A Morning Like This (12 page)

David picked up something to fold, some flimsy silk thing that he’d seen Abby wear underneath her sweaters. He tried to match
seam to seam, corner to corner, but the thing slithered formless from his grasp like something alive.

If he didn’t have anything to fold, he didn’t have anything to do with his hands.

He considered sitting down on the bed before he told her. But, no. He felt more comfortable, more in control, standing up.
“I don’t know how to say this, Abigail. I don’t know where to start.”

“At the beginning.” She rescued the shiny silk thing from his knee and pressed it into a perfect, tiny square. “Just start
at the beginning, David. It’s as good a place as any.”

“This is important, Abby.”

“Well.” He could see she was confused. Her expression became neutral. “Okay.” She waited. “Go on.”

Lord. Is this the way it is with You? Giving up everything good I know in exchange for failure I deserve? Sacrificing something
that I understand for everything that I don’t?

Outside, the boys had abandoned the skateboards and turned on the hose. In the grass out the window, the yellow sprinkler
threw up May Pole ribbons of spray. Braden ran through, the water beating against his bare legs. He skipped and yelped, running
back for more.

“They’re getting their clothes wet out there,” Abby complained. At first David thought she wanted him to tell them to stop.
But he realized she was only talking, filling the space between them. “I’m not doing laundry again until next weekend. This
is my only day.”

David turned from the window, back to his wife, back to the awful matter at hand. “I need you to listen carefully and not
to interrupt me with this.” There wasn’t anything he could say to cushion the blow for her. “Because I have difficult news.”

She stopped folding and rested her nose in the vee between her thumb and her pointer finger. “Okay.”

“I’ve gotten into… well, it can’t be helped, Abby. There’s going to be some trouble.”

She lowered her brows. “Go on.”

“It’s something you have to know. In order for us to…go forward.”

“Okay.” She waited.

He took a deep breath and launched. “I’ve had an affair, Abby.”

“What?” For a moment she seemed disoriented, as if she had lost her bearings. She gave one half-witted, awful-sounding hiccup.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” She removed a pair of his socks from the basket and matched them, toe
to toe, heel to heel, before she rolled the tops together, one inside the other. David had an absurd thought as he watched
her: here was why he didn’t help with the laundry. He could never fold things quite right for her.

“No. It isn’t ridiculous. It’s true.”

She stopped folding.

“Abby, listen to me.”

She waited, those eyes of hers dazed, bewildered, still. “You’re crazy, you know. Saying things like this. It isn’t in very
good taste.”

“No, Abby. Maybe then I was crazy. But not anymore.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“I didn’t intend it to be.”

She cocked her head to one side, staring at him, her eyes turning hard. Her face showed slow recognition, slipping into a
mask that didn’t look like Abby anymore. “Suppose you tell me again, David. Suppose you tell me again and this time I won’t
be stupid enough to think you’re kidding.”

He could see a tendril of her hair that had escaped, curling against the nape of her neck. He wanted to reach for it and tuck
it away from her face. Only, now, he didn’t think he had the right. “Please. I don’t want to tell you again.”

“You’re lying—”

“I wish to God that I were.”

“You are.”

David shook his head slowly. He branded her eyes with his own. “I’m not lying.”

Until now it’s been a lie, Abby. Now, this time, it’s finally the truth
.

Slowly, methodically, she began to take the few pieces of laundry she’d folded, wad them up, and pitch them back into the
basket one piece at a time. Each word she spoke was punctuated with tossed clothing. First the silk lingerie she had smoothed
into the little square. The socks, landing like a Scud missile on the floor. His khaki shorts pinwheeling through the air,
like some bodiless person turning a somersault.

“Why are you telling me now?” In went a pair of his burgundy BVD’s. “Why on a Sunday, when we’ve been to church?” A washrag
and the green shirt to Braden’s little league uniform. “Why, on Father’s Day?”

When he answered, his voice was grave. “Because it couldn’t wait any longer. Because I’m doing what I think the Lord wants
me to do.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “You’re doing what the Lord wants you to do? The
Lord?”
He watched her draw in on herself, her body language tightening, her emotions pulling in. She gave one slight rock of her
chin, one small robotic flick of her hand. “Well, then. Thanks be to the Lord,” and her voice gave one broken little cry,
to be saying such familiar words when her heart felt so little. “I don’t know what we’d do without Him.”

“Abby, I’m sorry.”

Her face had gone pale. How he hated himself for the numb shock in her voice, the deadness in her eyes. “I don’t want to talk
about this right now. I have to absorb this.”

“Please.”

“You need to leave me alone.”

“No, I can’t.” He took one step toward her. Just one step. No more. “There’s too much at stake.”

“I should say so.”

“Things have gotten messed up.”

“An affair. What does that mean exactly? Were you
attracted
to someone besides me?”

He had the grace to look at the toe on his left shoe.

“Did you… did you spend
time
with someone else?”

“Please, Ab,” he said. “Don’t make me have to spell this out.”

She looked deeply into his eyes and he could tell she didn’t trust his words anymore, only his expressions, and she was trying
to read the truth in him. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t—”

Outside, Braden must have picked up the water sprinkler and aimed it. Spray pelted the side of the house and made them both
jump. Water spattered like pancake batter against the windowpane.

As powerful as Abby’s gaze had been to search him out, so was his need to break it and turn away. He refused to meet her eyes.
“I did.”

“When, David?”

“A long time ago.”

“
When
a long time ago?”

“It doesn’t matter now, does it? It’s been over for years.”

“It matters, David.”

He struggled against himself, trying to wrangle a way to protect her from any more pain. He owed her so much more than deception.
He owed her the truth. “It was nine years ago, Abby. I met her at the bank. She was a grad student spending her summer here
and I…I got way too involved.”

