Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [87]
“But the kids love them.”
“So just order all of it. We can have leftovers.”
“That place is never any good on the second day. You know that.”
He sighed. “Come on, Alison, it’s eight bucks. I’m in the mood for chow fun. Could you just order it, please?”
“Okay,” she said tersely.
As he took the elevator down to underground parking, he wondered at Alison’s truculence. Though of course she had every reason to be mistrustful, Charlie had no idea whether she actually was. She’d never confronted him with any suspicions; if she had them, she’d done a good job of keeping them to herself. Even if she did think he was up to something, she had no reason to suspect that Claire was involved. Unless … what if Ben had called? But surely then they wouldn’t be arguing over noodles. No—she didn’t know. He was sure of it.
In a way it might have been easier if she did. The idea of being honest with Alison was profoundly unnerving. How was he going to summon the strength to tell her? And what would happen then? Charlie felt as if he were poised on the edge of a cliff, and he could either step back to the safety of land or step forward into a free fall. He knew what was behind him, but had no clue what lay ahead.
AT DINNER ALISON was friendlier. She took some chow fun for herself and exclaimed over how good it was, then urged it on the kids, both of whom refused to try it. Too many unidentifiable green things. “Just take a noodle. A noodle! You love noodles,” she said to Annie in the falsely jovial tone of a Mouseketeer.
“I love sesame noodles,” Annie said. “And only because they have peanut butter on them.”
“It’s not peanut butter. It’s sesame paste,” Alison said.
“Eww. Then I don’t like them either.”
“It’s peanut butter,” Charlie said quickly. “Mom was kidding.” He raised his eyebrows at Alison, who nodded, signaling her complicity.
“Is that true, Mommy?” Annie asked suspiciously.
“Yes.”
Annie sniffed the brownish noodles already congealing on her plate. “Okay. Because I do love them,” she said, clearly relieved.
Alison glanced at Charlie, who smiled back. Disaster averted. It was these kinds of moments, Charlie realized with a stab in his gut, that he would regret giving up most, the moments he couldn’t share with anyone else, embedded in the intimacy of creating a family. He hadn’t really thought it through, but suddenly it occurred to him that all of this would be off-limits as soon as he told Alison what was going on.
He looked at Alison, cutting broccoli into Skittles-size pieces on Noah’s plastic Tigger plate, furrowing her brow in concentration. There was a fine vertical line between her eyes that seemed to have become permanent in the past few months. In her dark hair he saw glints of gray. She was wearing a long-sleeved purple T-shirt and old Levi’s, her “mommy uniform,” as she called it, and the holes in her earlobes were empty; she must have forgotten to put earrings in, or maybe she didn’t wear them anymore. He had to admit that he didn’t know. It had been a long time since he’d noticed much about her. Was that a symptom of the problem, he wondered, or was it, in a larger sense, the problem itself?
After all that fuss about the noodles, Charlie didn’t want them. He wasn’t hungry. He choked down a few bites, moved the food around on his plate like a cagey anorectic, and went to the fridge for a second Sam Adams. Or maybe a third. Yep—he’d gulped down one right away when he came in, opened a second when they sat down to eat. When everyone else was finished, he scraped and stacked the plates—which Alison had once told him was rude to do at the table, but which he did now anyway—and loaded the dishwasher.
“Do you want to do the dishes, and I’ll do the kids?”
“Nah, I’ll do the kids,” he said. He brought the plates over to the counter, holding his beer by the neck, and then took a long swig. He was beginning to feel a little fuzzy around the edges, and it was so much more appealing than the alternative that he determined to finish this one and have another.
“Okay,” Alison said equitably. “I’m reading On the Banks of