I closed the door begrudgingly. “What?”
“Are you, like, swearing off electricity completely?”
“Turn on a light if you want it on,” I grumbled, kicking a Barbie to the side on my way to the couch.
Then an ache pinched in my chest at the thought of treating something of theirs with such disregard, and I bent over to pick up the doll and slowly crossed the room to lay it gently on the pile of their other toys. I brushed its hair from its eyes, the way I’d once done to them so many times before. Fucking hell, if this pain in my chest could just let up for once …
I felt Sid’s eyes on me, felt him watching my every move, and when I finally tore my gaze from the doll to sit on the couch, every part of my body in pain from simply putting in an effort to live, I asked, “What do you want, Sid?”
“I wanna make sure you’re not killing yourself over here,” he replied, flipping on a light.
I squinted at the assault to my eyes. “No,” I quietly murmured. “Not yet anyway.”
“What was that?”
I shook my head, lifting a dismissive hand. “Nothing.”
He dropped the bag on the coffee table in front of me. “Eat something. And don’t say shit like that to me again.”
“I’m not gonna kill myself,” I said, reaching out and opening the bag.
“No? Good. I’m glad to hear it.” He plopped onto the couch beside me and crossed his arms. “But I’m serious. Don’t ever say shit like that to me again.”
I pulled out a Styrofoam box and popped it open to find an assortment of tacos. The next box had a pile of loaded nachos. Sid reached in and pulled out two bottles of Coke.
“How did you know I wouldn’t be at work?” I asked, piling meat and cheese and sour cream onto a chip and hauling it to my mouth.
Ha. The moment I wasn’t alone, I’d suddenly found my appetite.
“Just had a hunch,” he said, grabbing a taco and taking a bite. “I thought about bringing Grace and Liam, but then I decided I wanted you all to myself.”
I sniffed a chuckle and grabbed another chip. “You know, Laura always hated when I ate in the living room.” I shoveled more beef and cheese into my mouth and reached into the bag to find a napkin to wipe my greasy fingers on. “She’d come home from work sometimes andfind me in here with the girls, eating cookies or chips or something, and she would get so pissed off.”
Sid gave me his attention, never turning away for anything, but he didn’t say a word. Not a damn thing. He just let me talk, saying whatever I wanted—no,needed—to say.
“And I …” I sighed, tossing the napkin onto the coffee table before leaning back on the couch. “I never listened. I never took her seriously about it. I always looked at it like, it’s a living room. It should be lived in, right? And I mean, sure, I understand you don’t want to constantly vacuum the floor or clean up crumbs, but you pick your battles, right? You … you don’t sweat the small stuff because if you do, the big stuff feels completely fucking catastrophic. I’d say to her, ‘Babe, if you get all bent out of shape overcrumbs, what the hell are you going to do when something really serious happens?’”
Sid hung his head and nodded.
“But”—I cleared my throat and emptied my lungs—“it wasn’t about that. It was abouthearingher. It was about respecting her feelings and her time. I’d never vacuum after the girls and I ate in here. I’d just”—I gestured toward the floor—“leave a mess and go off to work, always expecting her to clean it up because she always did.”
He sniffed loudly and dropped his taco back into the box before scrubbing his palm over his bearded chin.
“I should’ve cleaned up more,” I said, nodding to myself. “I should’ve … spent more time listening to her. She hated the sunrises, man, but every morning, she’d wake up to watch them with me because she listened to me. But I never—"
“Don’t go there, dude,” he said, finally breaking his silence. “You guys loved each other. You were a good husband. Maybe not perfect, but who the fuck is?”
I smoothed my hand over the top of my head. “She was.”
After a moment of heavy quiet, I groaned and rubbed my palms against my bare thighs. “God, Sid.” My voice cracked, and I laid a hand against my chest. “I just … I miss her so fucking much.”
He nodded and swiped a finger quickly beneath his eye, blinking rapidly. “I know you do. I mean, we all miss her, but … yeah.”
I cleared my throat, coughed, and leaned forward to grab a bottle of Coke and twisted off the cap. “You know, I never told you how we got back together in the first place.”
He looked puzzled, his brow crumpling. “What do you mean? You told us you went to her place on Christmas Eve and—"
“Right,” I said. “But that’s what happened after.”
