A Small Indiscretion Read Online Free PDF Page B

you know that?” I asked your father.
    “Because I’m full of fun facts,” he said, smiling.
    “Dad just knows about interesting stuff, Mom,” you said.
    “Oh, really?”
    You caught yourself. “Not to say that you don’t.”
    But of course that was exactly what you were saying, and I felt the old tug of discomfort. Your father was trained as a doctor; you were a STEM Scholar; I didn’t even have a college degree. And the thing that concerned me—the lighting of homes—was trivial compared to the matters that preoccupied you and your father. You, science in its purest form. Your father, science as it applied to the health of the body. Never mind that my salary from the store contributed significantly to the family income. Never mind that it had helped support us, over the years, when the books your father edited and published—books on chronic disease, arthritis, diabetes, cancer—unexpectedly failed to sell, or cost too much to produce. Or when the book publishing business as a whole felt the reverberations of the changing economy.
    “Looks like we’re both going to be in the business of making light,” you said, trying to appease me.
    “But Mom’s lights aren’t brighter than the sun,” Clara said.
    “And why do people want all kinds of lights made of junk, anyway?” Polly asked.
    “Well, because it’s beautiful junk,” I said defensively. “And people need a little beauty now and then.”
    “As long as it’s not form over function,” you said.
    “What’s wrong with a little form over function?”
    “Give her a break,” your father said. “Someone does need to put beauty in the world, and your mother does it very well.” He stood up and fished a box from a drawer in the hutch and handed it to me. “Speaking of beauty.”
    “Jonathan,” I said, taken aback. “We said no gifts.”
    “I know. But this is long overdue,” he said. “Open it.”
    Polly pulled the box out of my hand. “Can I open it?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    She opened the box. Inside was a diamond wedding ring. I picked it up and slipped it on and held it up to the light.
    “You didn’t need to do this,” I said.
    “You’re crying,” Clara said.
    “It’s all right if she cries a little,” your father said.
    “I’m crying because … it’s beautiful.”
    It was the diamond from your father’s grandmother’s ring, he explained, and the three smaller stones in the setting were to represent each of you. He’d had it made to replace the cubic zirconium he’d bought me when we were first married, which in turn replaced the gumball-machine ring he’d slipped onto my finger when he proposed.
    “I wasn’t sure whether you’d like gold or white gold,” your father said. “I figured you could have it reset if you wanted something different.”
    I stood up and kissed him.
    “I don’t want something different,” I said, and I meant it. And not just about the ring, but about our twenty-one years of marriage. The people we’d made. The life we’d shaped together, exactly the life I wanted. I had no reason to suspect, standing there, that the very next day, I would begin to act not as if I wanted to give that life away, but as if I wanted something different to go along with it.
    A FTER DINNER, WE all played charades. Then you read the girls a bedtime story, and your father promised to wake them up early so they could try to watch the daisies open. You slept in your old room.
    “I changed the sheets,” I said, pulling the covers back.
    “Gee, thanks, Mom. ’Cause I’m not used to sleeping on dirty sheets.”
    “I know, I know.”
    “I brought my laundry.”
    “That was collegiate of you.”
    “If you don’t have time, it’s no biggie.”
    “I have time.”
    I threw a load in right away. It gave me pleasure to wash all those dark T-shirts and dark sweatshirts and dark jeans that smelled of aftershave and outdoors. Some of it, I guessed, had not been washed since I’d laundered it at Christmas.