Throw Like A Girl by Jean Thompson

Author:Jean Thompson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-10-19T21:00:00+00:00

A

Normal

Life

She wanted them to have a normal life, she told him, and he said he wanted that too. They deserved it. After all the bad business of sneaking around and trysting in motel parking lots and telling the necessary lies. It had gone on for a long, rotten time and had filled them with loathing admiration for their own slick, dishonest skills. After the expensive wreckage of his marriage and the decertification of hers. It had been hell, their tricky love. Now they were finally together. The awful legalities had been played out. The angry children had said hateful things and transferred their allegiances. That was a sore point but you had to expect some sore points, you had to believe the children would eventually come around. For now they were happy, and free to revel in all the boring, normal things they’d been denied: grocery shopping together, and falling asleep in front of the television, and padding around the house in their sock feet.

Money would be tight for a while with the legal bills and child support, but they agreed that it was brave and freeing to live simply. Melanie had a small import business specializing in Asian gifts and gimcracks, carved elephants, bamboo trays, kites, fans, lanterns, beadwork, lacquerware. Mass-produced exotica for American living rooms. She thought she could squeeze a little more out of the business, now that she was no longer preoccupied with all the apparatus of an affair, the lingerie, the secret phone calls, the cover stories. Chad worked selling advertising for a radio station with a classic rock format. The ringtone on his cell phone played “Layla.” It could be a melancholy job, since the station’s demographic skewed to middle age and so many of the advertisements were for active retirement communities, investment funds, prostate screening tests and the like, reminders of the march of time, of bodily failure and mortality. Chad was forty-five and Melanie forty-three. They told themselves that they were still a long way from old. With any luck at all they’d have a considerable span of healthy years together. And after all, they had leapt and grasped at happiness, made purposeful, invigorating choices. Surely that was good for a few bonus points in the actuarial tables.

They regarded the grubby corners of their new, undersized home with a certain fondness. Each of them had come away from the marriages with a few pieces of family furniture, a rocking chair or dresser or hutch. Melanie rummaged her business inventory for decorative lamps and shell-encrusted mirrors and embroidered pillows, giving the rooms the look of a struggling carnival. It was like being kids all over again, back when they were just starting out. For each of them had once lived in similar small, lumpen houses at the beginning of their previous married lives. Each of them had arranged (with Diana, with Greg) similar sparse belongings in vacant spaces. They had not known each other then and they were jealous of all the time they’d missed.

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