Didier hums “You Are My Sunshine” and trims fat off raw breasts. He worked in kitchens for years, scorns recipes, is good with a knife. A decent restaurant job would pay better than teaching at Central Coast Regional, but he swore off food and bev because he’d miss the kids’ childhoods. The wife sees a calendar of vacant blue evenings, Didier away cooking, children in bed, herself alone and accountable to no one.
“—the tinfoil?”
“What?”
“Foil, woman!” Didier trots over to snatch it. His mood is merry; he’s happiest when cooking, a dish towel slung over his shoulder. Happiest, yet he rarely cooks.
“What else?” she says.
“I’m good here. Go relax.”
“Really? Okay.” She rubs at a smear of old yogurt on the stovetop. “Should I do a salad?”
“You should sit down.”
She watches him chop, one hand herding the olives and the other bringing down the knife, fast, accurate. Eyes don’t waver from the olives. Shoulders don’t slump. Happy and confident, yet most of the meals fall to her, the one who “has time.”
“By the way, why is Mattie still here?”
“She’s putting them to bed.”
Didier sets down the knife and looks at her. “We’re paying twelve dollars an hour to keep our kids at home while we’re at home?”
“Well, I would like, for once, to have dinner with you alone. Without the kids underfoot.”
“Just saying, it’s a luxury, whereas a cleaning service—”
“You mean like living rent-free is a luxury?”
He scrapes the olives off the cutting board into a bowl and lifts his beer bottle. “Is that gonna be held over my head for another six years?”
“How about, regardless, it’s saving us a lot of money?”
“That’s like saying ‘Be grateful you live in purgatory, because it’s cheaper than—’”
“Newville is hardly purgatory,” says the wife. The yogurt is stubborn; she licks her finger and rubs again. “I saw this thing on the road. A burnt little animal. I thought some kid had set it on fire. It was trying to get across to the other side.”
“As in the great hereafter?”
“Of the road. It was burnt within an inch of its life, but it was still moving—which felt so, I don’t know, brave?—and I wanted to help it, but it was already dead.”
Her husband slaps the breasts onto a foiled baking sheet. “I’ve never understood that saying, ‘within an inch of its life.’ Like there was some danger right next to its life but not quite touching it?”
“This little animal. It’s weird. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Where’s the salt?”
“I think it was a possum. It was like it wasn’t accepting death—or didn’t even realize death was near. It kept going.”
“There you are, Salty McSalterton.” He dusts the chicken, slides the pan into the oven. “You know what’s so messed up about Ro’s sperm donors?”
The wife closes her eyes. “What?”
“They can totally lie on the application. All four grandparents died of cirrhosis, but dude claims they’re alive and healthy? Nobody’s checking. I’m surprised that somebody as neurotic as Ro isn’t worried.”
“She’s not neurotic.” But it pleases her to hear him say it.
“You don’t work with her.” He sets the timer. “She’s in full denial mode. Doesn’t realize what a nightmare it’s going to be. By herself? It’s a nightmare even where there’s two of you.”
“Didier, I want to go to counseling.”
He wipes his hands, hard, on a kitchen towel. “So go.”
“Couples counseling.”
“Told you before”—reaching for his beer—“I’m not a therapy person. Sorry.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Means that I don’t respond well to being blamed for things that aren’t my fault.”
Oh God, not his father again.
“I found someone in Salem,” she says, “who’s highly recommended, and they do late-afternoon appointments—”
“Did you not hear me, Susan?”
“Just because you had an incompetent therapist in Montreal thirty years ago? That’s a great reason not to try to save—” She stops. Licks her finger again, scratches at the yogurt on the stove.
“What? Save what?”
“Can you please just consider it? One session?”
“Why are people in the States obsessed with therapy? There’s other ways to solve problems.”
“Such as?”
“Such as hiring a cleaning service.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Since you clearly don’t want to do it yourself. Which”—he holds up a palm, nodding—“I get. I don’t feel like cleaning either, especially after being at work all day.”
“I’d much rather be at work all day,” she says, wondering, as the words settle in the air, if this is true.
“Then get a job. No one’s stopping you. Or go back to law school.”
“I wish it were that easy.”
“Seems pretty easy to me.” He is paper-toweling translucent pink shreds of raw chicken off the cutting board. “Honestly, Susan? Things aren’t that bad. I mean, yes, some things could be better. But I’m not gonna drive ninety miles to talk about how I should’ve bought you better presents on your birthday.”
Or any presents.
“But what about the kids?” she says. “They sense things—Bex asks—”
“The kids are fine.”
She takes a long breath. “Are you saying they wouldn’t benefit from our relationship improving?”
“It’s kind of interesting that you don’t give a fuck about my benefit. That douchebag brainwashed my mom, and she never stopped blaming me. Me, who was basically a child.”
“I know it wasn’t your fault he left, but—”
“The therapist didn’t even care why I hit him. Said it was ‘immaterial.’ Really, dude?”
“You broke your dad’s nose.”
“Well, he did a lot worse to me. Which is my point. The goal of therapy is to make you feel like dog shit in the name of insight. I’m gonna pay two hundred bucks an hour to feel like dog shit?”
“Mrs. Korsmo?” A small voice from the hall.
“Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you,” calls Mattie, “but John scratched Bex’s arm, and she’s pretty upset about it.”
“Did he break the skin?” shouts the wife.
“No, but—”
“Then can you please just deal with it?”
Mattie appears in the doorway, nervous. “Bex says she needs you.”
“Well, she doesn’t. Tell her I’ll be up to check on her later.”
“I’ll go,” says Didier. “Take the chicken out when it buzzes.”
“But we weren’t finished,” says the wife.
He follows Mattie toward the stairs.
The wife shoves the chicken-stained cutting board into the dishwasher. Picks olives off the countertop. Wipes stray salt into her palm.
She washes her hands.
Switches the timer off but keeps the oven on.
Ignites a burner on the gas stovetop to high.
Reaches in with a pot holder for a breast, which she drops onto the burner’s high open flame. It flares and spits and sizzles, the whole breast blue with fire.
Darkening, bubbling.
Charred and rubbery.
Little animal, burnt black.