What We Couldn't Spit Out

Margaret watched Thomas chew, his jaw moving with that particular deliberation he'd developed over thirty-two years of marriage. The spinach salad sat between them like a battlefield, each leaf a minor surrender.

"You have something in your teeth," she said, and it wasn't kindness that made her tell him. It was the opposite of kindness—it was the way you kept pulling at a scab.

Thomas excused himself to the bathroom, and Margaret listened to the water run, imagining him leaning over the sink, spitting out evidence of their dinner, their life, the small indignities they'd accumulated like plaque. When he returned, his hair—thinner now, graying at the temples—was damp where he'd splashed water on his face. He looked at her with eyes that had learned to avoid seeing anything that might require action.

"The kids will be here tomorrow," he said, and she nodded, because they were both experts at speaking in sentences that meant nothing.

Margaret remembered their wedding, how she'd worn her hair long and loose, how he'd told her he loved the way it caught the light. Now she kept it short, practical. Like everything else.

"I slept with Daniel," she said, and the words were easier than she'd expected. They were just words, floating in the air between the spinach and the bread basket.

Thomas stopped chewing. The silence that followed was louder than anything she'd ever heard. She watched his throat work as he swallowed, and she thought about water—the way it could sustain you or drown you, depending entirely on your circumstances.

"Daniel from work?" Thomas asked finally, his voice steady, which was worse than if he'd shouted.

"It doesn't matter who it was."

"It's been going on for how long?"

"Six months."

He nodded, that same deliberate movement, and she watched his hairline in the harsh kitchen light. She wanted to reach across the table and touch him, not from desire but from some terrible, urgent need to apologize for the way love could curdle into something unrecognizable. For how they'd both let it happen.

"I'm going to stay with my mother," she said, and she didn't say for now or for a while, and they both heard what she didn't say.

Thomas picked up his wine glass, his hand perfectly steady. "Finish your spinach," he said. "It's getting cold."