Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [8]
A cup of steaming tea was awaiting him on the coffee table. Milo didn’t like tea very much, but he drank a cup each week with Edith because he knew that doing so made her happy.
Ed Marchand had once enjoyed a daily cup of tea with his wife.
“So what is your plan?” Edith asked, dropping a sugar cube in her cup.
“I dunno. I’m going to watch some more of the tape and hopefully figure out who she is. Maybe she’ll say her name or I’ll see an address at some point.”
“I wasn’t talking about your stranger. I meant Christine. What is your plan with her?”
“Oh.”
Since Milo and Christine had separated, they had spoken several times on the phone, but the conversations had been awkward at best. For more than three years, the couple had lived under the same roof and slept in the same bed, oftentimes sharing the same pillow. More than one thousand days of routine and ritual, not counting the two years that they were together prior to their marriage, was now lost. Milo still occasionally awoke in the middle of the night wondering where he was. And even though they were now living only a mile apart from each other, with every day that went by the distance seemed to expand exponentially. It was almost unfathomable for Milo to envision his wife sitting at home alone while he sat equally unattended in his undecorated apartment.
Most of all, it made him feel guilty.
Though it had been Christine who initially asked for space, Milo had apparently misunderstood her request and taken things further than necessary. When he finally decided to move out, after Christine’s umpteenth appeal, he had chosen an apartment close to home, hoping that the two would eventually work things out. A visit to a couples’ therapist was planned in the near future, and perhaps the time apart would do them some good. In fact, Milo had begun looking at the separation as a positive step to improving their marriage. The time away might be good for them, providing them with an opportunity to appreciate what they had.
In truth, the prospect of living alone, without the need to hide the constant, unpredictable demands like conflagration from his wife, if even for a short period of time, appealed to Milo.
And since he had moved out of the house, Milo had also found that these demands were more easily fulfilled. Twice in the past three weeks he had climbed out of the bed, left his house in the middle of the night, and driven to Vernon’s around-the-clock bowling alley in order to fulfill the sudden need to bowl a strike. Bowling a strike was a common and recurring demand for Milo, but it was one of the more logistically difficult needs to fulfill. Inexplicably, it often struck in the middle of the night, when a trip to the bowling alley would have been impossible even though the lanes were still open. Explaining to his wife that he needed to bowl a strike because something inside his head insisted on him doing so was not a conversation that Milo was willing to attempt. He knew that his entire relationship was predicated on his ability to keep his demands concealed from his wife, and during their three years of marriage, he had done this masterfully. Unfortunately, this meant that some demands had to wait longer than Milo would have liked, creating more tension and stress than he could sometimes manage. But he had always found a way of keeping them at bay until they could be fulfilled without his wife’s knowledge. Much of this was accomplished thanks to the freedom of his job and his advance planning. Jars of jelly hidden in the basement in case of emergency, books with their price tags still affixed on the shelves, ice cube trays loaded with ice, and other supplies helped in times of crisis, though Milo sometimes wondered if the presence of these items in his house also caused the needs to arise more frequently than