Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [58]
“When?”
“Tuesday morning. Which means I have to fly out on Monday, I’m afraid.”
“I thought they were in Philadelphia. Can’t you just take an early morning train?”
Clearly, he’d told Alison more about PMRG than he’d remembered. “Ahh—their creative offices are in Chicago.” Creative offices? Chicago? It made no sense, even to him. And now he’d have to be sure to keep his flight itinerary from her—and hell, what if she wanted the hotel number? “But, actually, they’re on a company retreat in Atlanta, and they want me to go there.” He shifted uncomfortably. His ears felt hot.
Ed rolled his eyes and shook his head—further confirmation, in his mind, of corporate waste and stupidity—but Alison just said, “Oh. When do you get back?”
“I’ll get a flight that afternoon. I’ll be home Tuesday evening. As soon as I can, honey.” Three months ago it would have been unfathomable to Charlie that he could lie to his wife like this, with her father and their daughter listening in. The shocking thing was how easy it was, how readily their lifestyle accommodated his deception.
That night, after a predictably disastrous dinner, with Annie moaning about the unfamiliar vegetables and rudely shoving her plate to the middle of the table and Noah chewing bok choy and spitting it out in viscous lumps on his Blues Clues place mat, and then toast and bath time and five renditions of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, with Noah successively supplying more and more of the words, Charlie stood at the foot of the bed he shared with Alison, listening in the stillness to the sound of her crying through the bathroom door. The water was running and it was hard to hear, but occasional whimpers and the faint sounds of her sniffling confirmed his suspicions.
“Al,” he said, leaning his forehead against the doorframe.
After a moment she said, “I’ll be right out.”
“Are you all right?”
He heard the faucet shut off. The door opened, and she said, “Yeah.” She was wearing a lilac tank top and floral pajama bottoms, and her face was damp and pink. She sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, like a child. Her ability to rally like this, to act resolute and self-possessed when she clearly wanted to fall apart, was a trait he’d always admired. One of the things that had attracted him to her at the start.
“Your parents are being helpful.” He phrased this as a statement, not a question, to show Alison that he was giving them the benefit of the doubt.
“Mostly.” She turned to pluck a sweater from the clothes piled on her dresser, shaking it out and folding it against her chest.
This was what passed for small talk between them these days— Charlie encouraging and slightly disingenuous, Alison only partly willing to play along.
“That stir-fry was actually pretty good. And it probably is reasonable every now and then to force the kids to deal with grown-up food, don’t you think?”
She held another sweater against the length of her body, draping the sleeve along her own arm and then folding it across the sweater, as if she were teaching it to dance. After a moment Charlie realized she wasn’t going to answer. He unbuttoned his shirt and took off his pants. He went to the closet and folded the pants on a hanger, then stuffed the shirt in a dry-cleaning bag that hung on a hook on the back of the door. In his white T-shirt and gray jersey shorts, he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, leaving the door ajar.
“What time is your flight on Monday?” she asked.
He answered with a mouth full of toothpaste, and she went to the door. “What? I couldn’t understand you.”
“Midday,” he said, spitting into the sink with a studied casualness. “I’ll leave from work.”
She nodded, went back to folding. When she was done she shut all the drawers of her dresser and the closet door. Then she sat on the bed, squirted Kiehl’s lotion into her hand, and rubbed it into her hands, elbows, shins.
“I love that smell,” he said, trying to fill the silence.
“It’s unscented.”
“That’s just marketing. Everything has a scent.” He sprawled on the bed behind her.
“Oh, you’re