Her voice tightened. “Nine years ago?”

“Yes.”

He watched her counting back. “I was pregnant with Braden nine years ago.”

“Yes.”

“We were just getting started, David. We were practically still on our honeymoon.” She twisted one of his favorite Denver
Bronco T-shirts into a wad, then pulled out a pair of his sweat shorts and yanked on each leg like she was unfurling a flag.
“I was
pregnant
.”

“I know that.” Even in David’s own ears he heard how feeble his story sounded. “If I had to do it again, Abby, I wouldn’t.”

“That’s noble of you. Don’t you think you should have thought about it then?”

Don’t say any more
. He wanted to shake her.
Don’t take us farther than we can go
.

“I just cracked, Abby. You were eight months along and I got…freaked out.”

When does it stop? This hurting people?

It doesn’t, the answer came. Never.

Abby’s face had changed. She looked transparent, as if mistrust and anger and fear were waiting there right beneath her skin.
“Did you fall in love with her?”

“No. Not, that way, I guess. I just… well…Oh, Abby, she was
there
.”

“You risked us for some woman who was just
‘there’?
You risked us for somebody you didn’t love?”

He hung his head like a wayward child.

“When… when the baby was born, when we brought him home, had it changed by then?”

Almost impossible, making himself say the words, “That was the middle of it,” he said. “She called the hospital. To see if
we had a boy or a girl. And I told her. A boy. We had a boy.” He hesitated, remembering. “And she cried.”

Abby’s eyes were intent and numb and sad. “What would Braden think?” She asked it as if she knew it was the very question
that would most torture David, as if she knew exactly how to make him pay. “What would he think if he knew his father had
done something like this? If he knew his father had betrayed him? Even while he was being formed in the womb?”

His father. As if they were talking about someone who wasn’t standing in the room. A third party. Someone Abby hadn’t known
before.

David heard his own voice, thin, like a thread of smoke. “Braden’s going to be involved in this, Abby. There’s nothing I can
do to change that.”

“Why?” she asked dully. “Why would Braden have to be involved?”

He saw it as a movie going slowly: him saying the words, “I have a little girl whom he needs to know.” Abby letting out a
cry and picking up her basket, still just as full as it had been when she’d come in. Walking past him like he wasn’t in the
room, leaving him standing there, gaping at the empty spot where she used to be.

T
he last place David and Abigail Treasure would have chosen to go, the next evening after they’d discussed David’s having an
affair, was to The Spud Drive-In with the entire Elk’s Club baseball team.

For time immemorial, for as long as anybody could remember—for as long as anybody’s
parents
could remember—The Spud Drive-In had been the place to gather during summer twilights in the mountains. The screen stood
like a great white slab above the farmland. Its red-and-blue sign was shaped like an Idaho license plate. White paint peeled
from its ticket booth, where a hand-lettered price list read, “Carload $10. No foot traffic.”

It was called The Spud because, for people from Wyoming, everything in Idaho begged to be called a spud. People who worked
in Jackson Hole but lived eighteen miles across the pass in Idaho were called Spud Brothers. Anyone who drove to Idaho Falls
to the mall said they were going to Spudville. And any baseball team that came back victorious from the Madison Grand Slam
tournament in Rexburg bragged for weeks about how they’d been Spud-bashing.

The Spud was frequented by hearty souls who didn’t mind staying wrapped inside sleeping bags to stay warm while they watched
a movie. It was filled every night with those who didn’t mind seeing something at least five months old and those who didn’t
mind swarms of moths and bats drawn by the huge projector’s stream of light.

On this night, of all nights, the Elk’s Club Little League had defeated Jedediah’s House of Sourdough at Mateosky Field in
a game in which Braden Treasure homered twice and sparked a five-run outburst from his teammates.

But during the showdown, Abby Treasure had cheered from the third bleacher on the left portion of the stands, sitting conspicuously
away from the bevy of other moms that she usually socialized with on the sidelines.

David Treasure had rooted for the team from behind the north fence-line, standing alone.

Nobody understood why Abby didn’t jump to her feet at the first homer, lifting her fists in victory and proclaiming, “Yes,
that’s
my
kid. I taught him everything he knows.”

Nobody understood why David didn’t step forward and high-five the other fathers and speculate with the usual false modesty,
“Yep, it was a nice pitch, all right. Brade really got ahold of that one, didn’t he?”

Nobody understood why, with the game ended and Braden begging them to come to The Spud, David had said, “Maybe tonight isn’t
the best time, sport.” And Abby had said, “Honey, I’m just not in the mood.”

Braden wouldn’t give up. “But, Mom. I hit two homers.
Two
.”

“I know that.”

“Everybody’s going. The whole team. Even Wheezer.”

Wheezer was Sam Jacoby, who suffered asthma attacks every time he inhaled dust while base running or had to slide in at the
plate. He kept his inhaler in his sock, and nobody could understand how a boy could suck something into his lungs that smelled
like his feet.

Cindy Hubner, the coach’s wife, gave Abby a long look. “Are you okay? You were really quiet today.”

Abby tried her best to answer, but no words came. Her lips felt as thick and useless to speak through as sponges. “I don’t—”

“You have to come, Abby. It won’t be as much fun without you.”

And so they were coerced. Two people driving over Teton Pass to Idaho, sitting in the front seat of a shiny late-model Suburban,
and there might as well have been a fissure in the earth between them. The man, who’d satisfied himself at the expense of
their covenant. The woman, who saw her life changing forms and boundaries, melting away like a Salvador Dali painting. She
was standing on empty air. Nothing around her was what it seemed to be.