Because she doesn't have anyone else."
"She has a therapist, remember? She told me she’s had years with a therapist.”
"It's not the same thing." He pulls the toast, swears at it, drops it on a plate. "Marnie, I'm the only other person alive who was in that house. You get that, right? Nobody else knows what that year looked like. Not her sister, not her therapist, not you."
Not you.
He doesn't even notice he says it.
"I know what the almost twenty-four after it looked like," I say.
"That's not what I meant."
"I know exactly what you meant."
April calls me Wednesday about the shuttle contract and, at the end, in the middle of nothing, says this:
"Sherry told me you and Dad had a really rough year when Erin was a baby."
I'm at a stoplight on Vernon with my blinker going.
"She what?"
"She wasn't gossiping. She said it like, in a nice way? Like she was saying that every marriage has one and that she thinks you two are stronger for it." A pause. "Was that a weird thing for her to tell me?"
"Little bit."
"Sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."
"You didn't do anything wrong, honey."
The year Erin was born, Keith slept at the office four nights a week for eleven months and I got very close to leaving him.
Four people on this planet know that. Me, Keith, my sister Deb and the counselor at the Lutheran church on Wooddale who charged us forty dollars a session and told Keith he was going to lose everything he was working to protect.
Well, make that five people, now.
I feel violated, but still don’t complain.
Sherry comes by on Thursday afternoon with the seating diagram she offered to help laminate, which is not a thing that needed a person, and I make coffee because I make coffee.
We sit in the sun porch. She's good company. That's what nobody tells you either. She's funny about her job and self-deprecating about her knee and she does an impression of the orthodontist that makes me laugh out loud twice.
Then she sets down her cup.
"Can I say something? And you can tell me to mind my business."
"You can say something."
"Keith told me this has been hard for you."
The sun porch is very bright. There's a wasp working at the corner of the screen and I watch it for a second because I need somewhere to look that isn't her face.
"Did he?”
"He's worried about you, you know.” She leans forward, hands together, all warmth. "And I want you to know I don't take it personally. I think it would be strange if it wasn't hard. I've thought about it a lot, actually, about what it must be like to be you right now."
"What must it be like?"
"Honestly?" She tilts her head. "I think it must feel like somebody came back to apply for a job you’ve been doing for free."
I sit there with a cup in my hand.
That is the single most accurate sentence anybody has said to me in six weeks, and she is the one who says it, and she says it so kindly.
"Did he say hard, or did he say something else?" I ask.
She hesitates. Just barely.
"He said you were struggling with it."
"That's a dramatic word."
"I'm sure I'm mangling it."
"No," I say. "I don't think you are."
The wasp gets in through the corner of the screen. Sherry flinches and I get up and open the door and shoo it back out with the seating diagram, and we both laugh, and she says she should get going, and she hugs me at the door and I let her.
Keith gets home after six.
I'm at the counter with the laminator, which is still hot.
"How was your day?" he says.
"Sherry stopped by."
"Oh good, did she bring the thing?"
"She told me you told her I've been struggling with her being back."
He stops in the middle of the kitchen with his bag still on his shoulder.
I keep my voice level. I keep it so level that later I'll wonder if that was a mistake, if I should have thrown something instead, if a plate would have made this land faster.
"You actually told her that?" I say.
"Marnie, she asked me a direct question."
"You told her what, Keith?"
And my husband, who has never cheated on me, who has never once looked at another woman across a room, who came home every night of our marriage, sets his bag down on the chair and says:
"She asked me why you don't like her. What was I supposed to do, lie?"
I clench my fists and wonder what’s happening to my marriage.