Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [5]
“I did,” she snapped. She looked at her husband for a moment, eyes bulging, breathing heavily, seeming to search for more words, and for a second, Milo thought that his wife might be in the midst of a panic attack, a condition to which she was occasionally prone. Though these attacks could result in hyperventilation, a loss of equilibrium, and disorientation, Christine’s primary concern had always been the public spectacle and potential embarrassment that she might suffer if one was to ever strike while outside the home, as had happened when she was younger. If Christine were to experience one of these attacks in a public location, like this street corner, Milo was under orders to remove her from the situation as best he could, as quickly as he could, in order to prevent further embarrassment.
But this was not a panic attack, Milo realized rather quickly, but simply a moment of extreme anger and a subsequent loss for words, something that did not happen often to a litigator such as Christine. For the first time that Milo could remember, his wife didn’t know what to say. For a moment, he thought she might apologize. “I don’t know what came over me,” he half expected her to admit, which would be followed by a brief embrace and an offer of sex when they returned home.
After all, he hadn’t done anything wrong.
But for almost a minute, Christine said nothing, and the protracted silence made Milo uneasy. Finally, she spoke, settling on “Never mind,” and took off in another sprint. Unsure what to do, Milo broke into a sprint himself, trying to catch his wife. He understood what she had been trying to say, but at the same time, he couldn’t understand the logic behind it at all. Had she hoped to always outdistance him, and if so, why bother running together at all? For Milo, who was twenty pounds overweight, the challenge had been to just keep pace with his wife, yet unknowingly and unintentionally, he had apparently stolen a source of pride from her. The expected admiration that he thought his wife might feel for his ability to match her pace couldn’t have been farther from reality, and he still couldn’t understand why.
Nevertheless, Milo had no intention of allowing his wife to finish ahead of him that day. To walk into the house after her would mean facing the awkward silence that comes after a couple has engaged in marital combat and is then forced to immediately resume their daily activities under the same roof. Milo hated this form of vicious, nonverbal warfare, the purposeful absence of words where there would normally be many. If Christine finished the run first, she would invariably be in the shower by the time Milo arrived home, and rather than shouting, “The shower’s all yours!” when finished, she would exit the bathroom without a word, probably donning a robe rather than remaining naked as she crossed the hallway into the bedroom. Standing in front of the dresser, she would begin drying her hair, refusing to even acknowledge his presence as he made his way to the bathroom for his own shower. This stubborn unwillingness to speak, an indication of anger through a deniable lack of words, would persist throughout dinner and perhaps all night unless Milo did something about it. By forcing polite conversation on his wife and preventing a break in the action, he would give Christine no choice but to either resume hostilities with another verbal barrage or stand down. Standing down was her typical response in these circumstances, but either one was preferable to that dreadful silence.
So with a burst of speed that he didn’t know he had, Milo caught his wife as she rounded the final turn and ascended the two hundred yards of hill leading to the couple’s driveway. He passed his wife over the last twenty yards, then clutched his knees, gasping for breath, in front of their home as she jogged by declaring that she was going for a walk to cool down.
Whether Christine had meant to cool down from the argument or from the run was