Broken Fortune by Aly Mennuti

Broken Fortune by Aly Mennuti

Author:Aly Mennuti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regalo Press
Published: 2024-05-16T17:08:08+00:00


Chapter Nineteen

As I step aboard the smaller boat—a sea-faring vessel dotted with my family’s sad, unforgiving faces—that has been tasked with taking us to the bigger boat Benjamin chartered for tonight’s dinner, I can’t help but think that not only is no one trying, but we all appear to be passengers on the same craft that dragged Dante across the River Styx into the mouth of hell. Fourteen silent pilgrims, all equally afraid in their own way and realizing there is no turning back. There is only the future and the implicit promise of chaos. And much to my own chagrin, I’m a part of it, equally guilty of not trying, of ignoring my own advice, of removing myself from my family and spending all afternoon with Nathan and the kids and never mentioning—in fact, willfully ignoring—that I’m pregnant.

Once Theo returned from a snappy six stitches, a suturing maneuver I’m sure Sean could perform in his sleep, we had lunch, then spent the rest of the day by the pool. I was even uncharacteristically willing to “play” several fraught rounds of table tennis with Theo, throwing a few games to spare myself his erratic sportsmanship and let him luxuriate in his inability to lose without mass recriminations about the unfitness of the resort’s equipment, about how he’d forfeited the game before he even stepped up to play on account of not being set up for success. How could he work with such weak tools? With shoddy paddles and half-deflated balls?

I also patiently allowed Nathan and Winnie to marinate in their half-invented personal crises, which gained in fury the more they spoke. Like Winnie’s apocalyptic rage over needing an SAT tutor when it wasn’t required of Theo. I wanted to answer it was because he got a 1590 on his first try, and Winnie came in around five hundred points lower on her PSATs. Nonetheless, I let her fulminate—logic be damned. I nodded; I agreed; I took her hand in mine and let her cry at the injustice of it all.

Then, while I watched Theo and Winnie play volleyball, I listened to Nathan continue his raging soliloquy on the writer’s life, unsure if he’d finally succumbed to writer’s block or if he just hates being pigeonholed as a particular type of a writer: one with very expensive and very successful projects that stir up great controversy on film Twitter, which only gooses their grosses. Once again, I nodded and agreed; I took his hand in mine and let him cry at his caged creative spirit yearning to break free and soar.

On a normal day, any other day, I would have stopped them cold, cut them short, pointed out the patent absurdities, the maudlin turn toward personal melodrama that runs through my husband and children like an emotional isthmus. But I didn’t.

Getting pregnant again never even crossed my mind. Nathan and I never thought about, never seriously discussed, having a third child—and for the brief moments we did after Winnie turned two, we laughed it off, never wanting to be outnumbered by the kids.



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