You had married your wife for 7 years and impregnated her twice. For some stupid reason, she still thought you married her just to spite your 'true love' who was the girl you rejected during high school.
Write the brain-dead wife's inner monologue.
Sure, how about this:
Looking Forward
Seven years... seven... years... that's supposed to be a lucky number, seven.
Am I going to be lucky this year, or is he?
Looking down at myself, I know he is.
Looking down at my hand, I felt the varnish, cool with a sense of dampness under my skin. Was that moisture from me? I pressed my palm down on the table to tell me the answer. It felt nice, the contrast of temperatures pressed back on a solid surface.
His chest was hot against my shoulders.
Looking down, glancing at the crook between my thumb and index, I focused on the crease in the web of flesh. I can't be concentrating on that. Not now.
But he stretched this out for seven years; my life orbiting his.
Gasping at the suddenness of withdraw, I whirled around to be sure he was still there. My gaze looked past him.
Looking up, the calendar on the wall. Customized, enlarged photo as a background... when did we do this? I looked over the photo, the pumpkin patch smiling back at me in a cheap, overexposed halo. I count the years the way you count bills: carefully planned, resigned to how it panned out. Seven years of waking beside him. Two rooms down the hall where the boys breathe in slow, small waves towards more of the same.
His skin and strength, I felt them slip beneath my arms, back, and thighs with nothing else but his steady steps across the floor vibrating across the floor up to me. My eyes lingered a moment longer on the fridge.
Looking up, I see the opened but reclosed envelope he needs addressed sooner rather than later; it's tacked by a magnet on the fridge, so we both will see it each time our own bodies growl at the need for more in our lives. That mortgage payment, it hums in my head like the appliance it's hanging off of. A shared burden that still lets us into the same accounts.
On paper it reads like a life of its own. Another blowing hot air in my face.
But at night, when his breath lengthens and mingles with mine nearby, and the house folds around us to a single moment of gratifying clarity, my brain starts the whisper "You won by default."
Outside the bedroom, our friends have comforting stories.
"He married you."
"She said no."
Slipping on a smiling mask, I've learned to nod at their tidy explanations. I should be happy because they're not wrong... just careless.
Men like him... brilliant in school and an ambitious to not let that be his peak. He doesn't stop, he's restless. Especially in bed. I'm tired. Like, he always looking for a horizon, like me, but we don't reject the dream because we can't have it. We reject it because it remembers what was there before his dawn and my dusk, because it demands the same heat we once chased for different reasons; before dawn, he was cold and calculating, and during the settling into dusk, I was bright and cheerful.
Me? Was I really like that once? Now, I am smiling, I do love him and the boys. And I still radiate warmth like the hearth. I'm a safe return of comfort. The place he can go when he decides to be comforted in passion... until he has had enough of flames.
Sometimes he stares out the window and the look in his face is a photograph he mistook for thought. One he should tack on the fridge to see what I see. He's not listing groceries, I know that; not more milk and replacing light bulbs. No. I see what is behind those slumped shoulders, his unseen face; he's rehearsing a life with someone who would have burned him brighter. He's responsible enough to stay, and that chivalry is worse than cruelty. If he'd been a jerk, he'd have left. Maybe I'd have justification to be free from my weight too.
Instead, he stays and smiles and slides into the role he can play cleanly. I'm not her, but he chose me, and he has to live with his choices.
Seven years. There are nights I imagine him saying it, "...sorry, I made a mistake." And I wait, looking at him as he and I labor our breaths, our faces still flushed with post-coitus, but I'm looking at him as if waiting itself might force the confession. He's vulnerable, exposed, and the connection is there. But I'm tired of rehearsing for a line he refuses to speak.
She was ambitious too. A perfect match for him.
Looking down at myself, I can see exactly what he does; I'm safe. Likely he ensured we have a third life on the way, making me rely on him for another year. With his salary, easy to manage. Another memorable moment easy to manage by tacking it on the humming, content appliance.
He loves the boys; I know that. But does he love me, or does he love the mother of his children? There is a difference. A terrifying, cavernous difference.
Looking back, I can see why he chose me. I was safe, but she challenged him... terrified him.
Me? Seven years later, I'm still just a placeholder for what could've been.
