The Baby Tree by Erin McGraw

Author:Erin McGraw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Baby Tree
ISBN: 9781941088388
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2002-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ten

But in the days that followed, Kate didn’t walk away from any tasks or put down any burdens. She took on new work, offering to tutor Marie Moeller’s oldest boy, who was struggling with arithmetic. She high-fived him after every multiplication problem he got right, relieved to be a part of a helping profession that invited her to dive into the lives of others and escape from her own.

She might have shared the insight with Ned—no one could understand better—but words between them now passed through a narrow channel banked with suspicion on one side and hurt on the other. In the few hours they spent together, they talked about laundry, dinner, the need to get the car serviced. Sometimes at night, jabbed awake yet again by an insistent spring in the foldaway, Kate glanced at her husband and tried to take reassurance from his familiar profile and steady breathing. She discovered she could hold make-believe conversations with him, anticipate his response to every comment, question, remonstrance, or joke. In no circumstance could she imagine him surprising her—except, of course, in the circumstance that had introduced their current, clenched relations.

One night, thinking that touch might let them sail free from the shoals where talking had steered them, she tried to pull him into an embrace. She was thinking also—how could she not?—that it was Thursday night, their usual night. But his muscles locked, and his arm reflexively jerked away from her. She pulled back to her side of the bed although he kissed her and apologized, promising soon, soon, soon. Since then, conversations had withered further, and Ned had spent more time reading medical journals in the living room, the tall stack by his feet testimony to the hours of work that always lay ahead of him.

For her part, Kate pulled out her neglected sewing machine and hemmed skirts that had gone nearly a year unfinished. She added new darts on her favorite dresses; in the to-do of the last month, she had lost weight, and the line of her hip fell away pleasingly under her hand. She started to wear mascara again, and after spending an unscheduled afternoon at the mall, brought home two new pairs of soft pumps. An old spirit was stirring in her, a sense of possibility, and she gave in to it, brushing her hair off her face to make her eyes seem bigger. Barb smiled, supposing, Kate knew, that the softened hair and shapely feet were meant to woo Ned back. But Kate didn’t feel like a wooing wife; she felt abandoned and reckless.

Bill-o’s furniture and oven door had finally arrived; he’d been slowly moving out of the parsonage ever since, taking three sports coats on one trip, a box of audio tapes the next. Kate could hardly stand to walk past the extra bedroom, which looked like a mouth growing more and more toothless. “You don’t have to go,” she told him the evening he was clearing out his shelf in the bathroom, packing shaving cream and dental floss into a shoebox.

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