Mrs. Perfect

I’m standing next to the counter, making a grocery list. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

“I like this house,” she says, putting down the box and coming to stand next to me. “It’s little and old, but you made it nice.”

“Thank you.” Someday, I think, I’ll miss our old house, but for now, I’m determined to focus on the things I can do, the things I can make, and the things I can paint. “Did you and your sisters still want to get out some of the Christmas decorations today?”

“Are we going to get the tree, too?”

“Maybe.”

Jemma enters the kitchen with a stack of catalogs that came in yesterday’s mail. “I don’t want to do the tree today. I want to start our baking. We haven’t made anything yet.”

I add peanut butter to the list before looking up at the girls. “Maybe we can do the tree today and the baking tomorrow.”

“Or maybe we can do the baking today and the tree tomorrow,” Jemma answers, hauling herself onto the kitchen counter to look through the new Victoria’s Secret catalog. She loves all the catalogs, always on the lookout for something interesting or new. I used to be like that. I loved the opportunity to browse and shop. Every glossy catalog filled me with ideas of how life could be. Every purchase hinted at the person I wasn’t yet but hoped to be.

“Some of the girls in my class are already wearing a bra,” Jemma says, studying pictures of the world’s supermodels in delicate bra and panties sets.

“Girls develop at different ages.” I chew on the end of my pen and wonder if I’m going to finally have to give the birds and bees talk, something I’ve carefully avoided almost as much as Jemma has. She never asks questions about how babies are made, and I’ve never tried to explain . . . yet. But I should. My mom never explained it to me, and I found out through trash talk from friends.

“I know girls develop at different ages,” she answers, “I was just telling you that some are wearing bras. And Katherine Kelley is already big, really big. Everyone’s always watching her when she has to run because her . . . um”—Jemma puts a hand out in front of her small chest—“they go up and down. A lot.”

I put down my pen. “Do you stare?”

“No.” She pauses. “Maybe. It’s just . . . weird. Last year nothing, and now these big . . . breasts . . . and people treat her different. One boy, I don’t think he was a fifth grader, tried to kiss her and grab her there, and he got suspended. For a week.”

“That’s sexual harassment,” I say, surprised that such things are even happening at Points Elementary.

“What’s sexual harassment?” asks a deep male voice from the living room.

Nathan?

Jemma lets out a scream and leaps from the counter. “Dad!”

Brooke chases after, and Tori comes shrieking from her bedroom. “Daddy, Daddy!”

Stunned, I follow a little more slowly, emerging to see three little girls throw themselves onto Nathan. Within seconds he’s covered in arms, legs, and kisses.

I don’t think he’s even aware of me there with all the shrieks and hugs and love, but then his head lifts and he looks at me. He is shockingly thin, with deep creases and shadows beneath his eyes. He looks at me for a long moment. “Hello, honey.”

Honey.

Honey.

I try to smile, but I can’t. I sag weakly against the wall, my heart so tender that it hurts to speak.

The past rushes over me, the girl I was, the years we shared, the babies we had, the baby we lost, the house we built to fill the emptiness. And looking at him, I feel no anger, no sadness, just peace. Here is my man. Here is my partner. “Welcome home.”

Nathan takes the girls to pick out the perfect Christmas tree. I was asked to come, but I said I’d stay home and drag out the boxes of decorations from the storage unit (decrepit shack) that’s been attached to the carport in the backyard and start untangling all the lights.

Nathan and the girls are back within the hour with a tree that’s way too tall for the living room. I don’t even have to say anything to Nathan. He walks into the house, looks up at the ceiling, then sighs. “They are eight-foot ceilings, aren’t they?”

“Yep.”

Fresh lines run from his nose to his mouth. The furrows in his forehead deepen. “I should have called you.”

“It’s okay.”

“Dammit.”

I glance at the girls, who are hovering in the doorway. “We have a saw. We’ll just cut the bottom off.”

