Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

He couldn’t explain to her that he needed the trees and the quiet as a correction for what he saw on the job, how crossing a bridge and having that physical barrier between him and his beat felt like leaving one life and entering another.

He knew it didn’t quite have anything to do with him, but some days, often when he least expected it, he removed his sympathy from her and took it back to wrap around himself.

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”

Then George thought of his brother and felt rage settle in his body. For years now he’d been scrolling through his memories to find evidence that Brian was capable of this titanic degree of selfishness. At the exact moment the boy needed him most, he’d looked at a picture of a golf course and taken off.

He couldn’t remember how people used to greet him before he was hurt, but now they seemed to make a special point of it, and he wondered if talking with him made them feel virtuous, like they’d done a good deed.

She thought of that on the nights when he set out plates for supper—how careful, how deliberate. Or when he asked about her day, the way he neatly lined one word after another and made the right shapes with his mouth.

“Well, if you want a drink, why not have it here, at the table? Why not with me? I’ll have a glass of wine. Why go off by yourself? You stay down there all night sometimes. Why?” There was no way to answer any of these questions. The truth was that he didn’t know why, but she’d never accept that answer, and if he engaged at all, she’d only keep pushing, as if logic were at the center of everything.

They’d both learned that a memory is a fact that’s been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room, anyone else who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.

He decided the only thing to do was be with her as much as he could. He started going up to bed at the same time as her again. On nights when she stayed up to study, he made tea and kept her company in the kitchen, reading the paper or preparing lessons. When she sat on the couch and tried to find something good on television, he sat next to her. She began looking at him again, sometimes just long enough to let him know that she knew exactly what he was doing.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he’d figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.