“Here we are on a date,” she said. “Right back where we started from.”
“Not really,” he murmured, having just taken a big bite. She waited while he chewed and swallowed, curious to know what he felt had changed.
“Truck’s got a different engine,” he finally observed.
She swallowed too much of the icy milkshake and an ache seized her throat. “That’s it?” she asked, when the pain passed. “Eleven years of marriage, and that’s what we’ve got, a rebuilt engine?”
He retreated into his lunch. She stole some more fries and stared out through the blur. Like a cataract. Rushing water, a blindness. Her father hadn’t lived long enough to be old, but he’d had cataracts, brought on by some trauma she’d never quite understood.
“So,” she said. “Are we just never going to talk about the other stuff?”
“What other stuff?”
“Any of it. Why we did this. That poor little baby.”
“What for? It’s gone.”
“It is not gone. Not like something that never existed. It was, Cub.”
“But then it wasn’t. Anyway, we had more kids. Just let bygones be bygones.”
A change in the density of the rain now gave a vague visibility to certain shapes: the red rectangle of the Dairy Prince sign, a dark green Dumpster. She considered what her father must have endured with that kind of diminished vision. Seeing without seeing.
“They’re not bygone,” she said. “Everything changed, and that’s still here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Great day in the morning, Cub. We should have used a condom, and we didn’t. No going back. Look at what’s in your life. A house, a wife, Preston and Cordie. All because we accidentally got me pregnant in high school.”
Cub looked hurt. “You’re acting like we wouldn’t have got married.”
She blinked her eyes. “Cub, seriously? Were you, like, thinking of popping the question? Before that happened?”
He looked away from her, toward the shapes that came and went with the waves of rain. Dellarobia could imagine the inner structure of her husband’s world, in which events confirmed themselves. Their marriage must be good, because marriages were. It had come to pass.
“I appreciate you for manning up. I do,” she said. “I had no family, and then all of a sudden I had your family. But you were there too, Cub. You know what I’m saying. We were headed in different directions. You can’t tell me we weren’t.”
Cub pressed his thumbs against the inside corners of his eyes, and his breathing grew ragged, and she felt terrible and cruel, as if she were prodding him with a stick. She should just let him be. It’s what she had always done, let him be. “I honestly thought I was going to college,” she said in a low, flat voice. “You’d find some nice girl and settle down. How come we can’t say what’s true?”
“We love each other now,” he said. “That’s what matters.”
“I know. People say that. We do. You can make yourself love a person, we’ve done a fair job of that. But there’s other stuff, Cub.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Respect? You can’t manufacture that. You can’t demand it at gunpoint. Whatever. You earn it. Like a salary or something.”
“I respect you,” he said.
“I know. And you’re sweet to me. It’s just never quite—I don’t know how to put this—” She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “It’s like I’m standing by the mailbox waiting all the time for a letter. Every day you come along and put something else in there. A socket wrench, or a milkshake. It’s not bad stuff. Just the wrong things for me.”
Cub now sat forward with his arms and head on the steering wheel, mute with grief, his shoulders shaking. Dellarobia felt stunned. His reaction made this real. She could easily have stayed home and skipped this conversation. She leaned over to give him an awkward hug. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m thankful for our children. But I’m not what you need.”
He spoke without lifting his head. “You’re different, Dellarobia. It’s because of all that business up the mountain. I wish they’d never lit down here.”
“That’s not true. It started way before that. I never told you. But I went up there by myself one day before anybody else knew about the butterflies, and I saw them.” She felt breathless, as if falling through air. “I was running off.”
He sat up and gave her a wary glance before reaching across to flip open the glove box. She helped him get a handful of the fast food napkins that were crammed in there. She took some herself, and they blew their noses in a companionable, married way.
“I knew about that,” he finally said.
“What? What did you know?”
Cub looked at her directly, though it seemed to take more effort than he could sustain. “Mother found out some way. She said you meant to do away with yourself.”
Dellarobia’s heart thrummed in her ears. “Hester told you this? When?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A while back. She’s fretted over it.”
The world in Dellarobia’s mind took a tumble, and nothing in it felt true at all. Hester’s strange confessions, Cub’s attentiveness. She felt like a blind person grappling for the doorway. “That’s not it,” was all she could say. She sat quiet for a moment, considering the threshold where she found herself. “I wasn’t going to kill myself. They put that on the news, but it’s a lie. I was going to run out on our marriage in a stupid way. I’m sorry. I ended up not doing it. I ran into that . . . whatever it was, the butterflies, on my way up there. And it knocked me on my butt. It was like I had to come back and do the right thing.”
“Which is what?” Cub asked, sounding more dismayed than angry.
“Which is I don’t know what,” she said. “I’m still trying to figure that out. To do something for the right reasons? Instead of another mistake that can’t be turned back. That’s my whole life, Cub. Just flying from one darn thing to the next.”
“You’re in love with him.” Cub stated it, rather than asking, which relieved her of the burden of answering. Now he did look angry, heavy-browed. He scowled at the windshield. She wished this rain would stop. It felt like the end of the world.