Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“You don't think he could have checked something like that?” my wife wanted to know after she saw the paper. She was so upset on my behalf that I couldn't really complain.

It's not like I never had any advantages. I got a full ride, or nearly a full ride, at Saint Mary's in Moraga, near Oakland. I liked science and what math I took, though I never really, as one teacher put it, found myself while I was there. A friend offered me a summer job as one of his family's set-net fishermen my junior year, and I liked it enough to go back. The friend's family got me some supermarket work to tide me over in the winter, and it turned out that meat cutting paid more than boning fish. “What do you want to do?” a girl at the checkout asked me one day, like if she heard me bitch about it once more she was going to pull all her hair out, so that afternoon I signed up at Fly Alaska and Bigfoot Air, and I got my commercial and multiengine, and two years later had my float rating. I hooked on with a local outfit and the year after that bought the business, which meant a three-room hut with a stove, a van, the name, and the client list. Now I lease two 206s and two 172s on EDO 2130 floats, have two other pilots working under me, and get fourteen to fifteen hundred dollars a load for round-trip flights in the area. Want an Arctic Cat? I can buy one out of petty cash. At least in the high season.

“So are we not going to talk about this?” my wife asked last week after her parents had been over for dinner. We'd had crab and her dad had been in a funk for most of the night, who knew why. We'd said good night and handled the cleanup and now I was lunging around on my knees trying to cover my son in Nerf basketball. He always turns into Game Fanatic at bedtime, so we hung a Nerf hoop over the inside of the back door to accommodate that need. He was taking advantage of my distraction to try and drive the baseline but I funneled him into the doorknob.

“I'm ready to talk,” I told her. “Let's talk.”

She sat on one of the kitchen chairs with her hands together on her knees, willing to wait for me to stop playing. Her hair wasn't having the best day and it was bothering her. She kept slipping it back behind her ear.

“You can't just stay around the basket,” Donald complained, trying to lure me out so he could blow by me. He was a little teary with frustration.

“I was going to talk to Daddy about having another baby,” she told him. His mind was pretty intensively elsewhere.

“Do you want a baby brother?” she asked.

“Not right now,” he said.

“If you're not having fun, you shouldn't play,” she told him.

That night in bed she was lying on her back with her hands behind her head. “I love you a lot,” she said when I finally got under the covers next to her. “But sometimes you just make it so hard.”

“What do I do?” I asked her. This was one of the many times I could have told her. I could have even just mentioned I'd been thinking about making the initial appointment. “What do I do?” I asked again. I sounded mad but I wanted to know.

“What do you do,” she said, like I had just proven her point.

“I think about you all the time,” I said. “I feel like you're losing interest in me.” Even saying that much was humiliating. The appointment at times like that seemed like a small but hard thing that I could hold on to.

She cleared her throat and pulled a hand from behind her head and wiped her eyes with it.

“I hate making you sad,” I told her.

“I hate being made sad,” she said.

It was only when she said things like that and I had to deal with them that I realized how much I depended on having made her happy. And how much all of that shook when she whacked at it. Tell her, I thought, with enough intensity that I thought she might've heard me.

“I don't want another kid,” Donald called from his room. The panel doors in our bedrooms weren't that great in terms of privacy.

“Go to sleep,” his mother called back.

We lay there waiting for him to go back to sleep. Tell her you changed your mind, I thought. Tell her you want to make a kid, right now. Show her. I had a hand on her thigh and she had her palm cupped over my crotch, as if that, at least, was on her side. “Shh,” she said, and reached her other hand to my forehead and smoothed away my hair.