Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

Author:Katherine Heiny
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

It was just like an affair, Graham thought, except without the sex or love or excitement or other good parts. There weren’t even the bad parts—shame or betrayal—because Audra knew and approved. Or at least she offered no objection and sometimes she even looked relieved. (She seemed overwhelmed lately.) No sex, no secrets, no guilt, no debauchery greater than gourmet potato chips.

So why then did Graham’s heart beat faster every time he climbed the steps to Elspeth’s building?

The reason Audra was so distracted was that she was getting the apartment ready for houseguests. She did all the usual things—set up a cot in Matthew’s room and put fresh sheets on the foldout bed in the den and stocked the bathroom with miniature toiletries and cleaned out space in the hall closet and made Graham wrestle the armchair out of the den and down to their storage space—this last part was reason enough never to have houseguests, Graham thought. But even for Audra, having these houseguests bordered on the extreme. Strangers. Two of them. For a month. (It seemed to Graham to get worse with every phrase.)

Over Christmas, Graham and Audra and Matthew had spent a week in a Miami resort and met another couple who were so unremarkable that if you got on an elevator with them, you not only wouldn’t remember them, you might not even notice they were there. They had an eleven-year-old son named Noah, and he, too, was completely unremarkable except for one quality—he and Matthew had become friends. The kind of friendship Graham had always hoped Matthew would have—easy and uncomplicated and heartfelt. Matthew and Noah explored the resort together and called each other on the hotel phones and went swimming and ordered milk shakes and stayed up late. Graham supposed they had fallen in love a little bit—the bright, sweet kind of love you feel when someone asks you to sit with them at lunch.

Naturally, Audra had spent hours talking to Noah’s parents and stayed in touch with them after they’d left. In some long complicated email thread (Graham imagined that printed out, it would stretch the length of a basketball court) Audra and Noah’s mother had worked out an arrangement where Noah would come and stay with them for the month of February, since he went to an international school with a long half-term break. And since Noah couldn’t travel by himself, he would bring his grandfather.

Oh, listen to Graham! Making it sound like this was all some crazy scheme of Audra’s. As if Graham hadn’t agreed to it, as if Graham hadn’t leapt at the chance, as if Graham didn’t want to live, however briefly, in that golden world where your child romped happily through the enchanted forest of friendship.

Graham knew that other people didn’t do this. Other people had children and those children had friends and they went over to the friends’ houses and watched TV and hung out and slept over and sometimes they drank the friends’ fathers’ whisky

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.