While They Ate

While they ate, Rosalyn watched her husband the way she might a rescued bird or nice earrings lent by a friend. He wore a collared shirt from his fraternity, burgundy faded to almost-pink and tight at the shoulders. She had made an avocado salad, and he smiled intermittently between bites, either from enjoying it or trying too hard not to look sad. The avocados were lemony and brown. Rosalyn swallowed bites of them quickly.

“Are you going to write James today?” she asked.

His mouth opened a slip as he chewed the salad into a mush. “Maybe,” he said after swallowing.

She told him it would be nice. She looked at her bowl, and then stood up to clean it and the knife and cutting board. In the morning it had rained but now sun through the open windows was all the light the house needed. She turned on the radio and asked if it was okay.

He told her yes.

She kept her eyes outside. For the last two nights he had lain awake crying. Afternoons he had the disposition of a spring day: shifting between warm, cloudy, and cold within a span of hours. Did he want to kill himself? she wondered often, and now, while a neighbor’s cat skulked through her herb garden. Whether or not he might ever go through with it she wouldn’t think about.

Immediately after he finished eating he brought over his bowl and stood beside her. The owner of a jewelry store talked about a sale on the radio.

“I thought we might visit him soon,” Rosalyn said. Her husband was also facing the window. His eyes went through the glass, the backyard hedge, and beyond the stucco house behind theirs. He touched her arm.

“I think I may take a nap,” he said. He smiled.

She nodded and turned away from him. A Dean Martin song followed the jewelry commercial, and Rosalyn tried to keep the beat with her finger. She heard him leave the kitchen and then his careful steps on the stairs. She thought for a moment of their son in prison. Upstairs her husband passed the bookshelf that creaked at any movement. It was from an estate sale they’d attended shortly after buying their first house. It creaked even then, because it was old or just poorly made.