Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

It was a crime what time did to women.

“You have kids?” he asked. Cousins nodded. “Three and a third.” Fix whistled. “You stay busy.” Cousins wondered if he meant You stay busy running after kids, or, You stay busy fucking your wife. Either way.

“Everything that’s happened in our lives up until now, everything we’ve done, it had to happen exactly the way it did so that we could be together.” Bert took her hand and squeezed it. “You really believe that?” Beverly asked. “We’re magic,” Bert said. Later that night he rubbed Neosporin down the length of her spine. She slept on her stomach. That was their summer vacation.

The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.

Bert liked a gun in his briefcase, in the nightstand, in the drawer of his office desk. He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn’t going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns.

He was still in front of her, waiting for her attention while she imagined him.

He looked at her sadly, or maybe that was just the way he looked, as if he felt the pain of every woman who had ever crammed her feet into heels. It was a beguiling effect.

There was no embarrassment there, only peace, only enough time left to ask for one more favor, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men.

“It’s a good thing there’re going to be two lawyers in the family,” Fix said to Franny over dinner, meaning Caroline and himself. “Somebody’s going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.” “They’re free,” Franny said. “I check them out of the library.” “Well, thank God for libraries,” Caroline said. Astonishing how much condescension could be packed into the words Thank God for libraries.

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.

Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself.

Franny found Ravi and Amit in the basement watching The Matrix on a television set the size of a single mattress. “That’s rated R,” she said. The boys looked at her. “For the violence,” Ravi said. “Not sex.” “And it’s Christmas,” Amit said, operating on the logic of wishes.