‘You’re the peanut butter,’ Nate says, glancing up.
I look down at him. ‘I am?’
‘In the sandwich,’ he says. ‘We’re the bread, you’re the peanut butter in the middle.’
‘Can I be ham instead?’ I say. He knows I don’t like peanut butter. ‘Or stretchy cheese, the kind you get on pizza?’
He shakes his head and grins, closing his eyes as he settles deeper into the crook of my shoulder. ‘Crunchy peanut butter is my favourite thing in a sandwich.’
I press a kiss against the citrus scent of his hair. ‘I know. Okay. I’ll be peanut butter.’
He opens one Susie-blue eye and looks up at me. ‘Crunchy?’
‘Crunchy,’ I say. He closes his eye again, satisfied, and I wonder how something as crazy as peanut butter can make my chest ache with emotion as I think of Cleo, of how a shared dislike of peanut butter was one of our secrets in the dark.
Leo’s more asleep than awake on my other side, his fingers clutching a handful of my T-shirt. His hair smells of the same shampoo as Nate’s. Mine used to smell the same too. It’s the smallest of insignificant details, a tiny wedge between us because I couldn’t remember the exact brand of shampoo, even though I sniffed every damn bottle in the store. On the one hand it’s really not important, but on the other hand, separation is made up of a million tiny disassociations that eventually add up to passing someone on the street and barely recognizing them.
There are two breakfast plates in the kitchen sink, two coffee cups on the table when I run the boys home, mid-morning as agreed. Susie sees me notice, and I know she wishes she’d cleared them away. It messes with my head to think of Robert sleeping here in my bed. Do I have any right to the anger that simmers my blood when I imagine his head on my pillow, his hands on my wife? I correct myself. Ex-wife. Is that the term I should use since we’ve been apart for a year? We’re in this weird limbo, still officially married. There’s a huge schism down the middle of us, we’re a landmass splintered in two by an earthquake. There must have been a hairline crack there for a long time, one I didn’t notice. Even when it widened, I didn’t pay enough attention. I didn’t see that damn crack until it was a canyon, too wide to safely jump, and Susie was on the other side, drifting away. And now Robert is standing over there beside her in an eye-wateringly awful vest, and I’m over here feeling like a stranger in my own house. It’s a lot.
‘I was thinking about Thanksgiving,’ I say.
Susie busies herself loading the dishwasher, tense. For as long as we’ve been together, we’ve hosted our parents here for Thanksgiving.
‘I thought I’d spend it with my mom this year,’ I say. ‘See Grandma, show her the photos of Salvation.’
I see the relief on her face as she straightens, a fight avoided.
‘I’d like to see your photos sometime too,’ she says. ‘Was it everything you’ve always hoped?’
I haven’t found the right time to tell Susie about Cleo yet. She’s just handed me an in. The kids are in the den, Robert can’t be heading over seeing as he’s evidently just left, and I have nowhere else I need to be.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It’s a special place.’ Jeez, Mack. Find the words. ‘Suze, I met someone there.’
She’s making coffee, tipping beans into the machine her folks gave us as an anniversary gift a few years back, reaching for mugs. I see my words settle, her movements falter.
‘As in …？’ She lets the question hang incomplete as she unscrews the lid from the sugar, and then slowly raises her blue eyes to mine. I looked into those eyes at the altar at our wedding, over the heads of our newborn sons, across crowded parties in silent agreement to sneak out early. Right now, those eyes are watchful, guarded in anticipation of incoming peril.
‘As in a woman,’ I say softly.
She stands bone-still, spoon in hand. Blinks a few times. ‘Oh,’ she says. A tiny word, just a sound, really, but she fills it with a hundred other unspoken words. Oh, I’m blindsided. Oh, I’m sorry, I feel like you just punched me in the heart. Oh, I’m tired. Oh, I love you, I hate you, I miss you, I’m furious, please stay, just go. Believe me, I know exactly how she’s feeling right now. It’s like looking in a mirror, so familiar I have to look away.
‘Is it serious?’ Her hand starts to shake. ‘What will you do? Move to Ireland? FaceTime the kids on their birthdays and Christmases, send for them in the summer? Take them to see Buckingham Palace?’ The pitch of her voice gets slowly higher as she speaks, shocked, painting pictures of things she knows will never happen. We’d always daydreamed of taking the kids to Europe, to the Eiffel Tower, to England. Letting go of long-held dreams is hard, even more painful when your brain inserts someone else into the picture in your place. Susie has just erased herself from our family trip to London and inserted a faceless woman beside me.