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By Root 911 0

rope thick and long enough for Rapunzel to be jealous of ― even so, she never owned a hair dryer, and still her hair managed to dry. I often imagined, in my spare moments, that her hair had its own heating coils, firing from within, and just looking at her I felt my own heating coils firing from within, the flames coming up through my legs and private parts and chest and into my face. I had to resist the urge to tackle her right there, out of love and desire. I had done this once, in the Pioneer Valley Mall, in a shoe store, where Anne Marie was trying on a pair of black knee-high boots, turning this way and that like the model she easily could have been, and my need for her was so big that there seemed no way to do justice to its enormity except to tackle her. So I did, scattering boxes and display tables and other customers. After we'd cleaned up the mess and apologized to the manager and bought the boots, Anne Marie had made me promise never, ever to do it again. So instead I said, "Smoothies."

"Smoothies what?"

"Katherine is drinking one. We were just talking about how a smoothie isn't a milkshake." Anne Marie looked at me quizzically, as if I were speaking one of the many foreign languages I'd never learned to speak. So I clarified. "They're different."

"How was your day?" Anne Marie asked. "Anything special happen?"

This was the moment, of course, for me to tell her the truth. It was there in front of me, like another family member in the room. I thought of the bond analysts, could see the pages of their memoirs flapping like gums, telling me: Tell the truth, tell the truth; you will feel better, dude. I could do it, could I not? I would tell Anne Marie about the Emily Dickinson House fire and the Colemans and my time in prison; I would tell her about my parents and how I'd hurt them so, and how they sent me off to college because of it: I would tell her about how Thomas Coleman had just come to see me. I would tell Anne Marie that I'd lied to her out of love and fear of losing her, and now I was telling her the truth out of the same fear, and that if she'd please, please forgive me, I'd never tell her another lie again.

So what did I actually tell Anne Marie? I told another lie. Because this is what you do when you're a liar: you tell a lie, and then another one, and after a while you hope that the lies end up being less painful than the truth, or at least that is the lie you tell yourself.

"Nothing special," I said. And then, before she could ask me another question to which I'd also have to lie, I told her something true: "I love you so much, Anne Marie. You know that, right?"

She smiled at me, put her hand on my cheek, which was her favorite fond gesture, and said, "I do know that. I do."

"I'm starving," I said. "Let's make dinner." We did: Katherine shredded the lettuce, washed it under the faucet, then put it in the salad spinner, which she spun violently, switching hands when one got tired; I set the table, putting the utensils where I thought they should go; Anne Marie made the actual meal, which I don't remember specifically but I'm sure consisted of most of the important food groups. Christian came down, still logy from his TV watching, and managed to do his part, too, which was to sit in his chair and stay out of everyone's way.

While we made dinner, the kitchen was filled with the usual chatter: Anne Marie talked about the book club she'd just joined, Katherine the soccer team she was the star of, Christian the cartoon he'd just watched and partially understood. Me, I didn't talk much, mostly because there was that voice ― What else? What else? ― booming in my head, the voice I hadn't heard in so many years. I was distracted by it, didn't understand what it was doing there. I had what I wanted, it was with me, in the room, including the room itself. Was it possible that we hear that voice not when we want something else but when we're in danger of losing the things we already have? The voice was so loud that I smacked myself on the side of the head to get rid of it, which Christian saw and imitated,