A Morning Like This (15 page)

What do David and I do now?
Abby asked the river, because it was the only thing she felt close enough to to ask.
Where can any of this go from here?

Nothing. Only silence, and one little thump as the trout rose farther upstream to feed.

Abby unfastened the buckles on her sandals. She tested the water with one toe. Cold. Icy. She slid first one foot, then the
other, all the way in. She put her weight on them and stood, biting her bottom lip because her feet had already begun to throb.
Black mud oozed between her toes, tiny specks of mica floating over her skin. Her persimmon toenails sat magnified in the
water and sunlight, looking twice as big as they really were, while the current rushed against her ankles as if it wanted
to push her along.

She was still standing in Fish Creek when she heard David calling her across the lawn. A week ago, she would have splashed
out of the water and started toward him, eager to welcome him back. Today she only stood with her toes in the water, welcoming
the fierce cold that had made her limbs go numb—the way she wished her heart could be numb.

What had David said?
I’m doing what I think the Lord wants me to do
. Well, if the Lord wanted David to do this, he could just as well do it without her.

“Come on, Abby. Why can’t you walk where there’s already a path?”

“I didn’t expect you home.”

“I called you at the shelter. They told me you were here.”

If she had been alone, Abby would have climbed out of the water. Instead, she stood staring at him, her jeans hiked up in
her hands, not moving.

“We live in the same house,” he went on, “and we can never talk because of Braden. I can’t wait any longer for this. We’ve
got to decide something.”

“David. This has been years in the making. I don’t know what it is you want from me
today
.”

“I want you to forgive me. I want us to go forward on this together.”

Her shoulders moved as if she’d felt a chill. “Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen that way.”

“It has to,” he said. Then softer, “It
has
to, Abby.”

Abby began to clamber up out of the water. She sloshed up on shore and stood in the grass with wet, muddy toes. She stared
at them a long time before she spoke. “You made your decisions about this nine years ago. And you made them alone. With no
regard for what it would do to your family. There isn’t anything that says I have to stand beside you now. The Bible even
says I don’t have to stand beside you. I looked it up this morning.” And then, probably to his horror, she quoted. “ ‘I tell
you whoever divorces his wife and marries someone else commits adultery—unless his wife has been unfaithful.’ I say that would
apply to the husband, too. Or, maybe not. What do you think?”

“You’re using the Bible against me.”

“I’m using the Bible as…the
Bible
.”

“You’re thinking about divorce?”

“I’m thinking I have some options. It’s nice to have options.”

David slapped his hands together once, twice, glancing toward their house. “If you won’t go forward with me, then I’m going
to have to go forward alone.”

“How can you do that? How can you go forward on a marriage alone?”

“I’m not talking about marriage anymore, Abigail. I’m talking about Braden. I’m talking about having him tested.”

She stared at her husband. “You can’t do that. That means he’s going to have to
know
.”

“I wanted us to stand together on this. I wanted you to be beside me when I explained it to him.”

“Oh, David. No.”

“You know I’ve got to do it. To see if he could be of some help—” David stopped, as if he couldn’t say the other child’s name
in front of his wife. “—for my daughter.”

The words “for my daughter” struck a deep blow. Abby felt her stomach go weak. This mention of David’s daughter brought them
both to a singular, more fragile, territory—one in which she did not dare be self-righteous. Dissolving a relationship was
one thing. Saving that child’s life was another.

“David, I’m really trying—” She swallowed hard, her stomach heaving, clinging to reason as a rush of salty liquid filled her
mouth.
Please don’t tell Braden. Don’t let him know all that his father has given away
.

“I’ve already phoned Susan in Oregon. She knows that you know, and that I’d like to proceed with tests on Braden.” David’s
voice stayed cool and deliberate. “They’ve sent a second test kit to St. John’s by special courier. It will be here this afternoon.
I’m going to pick him up after ball practice and take him over to the lab.”

Oh Lord, please
, she wanted to cry out.
My son
.

“I’m going to talk to him,” David said. “Maybe he won’t have to know so much of it. Maybe I can tell him… just enough.” He
paused and sought her face. “Do you want to be there when I do?”

“I don’t think—” Could she trust David to handle this well, to be gentle with Braden’s heart?
If he expected me to trust him, he never should have betrayed me in the first place
.

“You weren’t ever going to tell me you had an affair, were you, David? You were going to die with this. If something like
this hadn’t happened, I was never going to find out.”

He thought about that, shook his head. “No. You wouldn’t have.”

“Braden is the only reason.”

“Yes.”

Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. What have I missed? What could I have had until now, if I hadn’t had David? What did You
want
me to have?

Abby pushed her painted toes into her sandals, bent to buckle them. She shook her head sideways, tossing her hair, afraid
to look up, as if she were trying to deny something to someone who had shamed her. “When you talk to him, David, I want you
to measure your words with your
life
.”

“I’ll tell him what he’s got to know, Abby. I won’t go any further than that.”

Abby felt as though her life were rushing away from her, as if it were water tumbling and thrashing past her, and the only
way to be a part of it was to leave the bridge—to jump in, to let it tumble her along, too.

“Will you say that I love him? That we—” She stopped, furious at her husband. “This is asking way too much of him.”

“I have no reason to exclude you, Abby.”

She met him head on.
Of course you have reason to exclude me. You’ve been excluding me ever since you touched that… that paramour
.

“Abigail—”

“You just don’t let him be scared.”

They waited with nowhere to run, both of them facing consequences, terrified suddenly at how they could discuss these details
this way.

