The Instant When Everything is Perfect Read Online Free PDF

up.
     
    Harper finishes eating and stands up. He unfolds forever, his body long and lanky, the tallest Alden boy, taller than Ford. He is on his nighttime path, homework, IMing his friends, shower, sleep. He doesn’t seem to notice his parents, but he touches Mia’s shoulder as he passes her at the sink. Her baby. Her last baby, a man now.
     
    “So how was it?” Ford asks, his elbows on the table. “What’s your mom going to do?”
     
    Mia sighs. “She has to decide by Monday. But it looks like she’ll wait to heal from the first surgery before she goes ahead with the reconstruction.”
     
    “Does the doctor seem good?” Ford takes his last sip of wine, stares at the empty glass, and then pours another to the top of the thin, crystal glass.
     
    “He’s nice.” She shrugs. She looks at her husband. His shirt sleeves are rolled up, the neck of his shirt open. If she were to squint, he would be the young man she met her sophomore year of college, the one who rode his bike in winter wearing shorts. He would be knocking on her apartment door, asking if he could borrow the phone, he and his roommate upstairs too poor to get one for themselves.
     
    He was the first man to want her so aggressively, asking her out over and over until she said yes. And if she’d been disappointed with how it felt to be with him in bed, everything else about him made up for that lack of feeling. His kindness, his warmth, his desire for her, his commitment to their “unwanted” pregnancy, of Lucien. What a wonderful father he was, is, always has been, to both Lucien and Harper.
     
    Sometimes before bed, Ford undressing slowly in their room, sighing about something from his day, Mia wants to ask him where he is. Where have you gone? she wants to say. Who are you now? She wants him to ask her, too. Maybe she would tell him then how she feels, but his sighs pass without her saying a word, and then they are in bed and then they are asleep.
     
    But she knows she really doesn’t have to change anything about their marriage. It could go on for years just like this. He is a good man, a lovely man, even if most of the time, she feels as if she is sleeping with her brother.
     
    Once Kenzie said, “It’s a myth that one person can give you everything you need. Is one person supposed to keep you mentally and physically challenged at all times?”
     
    “That’s the way we’ve decided it should be.”
     
    “There’s always self love, sweetie,” Kenzie said, laughing. “There’s always a quickie at the Harlot Hotel.”
     
    Mia snorted. “There’s not a lot of support out there for going elsewhere for sexual pleasure. We call that adultery.”
     
    “So? And anyway, here’s the other thing. Honesty is overrated. Don’t forget that. Say it over and over to yourself over and over before you leave the house in the morning.”
     
    Now, as Mia looks at Ford, she knows that if she ever tells him the truth, if she ever says, “You know, Ford, I love you so much. But I want something. I’m not sure what it is really. A feeling. A pulse. I think I want to go outside our marriage for sex. You mean well, but you just don’t do it for me,” she thinks it would kill him.
     
    Ford takes her hand. “It will be okay. Your mom will be fine.”
     
    She looks at her husband and hopes he’s right. She hopes it all will be okay.
     

Two
     
     
     
    Sally
     
     
     
    Sally stares at herself in her bedroom mirror. She’s taken off her blouse and her bra and turned on all the lights in the room. Now she stands a foot away from the mirror, looking at her breasts. She lifts up one arm, watching her breast rise, seeing the pale white smoothness of her underarm. Then she drops that arm and lifts the other, the healthy breast bouncing up, this underarm just as pale.
     
    Her breasts seem exactly the same as always, not much different since she weaned Dahlia. The nipples are large, brown, distended, the flesh below them saggy. Droopy was the