The Half Moon

by Mary Beth Keane

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

He stuck to things that were relatively cheap and quick. But it turned out people didn’t want things to be nice, they wanted them to be familiar.

He was forty-five years old and he’d never had any other job. And he was good at this one. But middle age was looming and he could already see the headline that would arrive with it: that a person could be extraordinarily good at something and still fail at it.

In the world of bad investments, wouldn’t nearly seven years of fertility treatments be right at the top? At first they could keep up with whatever insurance didn’t cover by going to his safe deposit box, handing over a brick of cash. But it didn’t take that long for the box to empty. All that money—just gone. He stopped himself from saying it aloud, but they knew each other so well that the air between them became legible, and she could read it anyway.

He didn’t know how much he depended on her habits to set the pattern for his days until they were gone. He never knew what he was supposed to do with himself when he was alone, and wondered what people did who lived by themselves their whole adult lives. He’d not eaten a single meal inside his house since Jess left.

They’d been moving around each other without seeing one another lately, but that week she’d touched his arm as she passed behind him at the sink. She’d reached for him in her sleep and fitted her body around his. He thought things were getting better, but actually, all that time, she was saying goodbye.

She knew she sounded like the exact kind of wife she swore she’d never be, speaking to him like she was his boss, or his mother. Did she want to speak to her husband like he was a child? Of course not. But when a person dreams of partnering with someone for life, no one ever considers the fact that there’s no dependable way to communicate a thought except to say it.

At twenty-two, money was still only theoretical to her, and the higher that loan amount climbed, the more abstract it seemed.

Her friends were all moving to the Villages in Florida, a fifty-five-plus community so big it had its own zip code. They were drinking Bloody Marys by eleven and whizzing around on golf carts all day. Dinner was a rotating potluck. No one ever wanted to stay home.

He saw worry in her face. He saw how many of her thoughts went to him, her boy. This was what having kids was like, he wanted to tell Jess. You worry sick over your child even when he’s forty-five years old.

He remembered being a kid, all the things he felt capable of, all the streets and avenues that branched away from his body, all the possibilities. But in the end you can only have one life. One at a time, at least. You could turn, you could pause for a while, but you couldn’t go down two streets at once. The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn’t lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.

“Life is complicated, right?” “Funny,” Mr. Sheridan said. “I was about to say exactly the opposite. I was just about to say how simple it is. Life is actually really simple when you boil it down.” Why? Because he loved her.