TWO

Mitch

It's possible to love more than one person at the same time. This is what I can’t say to Elena.

“Trudy’s,” my wife says in the morning after our whiskey-soaked night. We put on our “happy parents” routine even though we're both throbbing in the head and neither of us took a shower after soaking Sela’s moonlit sheets.

“That should be fun,” and I look over at Sela, a questionable smile on her face. Her friend Trudy of the coke bottle glasses reminds me of a mosquito bite, questions constantly itching my skin and no good way to satisfy them. “Hey Mr. Reynolds, why does your breath always smell funny?” Years of regret. Ba-dum-dum.

Frozen waffles, glasses of pulp-free juice—Elena places them at the table but doesn’t sit with us. She wedges her small waist into the corner where both counters meet, her pink, puffy robe snaking out around her hips. Her naked toes look at me accusingly.

“What about you?” she asks.

“Work.”

“The whole world’s leaking,” she says and gnaws a little on a bone-chilled waffle. My waffle is cold through the center, but I don’t even think about confronting her at the microwave.

Dishes in the sink, bodies in the shower. Sela is wet-haired and sitting on the couch in our living room after I’ve dressed.

“No cartoons? It’s Saturday,” I say by way of conversation. It's my usual go-to with her, TV.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She’s crying, and it's a mirror image of the mess I've just left in the bathroom: Elena shouldered against the shower, sliding down its glass face. Her towel gave up and there was her cesarean scar smiling at some silent joke. “A heartbreak thing,” Daddy’s voice said in my head, and it was the same thing he had said when he found out that my sister, Tammy, was pregnant at seventeen and then again after she had the abortion.

“Never be sorry.” My arm wraps around Sela’s small frame, and like that—her close to me and no words being made—everything makes a lot more sense. We sit still on the burgundy and forest green striped couch. We sit in a room with dried flowers on the mantle, half-burnt candles on the mantle that smell like engineered vanilla. I close my eyes and think about my younger self, a boy with a quiet, gin-soaked daddy and a mama who took her anger out with her hands. And I used to think, if I had a glimpse of this future, wouldn’t I be happy to know I'm safe now? The hardest part is knowing the answer.

“There are my two favorites,” Elena says. She's dried and dressed, and her eyes don’t betray her. A boy seeking his future would say she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. That boy would be right.

#

I don’t have to work today. If Elena asks Pam, they’ll be on the same page: the Dynamic Duo working hard for the money, keeping White Smoke drip-free on a Saturday afternoon. Jimmy and I stash some extra cash on days like these so we don’t go home empty-handed because if there's something both our wives have in common, it’s that they don’t like empty hands.

In reality, neither of us is working, and I know for a fact that Jimmy is hightailing it across the Oklahoma state line to play a little blackjack and shoot the breeze with Darlene, a dealer at the Cherokee who keeps her players happy and her shirts barely buttoned.

It's like they say, you’re only as sick as your secrets. And I guess this means Jimmy and I are practically invalids since I keep Jimmy’s secrets, and he keeps mine, even if he doesn’t know exactly what they are.

“Golf again? I keep telling you the tables are hot over here. Don’t know why you’re messing around with those white-collar jokesters. ‘Don’t trust a man who can’t get his hands dirty’ like my Papaw used to say.” Jimmy’s Pinto is growling through the cell phone attached to my ear, The Beast eating Oklahoma’s dismally flat pavement.

“Yeah, well, they’re the dads of Sela’s friends. But Elena would kill me, so keep it quiet,” I mumble into the cell. “Pulling in now.”

“See ya, Chief.” I can almost see Jimmy next to me, wry smile on his face wondering what color blouse Darlene will be wearing today.

I snap the phone shut and pretend I'm taking stock of a wall of brightly colored cracker boxes. There are too many to choose from: fat free, low fat, low sodium, taste-free. I spy the clock above the double doors at the Piggly Wiggly, and even though I'm too far away to hear it, the ticking is perfectly tuned to the beats in my chest.

It isn’t the first time I've done this, but it might as well be because I have a “first time” sheen of sweat on my forehead that I lightly press with the handkerchief shoved in my back pocket. A fat woman with hair freshly dyed the color of chocolate purses her two pink lips at me as if to say, “Leave this nonsense alone, Mitch.”

“There you are.” Aaron's behind me now, facing the wall of cookies parallel to the crackers. I turn and watch him dip his head at the fat lady who breaks out into a face swallowing smile. He waits until she turns out of the aisle to lightly brush my hand.