Chapter 1: Wear the Green One
Her phone lit up on the kitchen counter at 11:42 p.m., and the preview was short enough to read from across the room.
tyler.lifts.ohio: Same time tomorrow? Wear the green one 😉
I was standing at the sink rinsing out my coffee thermos for the morning. Jenna was upstairs in the shower. The phone sat face up next to her gym bag, the way it always did, because my wife had never once in sixteen years hidden her phone from me.
That was the thing I kept thinking about later. She never had to.
I dried my hands. I picked up the phone. The screen went dark again, and I didn’t know her passcode anymore. She’d changed it in the spring. Work made us update everything, she’d said. I’d believed her, because why wouldn’t I?
When she came down in sweatpants and her teal gym jacket, wet hair pulled up in a ponytail, I was still holding it.
She stopped on the bottom stair.
“Who’s Tyler?” I said.
There’s a half-second where a person decides what face to make. I’d never watched my wife do it before. I watched her do it then.
“Tyler from the gym,” she said. “Dan. Come on. He runs the six a.m. strength class.”
“He wants you to wear the green one.”
“The green leggings. It’s a joke. Everybody gives me a hard time about them, they’re ugly.” She crossed the kitchen and held out her hand for the phone. I didn’t give it to her right away. “Are you seriously doing this right now? It’s almost midnight.”
“I’m asking a question.”
“You’re accusing me of something.” She took the phone. Her fingers were cold. “He’s just a friend, Dan. A gym friend. You’re being paranoid.”
Paranoid. I turned that word over. I’m an HVAC guy. I spend my days in crawl spaces and attics finding the one cracked line that’s making a whole house sick. Paranoid isn’t a word anybody’s ever used for me. Careful, maybe. Slow. My brother Chris says I’m the only man in Ohio who reads the warranty.
“Then show me,” I said. “Show me the messages.”
“No.”
“Why not, if he’s a friend?”
“Because I’m not a suspect, Daniel.” Full name. That meant she was angry, or wanted me to think she was. “Because sixteen years of marriage should buy me one conversation that isn’t an interrogation. Because I finally found something that’s mine, something that makes me feel strong after two years of feeling like garbage, and you want to take it away because a guy made a dumb joke about my pants.”
The two years part was true. After her mom died, Jenna stopped sleeping. She gained weight she hated, cried in the car, quit the book club. Then last summer her friend Tasha dragged her to Iron Peak Fitness, and something switched back on. She got up at five. She laughed again. I’d been grateful. I’d told her I was proud of her, and I’d meant it.
I set my thermos down on the counter.
“I’m not trying to take anything from you,” I said. “I just want the truth.”
“The truth is you’re tired and you’re jealous and I’m going to bed.” She picked up her gym bag, then put it down again by the back door, ready for the morning. “He’s a friend. If that’s not good enough, I don’t know what to tell you.”
She went upstairs. I heard our bedroom door, not slammed, just closed firmly, which is worse.
I stood in the kitchen a long time. The fridge hummed. Lily’s science fair ribbon was still stuck to the freezer door with a pizza magnet. Second place, Hamilton Middle School. Jenna had cried at that fair. We both had.
I told myself it was nothing. I told myself a hundred men get jealous of a hundred trainers, and the good ones get over it.
I went to bed at twelve-thirty. Jenna was turned toward the wall, breathing slow, maybe asleep.
At 2:04 a.m., I woke up because her side of the bed was empty.
The bathroom door was shut. A strip of light glowed under it. And through the door, so soft I almost thought I was dreaming it, I heard my wife whispering. Not crying. Not talking to herself.
Laughing, quietly, the way you laugh when someone you love is on the other end of the line.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. Me too.”
I lay there in the dark with my eyes open and didn’t move.
