The First Husband

“How could you not have told me you were here?” Griffin said.

Jesse tuned back to his brother, offering up a shrug. “Didn’t want to worry you,” he said. “Seemed unnecessary.”

Griffin put down the twins, who raced wordlessly up the stairs, fighting back their laughter, fighting hard not to tumble and trip over the massive amount of belongings covering the floor. I watched them go, my eyes shifting back to Jesse once they’d disappeared, a bedroom door slamming behind them. The only noise.

“What do the kids get for winning the silent contest? ” I asked. “They seem incredibly committed.”

“A hundred bucks,” Jesse said.

“That’s some prize,” I said.

This made Jesse smile. “I believe it breeds a certain level of commitment,” he said.

Griffin drilled his brother with a look. “Where’s Cheryl, Jessie?”

“Cheryl kicked me out,” Jesse said.

“She kicked you out?” he said.

Jesse nodded, his voice getting smaller. “Sammy hasn’t put down Cheryl’s watering can since. The kid even sleeps with it. That means he’s traumatized, right? We’ve probably traumatized him. Dex seems to be handling it all a little better, but last night he took a hard swing at Sammy to try to get that can. So I can’t really take that as a sign of progress.”

Griffin just stared at his brother. “Cheryl kicked you out? Why would she do that?”

“Well, she needed to catch her breath for a minute,” Jesse said. “That can happen.”

“When, Jesse? When can that happen?”

“You know,” he said, “when you find out your husband got someone else pregnant.”

I looked at him in disbelief—what did he just say? As if reading my thought, Jesse nodded again.

“It’s complicated,” Jesse said.

I looked at Jesse for so long that someone might have wondered if I were thinking it was possible that he was going to take his words back, say something different instead. But maybe I was also looking at him for that long because I was scared to look any other way—to catch Griffin’s eyes and see what he was or wasn’t thinking about what his brother had just revealed.

But Griffin wasn’t saying a word. The next several, I was guessing, were going to have to come from Jesse. Then they did. And they were for me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Griffin’s a little rude. I’m Jesse. Griffin’s brother. Who are you?”

He held out his hand, which I imagined was sticky from the Fudgsicle. But I took it.

“Griffin’s wife,” I said.

10

“He’s actually a genius, believe it or not,” Griffin said. “Like a certified one. His IQ is off the charts and he skipped two grades in school when we were growing up. Got a full ride to MIT at sixteen years old. Though maybe that did more damage than good. . . .”

We were lying in bed—my first night in our bed—and I was staring at the ceiling, only a bedside light still on. I was blinking too quickly, trying not to give into the tight ball taking hold in my chest, trying not to focus on the little-person-size hole in the wall near our bedroom door—the result of a paintball fight gone awry. It was now covered with a bedsheet that was unequal to the task of keeping out the outside world.

Instead of focusing too hard on any of that, I tried to make out the designs on the ceiling overhead, still mostly visible in the soft light: the intricate and beautiful designs, interstitial numbers and words, stand-alone letters, an entire system I couldn’t quite comprehend, right above my head. Griffin had just come to bed, after a longer conversation with Jesse, one I didn’t partake in, one in which Jesse provided some details about this other woman—he knew her from graduate school—and fewer details about what he was going to do now.

Now Griffin was whispering. I knew why and I wasn’t sure why. Jesse and the kids were in a bedroom across the hall, watching a movie—Raiders of the Lost Ark, I believed—the volume turned to high. They were laughing and shouting at the screen, shouting louder than the movie itself. Silent contest apparently over.

“I just wish that you hadn’t gotten such a bad first impression of him,” Griffin said.

“It wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Really . . .”

Then I cleared my throat because I wasn’t sure what to say next. A bad first impression, though, seemed like the wrong terminology. Someone’s mother being loud or eerily quiet was a bad first impression. Someone’s childhood friend drinking too much wine and getting silly. But finding a married brother-in-law living in your new house with his young twin sons because he’d impregnated a woman who wasn’t his wife? That seemed like something else.