The Most Fun We Ever Had Read Online Free PDF

professionals as being a rare and promising thing. She was bothered by his excuses, by his carelessness, by his inability to see in himself what she saw in him.
    “You’re so smart,” she said to him one night, when she insisted that they make a real dinner and eat at the table. “You’re brilliant, and there are a thousand things you can do that other people can’t. Don’t you see that?”
    “It’s not about being smart,” he said. “It’s about knowing the right people.”
    “You do know the right people.”
    “You don’t get it,” he said. “I’m not trying to be a dick, but you don’t.”
    Sometimes he did things during the day that were nice. He was a meticulous laundry folder. Occasionally, he washed the cars and vacuumed the interiors. He changed lightbulbs and talked to his parents on the phone so she wouldn’t have to. She tried to be effusive with her gratitude for these things, kissing his neck and purring that she never would have remembered to get the oil changed, which was true but not, she thought, necessarily worthy of any flowery thanks. Mostly, though, when she came home he was watching TV or sitting stagnant before his laptop and it would take her several intensive seconds of cognitive restructuring before she could even say hello to him. Because his salary had helped them buy their house but it was her salary, alone, that was paying for it. Because one of the disgusting grad assistants had made a pass at her and there was nothing she could do given that he was the protégé of the department chair. Because she just wanted to come home and have a glass of wine and talk to someone about these things, but her someone was deeply embedded in a season of Dexter and wearing the same gray sweatpants that he had been wearing since December and he didn’t want to hear about the pedestrian struggles of functional people because his trials were far direr.

    She couldn’t explain this to her parents and she couldn’t explain it to herself. She couldn’t explain how much it hurt— physically made her bones ache—when she went to kiss him and he turned his face away and muttered not a good time.
    Or tonight, when she’d been offered a tenure-track position—at thirty-two —and come home with her face almost cracked in half from smiling, bearing ice cream sandwiches from Mumbles and a sixty-eight-dollar bottle of pinot noir (champagne gave her a headache), all the windows on the first floor shut though it was a gorgeous spring evening, to find him pajama-clad and catatonic on the couch. She couldn’t begin to explain what it felt like when he looked up at her and could tell she had exciting news and started crying.
    “Shit, I’m sorry,” he said, now additionally racked with guilt. He leaned into her because she’d gone to him, startled by the bleak lighting and the stale air and how off things felt in their home. She’d dropped the ice cream sandwiches in the foyer and set the wine next to them and thrown her raincoat on top of her little celebration to avoid making him feel even worse. She had wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could and he buried his face in her breasts and wept like she had never seen an adult man cry until she met him. “I’m ruining this, Lize; I’m so sorry,” he said, and she rocked him back and forth, now crying a little bit herself despite her near-delirious happiness moments earlier.
    “Of course you’re not,” she murmured, kissing his hair—and she was reminded, horrifyingly, in that moment, of soothing Gracie once after she had tumbled backward out of their Radio Flyer when they were having races up and down the jagged slate sidewalks in front of the house on Fair Oaks. “You’re the reason I’m here, love,” she murmured, and then she began to worry that he would misinterpret it, think that she meant You’re the reason I’m stuck here; which surely she didn’t, probably. “You could never ruin anything,” she added, and knew