Maybe I wanted too much for him. Maybe after three months he realized he could never bear the burden of my hopes and dreams.
“Jeff has a new hose waiting for me at the dealership.” Sam cuts his meat, the knife scraping over the plate in a high-pitched, teeth-clenching scream. “Can you pick it up on your way home?”
“Sure.” Sam doesn’t like to go into town, and he rarely goes to the city unless he needs to buy a new piece of equipment. I’ve tried over the years to get him to take a weekend away, maybe stay a hotel, eat in a fancy restaurant, take in a show, see a band, or talk like we used to do, but he is always too busy, too tired, or has too much to do.
Why eat in a restaurant when we have good food at home? Or see a show when we have a TV? We see each other every day. What would we talk about anyway? Not work because farm work is all we do, and I gave up my dream of becoming a teacher after we lost Ethan. I couldn’t be around children without thinking of him. Would he have been friends with the little first grader who ran into me on his bike? Would my life have been filled with play dates and puppet shows instead of potatoes and peas?
“And I need some checks for the men,” he continues. “You can pick them up at the bank.”
“I’m getting my hair done, and I have to go to the florist and the bookstore before I visit the cemetery. And then I have to see the dentist. The bank closes at three. I might not have time.”
Today is Ethan’s birthday, and I have a ritual that I follow every year. I buy him flowers—exotic flowers from the faraway places he will never get to see—and a children’s book that I donate to the library in his name after I read it to him at the cemetery.
Sam freezes, the meatloaf dangling precariously on the edge of his fork. “The men need to be paid tomorrow. If I don’t pay them, they won’t show up the next day.” Sam doesn’t ask about the dentist. He probably didn’t even notice I’ve been unable to eat anything but soup and a little porridge for the last two days, and I don’t mention it because I know he has a lot on his mind. Harvest is all consuming. And, of course, we don’t talk about Ethan. Sam made it clear, on what would have been Ethan’s first birthday, that he wasn’t interested in doing anything to remember our son, so for the last ten years I’ve remembered Ethan alone.
I fist my hands by my side, forcing myself to take slow, even breaths as the cream-colored walls of a traditional country kitchen close in around me. “I’ll fit it in.”
He grunts his approval. “Why are you getting your hair done anyway? You look fine.”
Fine.
My hand flies to my thick dark hair, tied back in its usual ponytail. At thirty-five years’ old, I don’t want to be told by the love of my life who used to write songs about me that I look fine.
Fine means you look okay. Not bad enough to embarrass the person you are with, but not good enough to bring the life back to your husband’s eyes.
Fine means barely adequate, and that’s what our life has become.
I’m not beautiful in any sense of the word, but the constant demands of the farm have kept me in shape, and although my skin isn’t quite as smooth, and my eyes aren’t quite as bright, I think I am still pretty. I am pure Italian on both sides, three generations back, with my mother’s high cheekbones, thick straight hair, dark eyes, and long lashes, and my father’s oval face and deeply olive skin. Exotic, is how my school friend Alexis Morales describes me. She was always convinced my looks would take me far. I don’t think by far she meant a lonely acreage twenty-five miles from town.
“What about dinner?” Sam calls out when I grab my handbag from the counter.
“I’ll be home.”
I always come home.
There is nowhere else to go.