“Well, there are some new ones out there—”
“Stop it! Just give it a break! Stop trying to fix me like I’m one of your kids.” With that, he got to his feet and stormed out of the living room.
I leaned back on the couch pillows, my hand on my chest, feeling like I’d been talking to a stranger.
But I was also angry. In all our talks about his moods, why hadn’t he told me he’d gone for help? When was this? Years before I’d met him? Months? What else didn’t I know? And how dare he use my kids in an argument against me? That, to me, was the greatest cruelty.
As I thought back to the months before, I realized I’d done a lot of cajoling, cheering, joking, anything to try and get Bryan to respond. I’d run out of ideas—and worse, I had no plan whatsoever.
5
“I’m not happy,” I said one night after work while he was cooking chicken.
Bryan didn’t turn around. The oil was splattering on the stove; he had it on too high.
“Are you happy?” I asked.
“As happy as anyone, I guess,” he said.
“Is that good enough?”
“What are you saying, Jess? That you’re not happy with our life? With me?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying. Are you saying you’re happy?”
Bryan turned down the heat on the chicken, came over and put his arms around me. His gray scruff scraped my chin. He’d grown the beard to try and keep his face warm. I wasn’t crazy about it but if it helped, I didn’t care.
“What else can we do to make it better?” he asked.
I breathed in the smell of his shirt, a mixture of mountain fresh dryer sheets and the paprika he was sprinkling on the chicken.
We used to cook together, tossing pasta around, simmering sauce, trying but never managing to master braising beef or baking pumpkin scones, covering the kitchen and ourselves in flour and corn starch and pepper. We always planned to take gourmet cooking lessons but never got around to it.
Bryan used to be up for anything: a spontaneous game of mini-golf at 10:00 at night, shopping for Halloween decorations even in September, or choosing the perfect blue paint for the bathroom from among dozens of swatches. We once went to an all-night discount store for shovels because we’d bent ours trying to dig out our cars from the enormous snowbanks the plows had made.
I was always reminded of my childhood in New York in the wintertime. My older sister Katrina and I would bundle in so many layers we could barely move our arms, and only our eyes and noses showed. Weekends, we’d be up early to get suited up and head outdoors to meet our neighborhood friends. We built tunnels in snowbanks, dug up chunks of crusty snow and called it pizza, stamped out dirty words with our boots in fresh snow in a field where our parents would never see. We’d stayed out until our mom hollered for dinnertime, our cheeks stinging and flushed when we went inside. Our mother always made us take off our boots and lay them on the radiator even though they had no chance of drying out because we scarfed down tomato soup and grilled cheese so we could get back outside. Nighttime came early in the winter; the sun set around 4:30 p.m. and we reluctantly returned home, every layer of our winter clothes wet. Katrina even wore a hole in the knees of her snow pants and got a brand-new pair for Christmas, something I resented to this day because I had to wear my old crappy ones until they were the length of capris.
When I was growing up, a local rec field was flooded every year and turned into a makeshift ice rink. The ice was always choppy and caused lots of falls, but we didn’t care. I had to wear my sister’s hand-me-down skates and my mother always asked me if I could wiggle my toes to keep them warm. We pretended to be figure skaters, doing shaky figure 8s, or speed skaters with our shoulders hunched down, racing each other. Katrina, two years older, always beat me. I remember crying so hard when I lost the races that she bought me hot chocolate from the refreshment stand for 25 cents. It badly burned my tongue, but I didn’t care.
I liked New York winters, the howling winds and flurries giving a perfect excuse to bundle under cozy comforters and read. I’d never had a fireplace but hoped one day to buy a house with a large one in the family room. Despite the burned tongue of childhood, hot chocolate was a staple in the wintertime.
Winters in New York were something I never considered living without. I’d raised my kids on snowmen and snow tubes and sleds and hot chicken soup to warm up a winter chill. The seasons were part of my everyday life, like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west—part of who I was.
But it was something Bryan had never experienced, my love of New York, and no matter how many snowball fights we’d had and snowmen we’d built, there was no enjoyment in winter for him and never would be.
6
I’d met my first husband, Adam, in a photography class at college. His photos were so good the teacher used them as examples for the rest of us, who, like me, produced grainy images more gray than black or white.
He took one of the most classic photos I’ve ever seen that summer, or any summer since, of a Grateful Dead fan wrapped in an American flag on his way to an outdoor concert in the rain.
I ruffled the fur on a stuffed teddy bear and titled it a “bad bear day.”
“When are we getting married?” Adam had asked on our third date.
We were twenty-two;