He turns away, stares out the living room window. “I can’t—” He breaks off, shakes his head, his expression infinitely sad.

My insides squeeze. Not this, not this, not this.

“Nathan,” I say quietly, calmly, as much for my benefit as his.

“It’s too much, Taylor.” There’s anguish in his voice, anguish and heartbreak, and my eyes burn, my throat tightening. Something bad is coming. Something bad.

“Mom?” Jemma asks uncertainly.

I look at the girls again, make a shooing motion to send them away. “What’s too much?” I ask once the girls have disappeared into their rooms.

“Everything.” He turns to look at me, and he’s so pale there’s a grayish tint to his skin. “I don’t know how to do this anymore.” He makes a rough sound in the back of his throat. “I don’t know that I can.”

My legs suddenly don’t feel strong enough to support me, and I sit in one of the living room chairs. “Maybe it’s time you told me whatever is it you’ve needed to tell me. Maybe it’s time we just got it all out.”

He gestures toward the hall. “But the girls are waiting to do the tree.”

“They’re okay.”

I wait for him to speak, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead he stands, hands on his hips, his gaze fixed toward the fireplace. He runs his hand over his jaw with its day-old shadow of a beard.

“I’m not in a good place, Taylor,” he says at last. “I haven’t been in a good place for a long time, and I keep trying to protect you from this . . . whatever this is . . . but I can’t anymore.

“I was in trouble,” he continues wearily, “crashing and burning, and the worst part was I couldn’t tell you.” He looks at me, damning shadows beneath his eyes. His exhaustion is real. He seems to have aged ten years in the past two months. “I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t know how to tell anyone. It’s still something I’m ashamed of.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He stares at his hands. “Playing football, you never blame anyone else. You learn mistakes cost games. You learn to suck it up, take the hit, and get back out there. I’ve been trying to do that, but it’s not working. I’m back out there, but I’m not the same. We’ve lost so much. We’re out of the game—”

“No, we’re not. We don’t have the big house, but we don’t have the debt anymore, either. We both have jobs, we’re both working, we’ll soon be able to have another house. It’s just a matter of time.”

He just shakes his head. “But none of this needed to have happened in the first place. If I’d been more of a man—”

“That’s not fair, Nathan,” I protest, my throat tightening. Nathan’s a perfectionist just like me.

“Yes, it is. I invested badly in the stock market, and I didn’t want anyone, much less you, to know. I didn’t want you to know I couldn’t do everything. I didn’t want you to know that I’d screwed up.” Self-loathing gives his words a hard edge. “Taylor, I hate myself. I hate what I did to you. I hate what I’ve done to the girls, and I went to Omaha to try to fix things, to try to save things, but now I can’t even save myself.” Tears fill his eyes. “I can’t do this, honey. I can’t. I can’t do this without you. Please, Taylor, forgive me.”

I go to him, put my arms around him, and hold him tight, as tight as I hold the girls after they’ve had a nightmare. “There’s nothing to forgive—”

“Yes, there is. I’ve got it all wrong. Tried to do it all on my own. Thought that’s what a man was supposed to do.

But I can’t face who I am, or what I am, without you.”

I hold on. “You don’t have to.”

“Tell me we can make it.”

“We can make it, Nathan. We can and we will.”

In between decorating the tree, a trip to the mall for the girls to see Santa, and a visit to Kirkland’s Houghton Beach Park to see the Christmas ships, Nathan and I talk. And talk. And talk some more.

He hates his job in Omaha, hates it with a passion. The work is boring, the management is unstable and petty, but that’s not what’s making him unhappy. He can’t stand living apart from us, can’t stand feeling as though he failed all of us.

That evening after the girls are in bed and Nathan and I keep yawning, we agree it’s time to sleep, too. I wonder, though, where Nathan will want to sleep. We haven’t slept in the same bed in months and months.

He looks just as puzzled, too, standing in the hall between the living room and bedroom. “Where . . . what . . . should I do?”