Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [63]
Jack kisses my ear, biting just enough to tingle, then heads to the bar for celebratory drinks. On the house, cooed the cocktail waitress after making her way over to congratulate us.
I lean against the cool ledge and hold my left hand out for a view. The ring sings out—it is shining and round and big and hopeful—and by any standard, I should be bursting, I am bursting, to have it. I hug my arms in tight, wrapping my hands around my back, to ward off a cool breeze that strikes out of nowhere. The wind passes, and I release myself, staring down at my finger once again.
This was perfect, I think. It wasn’t intimate like Henry’s proposal, and so what if his words weren’t quite poetic, weren’t quite what I’d imagined when someone asked me to swear myself to him for life. It was pretty close to perfect. Perfect enough.
I run my thumb over the ring, trying to swivel it back and forth the way that I’d grown accustomed to with Henry’s, and it’s only then that I notice that the band is nearly choking my finger. That it’s wrapped around so tight that the better half of my ring finger looks like an overstuffed sausage. I pull my hand closer and hold it up to the light. It’s hard to see at first, but then, I can feel the throb: There, just to the right of my knuckle, is a tiny gash, no bigger than a gnat-sized paper cut. Jack must have nicked it when he pushed the ring on.
I raise my hand to my mouth and suck the pulsing joint, the unmistakable taste of blood spreading across my tongue, and after a minute, the pain subsides. I examine my knuckle again, turning back and forth and back again under the dull glare of the tiny white lights, and best I can tell, the cut is gone.
I catch Jack’s eye from the bar and smile.
And yet, if I listened to my wiser self, my suburban self who still clanged around in my brain when I let her, she would have told me that though the wound was now invisible, it was never really gone.
KATIE
By the time Katie was seven months old, many of my prebaby fantasies had come to fruition: Baby powder did indeed fill the air and her smile warmed me to my toes, but other things lingered, too—my fear of damaging her, which manifested itself in overprotectiveness; Henry’s new promotion at work, which sucked away at the little time we had together outside of Katie; the stale conversation between us, which circled mostly (and only) about Katie herself.
“Katie pooped five times today!” I said, as we sat down to a dinner of grilled salmon I’d painstakingly marinated the night before (Cooking Light!). “Can you believe it? Five times!”
“Should you call the doctor?” Henry asked, slightly disengaged.
“It seems like normal poop,” I reply. “Nothing runny or anything.”
“Well, I guess she likes to eat.”
“Like her daddy,” I said, smiling. “Poops and eats like her daddy.”
Henry grinned and dug his fork into his fish, as I searched for something else with which to update him.
In real life, most marriages don’t come undone with one big explosion. Unlike in the movies, most wives don’t stumble upon lipstick on a collar or discover a hotel receipt in a blazer pocket. Most wives don’t uncover hidden gambling problems or latent addictions or experience out-of-nowhere abuse that pops up one day and destroys everything. Some do, but most, no, not most. Most marriages unravel slowly, slipping drop by drop, like water ebbing through a curled palm, until one day, you look down and notice that it, your hand, is entirely empty. That’s how most marriages dissolve and run dry. And, in retrospect, it’s how mine came undone exactly.
“Oh!” I said with surprise that night at dinner. “And I can