It didn’t feel like a beginning anymore. It felt like an end.

David shifted his weight from his right knee to his left. “Do you want me to move out, Abigail?”

The memories came back to Abby, a flood of them spinning out of control: two silhouettes standing in the driveway, her mother
crying in the dark.

“I’ve already told Abigail good-bye, Carol. We had a day together yesterday. We drove all over the park. I bought her souvenirs.”

“How could it be a good-bye, when you didn’t tell her you were going to leave?”

“She’ll figure it out after awhile. You know Abigail. She’s a smart girl.”

Abby leveled her eyes on David’s face and said, “What if that’s what I wanted? What if I told you that I wanted you to go?
Would you come back to see him? Or would you go off with
them
and start a new life?”

“Abby.” He looked horrified. “Braden means
everything
to me.”

He looked, for a moment, as she remembered him from a vacation in California, his bare toes curved over the edge of the diving
board as he stood, taking two breaths, three, before screwing up the courage and concentration to jump. “Okay. I’ll pack up
some things tonight.”

“Well, I
do
want you to go. There’s no place I can go to have a clear head or to get a perspective on things when you are near like this,
pushing me.”

“Maybe I can stay with friends for a while.”

She took one step forward, as if she might grasp his shirtsleeve. Only she didn’t. “Is it as easy as all that, David? Both
of us asking for what we want?”

David shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at her. “I don’t think
easy
is the word.”

“You can’t move out right now. You can’t leave at the same time you tell Braden about your other child.”

Abby’s mother at the kitchen table with an untouched coffee cup before her. Tears streaming through her fingers, running down
her wrists to wet the cuffs of a blouse the color of dishwater
.

“He’ll read too much into that,” Abby said. “He’ll think you’re leaving
him
instead of me.”

D
avid and Braden Treasure sat together on shiny chrome stools at Jackson Drug, elbow to elbow on the black countertop. Their
bottoms—one swathed in a pants suit with button-down pockets, one with a dirt smudge the shape of a pear from sliding into
second base—kept a slow, synchronized pace, twisting right and left, right and left, in rhythm with the sucking they did on
their straws.

“Hm-m-mm.” David extracted his straw from his chocolate malt, licked it lengthwise, and laid it aside. “It’s too thick for
this. I’m killing myself. I say dig in with the spoon.”

As little boys are prone to do, Braden copied his father exactly, wrapping his tongue around the curve of the straw with the
same effort as a Hereford going after a salt lick. “Hm-mmm.”

“You like the shakes better? Or the malt?”

“I like the shake. You just like malts better because you’re an old person.”

“Watch it, sport. This is your father you’re talking to.”

Braden sat as tall as he could manage, watching his own face in the mirror behind the malted-milk machine and the Coca-Cola
clock and the little shelves of Tazo Tea. He made a face, pulling the skin below one eye down until veins appeared. “So what
did you bring me here to talk about, Dad?”

“Oh, you know.” David laid his long-handled spoon right in the center of the napkin, which he’d never unfolded or used. He
wrapped both hands around his malt glass and leaned into the counter. “Seems like we never have time alone anymore. Time to
talk boy things.
Man
things.”

“Oh, no.” Braden slumped on the stool. “Not
that
stuff. Charlie Kedron said you’d want to talk about that stuff. All dads do, and it’s eeew, yuck,
nasty
.”

David’s glass clattered on the counter. He had to catch it or it would have gone all the way over.

“I don’t even
like
girls, Dad. I like baseball.”

“That’s good,” David said, popping the spoon in his mouth and talking around the ice cream. “At least a man can
understand
baseball.”

Their feet sat together, baseball cleats and Hush Puppies, toes resting on the metal bar that ran along the floor. Shoulder
to shoulder, father and son plunged in with spoons again. Together they reached bottom with a huge clattering noise that would
have made Abby cringe.

“Braden,” David said at last, pressing his forehead with his palm, half out of desperation and half because he’d finished
his malt too fast. “I’m going to ask you to do something that most dads don’t have to ask their sons. I’m going to ask you
to do something courageous.”

“What?” Braden sat up straight again.

“There’s a lady at the hospital who’s waiting for you to come over. She wants to test you for something.”

That didn’t go over well at all. The color left Braden’s face. “Test me for something? Does that mean I’ve got to have a shot?”

“Yes.”

Braden turned away and began the process of bending his straw, tucking one end inside the other so the straw became a triangle.
“Why did you bring me here first?” he said. “Mom always makes me wait to have ice cream until after I’ve done that. Then I
have something to look forward to.”

“I did it different than your mom. I thought it would be best to have you prepared. I wanted to have time to explain it to
you.”

“Why didn’t Mom come? She always goes with me when I do something like this.”

“She thought it would be best if I went with you today instead.”

“Why you, Dad?” His voice, small and worried. “Is it going to be scary? You always go with me when things are scary.”

“No.” David held the top of his nose with thumb and forefinger. His shoulders lifted and fell with a resolute sigh. “Not as
scary as all that. Not really.”

“But it will hurt,” Braden said.

“Yes. It will hurt as much as shots hurt. And it takes a while.”

That most important of all details out of the way, they scraped the aluminum soda-fountain glasses with their spoons again
and took stock of each other in the fountain mirror. A lady stepped up to the cash register and paid for a refrigerator magnet
with a bison head that read I
GOT GORED IN THE
T
ETONS
. At the pharmacy on the other side, someone had opened a roadmap and was asking the pharmacist for directions to Jenny Lake.