Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart

Author:Leah Stewart [Stewart, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I meant to go to work on Monday. I really did. I drove to Durham as if I was going to, but then I turned where I should have gone straight. Alex and Adam lived in Durham, on Pickett Road, in the sort of house usually described as “cute,” a 1940s-era bungalow with a porch swing and rosebushes in the front yard. “Pickett Road,” I’d said when they found the place. “Sounds very American domestic.”

“No picket fence, though,” Alex said. “Don’t get any ideas.”

“Does it have an apple tree?”

“No, but there’s a taqueria up the street.”

“It has a taco tree.”

“Exactly,” she said.

I’d been the first person of their acquaintance, besides the realtor, to see the house. I’d helped Alex paint the living room purple, the dining room blue. I was at their house so often I kept a bouncy seat, a bib, and a baby spoon there. And of course I had a key, as I’d had a key to every place Alex had lived in the last six years, from the Carrboro mill house with the slowly descending ceiling to the tiny house in Durham that had once been a corner grocery store. And yet Nathan had made me feel like her house was on the other side of a border I couldn’t cross. Nathan country.

I don’t know what I had in mind when I drove there. Nothing very much, because if I’d thought it through—if I’d acknowledged and considered that intention, rather than just obeying the impulse—I wouldn’t have done it. Adam’s car wasn’t there, which surprised me because it was only nine o’clock and he kept rock-star hours. I parked behind Alex’s car in the driveway and took a weird satisfaction at blocking her in. “I’ve got you now, my pretty,” I said aloud, but then I just sat there. I thought about The Wizard of Oz, how in the movie they made Dorothy’s adventures a dream, when in the book they were as real as the spit-up stain on my shirt, the Cheerio dust covering the backseat of the car. Maybe the filmmakers felt it was too subversive to tell the audience that Oz was an actual place, with its witches and castles and poppy fields, that you could leave black-and-white Kansas and go there, lead a daily life in a place so extraordinary it rendered the ordinary impossible. You can go there in your mind, they said, but then you have to come back home. You always have to come back—you want to come back! What does Dorothy want most in the world, after all, but to click her heels and go home? Ah, but I read all the Oz books, even the later ones not written by L. Frank Baum, despite my troubling sense of their inauthenticity, and eventually Dorothy moves to Oz. She takes her family and moves there. No more Kansas. Kansas begone.

The front door opened, and Alex stepped out. She was dressed for work in a skirt and blouse, but her feet were bare.

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