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Sometimes, when she was alone in the house, dog in the backyard, silence all around her, she tried to imagine the shape of her future, and all she could see was the boys growing up. She’d think, In twenty years, I’ll be …
And the next thing she knew, she’d be imagining Clark working as a vet or a computer programmer, and her heart would swell with pride. She’d imagine Tony, building beautiful houses.
There was this gap in her life where she used to be, and she couldn’t fill it, so she mopped the kitchen floor and Swiffered the hallways of her big, empty house. She kept it clean and beautiful, kept her kids clean and beautiful, and tried to convince herself it was enough.
It wasn’t enough.
But it was all she had.
Amber looked at the rocking surface of the water. The sun beat down on the crown of her head, intense rather than diffused, its rays focused on one nickel-size spot of dark hair that would sizzle if she jumped into the water.
Too much hair, hot against her neck. Too much fuss, washing and conditioning it every day. Blowing it dry or dealing with the fact that if she didn’t, it would still be damp at lunchtime.
Tony liked it long, but he’d claimed to like those twenty-five extra pounds, too.
In the pool, a man was swimming alone. Good-looking. About Tony’s age, maybe a little older. Every time she looked up, he was in a new position, but he was always facing her direction.
She thought she knew what he saw when he looked at her. Lonely woman. Shiny bikini. An ad that said, Come talk to me.
But she was a false advertisement. The dry spot on her knee—raspy with flaking skin when she put her fingertip on it—that was the true product. She was desiccated, her body a ship held together by tarred hemp ropes, drying in the sun. A vessel with no captain.
She’d walked up to Jamila’s luxurious, beautiful suite, placed her bag in the closet, turned in a circle, and realized she didn’t have the faintest notion what to do with herself.
Have fun, Tony had commanded.
And then that kiss. The force behind it, the conviction—as if he knew something she didn’t. Something he couldn’t put into words.
At home, she caught herself watching him moving through rooms. Reaching for the salad dressing. Toweling off his hair or bending down to pull a pair of jeans out of his dresser drawer. She caught herself hoping that he still loved her as much as she loved him, and more than that—that he knew something.
Because there had been times when it surprised her what Tony knew. Not with his head, but with his heart. In his bones. Back when they met, he’d known how to make love to her until she was limp and exhausted, suffused with lazy confidence that there was no greater thing she had been put on the earth to do.
When she’d found herself pregnant with Clark, staring into the future and watching one door after another close in her face, Tony had known how to talk her back to reason. He’d known how to hold her hand in the hospital, how to carry the baby in the crook of his arm like Clark was this hardy thing, unbreakable.
He’d known how to deal with the fact that their plans had been replaced with question marks.
He’d known.
She could still feel that kiss. How erotically unfamiliar his mouth had been, with all those people watching. The tug of a golden thread of hope, wrapped around her heart even as the van drove away.
But then the van was gone, and that was that.
They’d been married for ten years, together longer than that. She bought his underwear, his socks. She scrubbed his toilets and birthed his children, and she couldn’t really believe at this stage of the game that Tony knew anything she didn’t know.
Not anymore.
“Hey, Mom! Watch this!”
She looked up in time to see a boy who wasn’t her son leap off the diving board, hands wrapped around his knees. His hair was airborne, his cheeks puffing out because he was so young, he still thought he needed that talisman to keep him safe from drowning.
He didn’t know that his body would float. That it took work, concentration, deliberation, to really let yourself drown.
Yesterday, it had been Tony in this pool with the boys. Wading toward the deep end with Jacob dangling from his back—surely choking him, but Tony had smiled as he cocked his arm and tossed the Nerf football into the deep end. It had shed water in a sparkling spiral and then dropped into Ant’s waiting hands right before Clark dunked him mercilessly under the water.
And then, when Clark came up with the football, “Go deep, Dad!”
Tony obligingly backing into the shallow end of the pool. One big hand gripping Jacob’s spindly thigh, holding the boy up. Black swim trunks sucked tight to his quads as water sluiced over his chest and stomach.
There had been two girls in the deck chairs beside her. Twenty, twenty-two years old. They’d rated all the men in the pool area, and Tony had come in a close second to the Jamaican lifeguard on duty.
