The Forever Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page A

impertinent teenagers. This thought made her sigh with relief.
    They sat in the kitchen, all six of them, almost like a family. Carmen passed the bowls of salad and steaming meat and noodles and got up twice—once for butter and once for more bread. As often happened while she was watching the children, she barely ate herself. They dazzled her with their unexpected opinions and differences. Of course she wouldn’t repudiate these three people for the chance to have had a real life all to herself! The idea of never having them seemed horrific right now: even Luca,
especially
Luca, who ate neatly and seriously, the way his father had, as if it were a job to be done.
    Near the end of the meal, she felt her phone’s text message alert vibrating through the pocket of her sweater. And later, when she checked—while the older children cleaned up together and Michael and Jeffrey played a game of Risk—there was a message from Danny. “Miss U. Call me.”
    Typically, she would have taken the phone outside, but the rain continued to pelt down. Carmen looked for a private place on the main floor, wandering from room to room. Siena and Troy were in the kitchen, lingering over the last few dishes. Michael and Jeffrey were sprawled on the rug in the living room. Luca was, by this point, in the den solemnly watching TV. She took the back stairs up but stopped when she got to the threshold of her bedroom. She and Jobe had shared this room—this bed—up until the last few weeks whenhe could no longer make it up the stairs. Carmen had dreaded nighttime throughout their marriage: They’d become alien to each other, exquisitely careful, lying sealed off, each occupying a separate half of the bed.
    But there had been other nights—random, scattered, occurring for small reasons—when the space between them had briefly disappeared. Seven years ago she’d had the stomach flu, for example, and was recovering: weak from a day of throwing up and another of leaving her body empty so she wouldn’t. Jobe had come into the room after tending to the children, then still young, and groaned slightly as he took off his shoes. He lay on top of the covers while she was underneath, anchoring her in a pleasant way. And when he’d reached out that evening to put his hand on her forehead—checking for fever—she had turned toward him and curled like a possum into the space under his chin. If he was surprised after months of feeling only her back in bed, he didn’t let on.
    He had reached over her with one long arm to turn off the lamp at her side, but stopped as he was retracting his hand, hesitated, and began stroking back her long hair. He’d made no move to take off his clothes or get under the covers. And somehow being swathed and touched by him in this way felt different, almost as if she were a child and he were anointing her. A holy man.
    Standing in the doorway, staring at the flat, empty bed, Carmen considered the memory of that night. The next day, she’d chalked it all up to post-illness euphoria: Her body was healing, her brain swimming from lack of calories and hydration. Within a week, she’d returned to being uncomfortable in Jobe’s presence, bristling at the way he chewed his food rhythmically, or blew his nose three times in a row then looked in the tissue to see what he’d produced. But now, she recalled the way she’d slid into the crevice his body made by pinning down the blankets and sheets. It was snowing that night, tiny, icy flakes that fell at a slant, ticking sharply against the windowpanes. She’d fallen asleep to this sound and to the glowing sensation of Jobe running his fingers along the tops of her ears, her brain empty of everything else.
    It felt wrong to sit in that room and talk to her lover about the easy life now that her husband was dead, the children were hers alone, and she didn’t have to explain to anyone where she was going on Tuesday or why she sometimes came back damp with her hair smelling of