City of Refuge by Tom Piazza Page B

eating her cereal, with her blond hair falling across her forehead, with its pale bluish veins visible under her skin. They lived a block from school, so there was less of a rush to get Annie pulled together for her day than there might otherwise have been, and Craig let himself feel simple pleasure in watching his daughter eat her cereal in the warm kitchen in the warm house he had provided, in the city he loved.
    As Annie brought her bowl to the sink to rinse, her mother walked into the room, dressed already and moving with a deliberate, businesslike rhythm. Craig’s heart fell slightly; in his mind some gauzy oasis of morning lounging, leisurely romance after the kids were out the door for the day, unrealistic given their logistics to begin with, evaporated. He tried to send her a little smile, edged over to kiss her as she poured out her cereal, but her attention was on the television, where they were back to talking about the storm; theywere monitoring its movements, it had lost strength over Florida but was reforming “nicely” over the Gulf.
    “Oh, good,” she said. “We’re going to have to evacuate again.”
    “No we’re not,” Craig said. “It’s hundreds of miles away and it will pull east the way they always do.” On the screen, the disingenuously concerned expressions on the broadcasters’ faces slid quickly into equally disingenuous hearty cordiality for a segment on a local chef.
    After several minutes, Annie went upstairs to finish getting herself dressed, and Craig took the moment to ask Alice if anything was wrong. Expressionlessly, she replied that they needed to talk. “What’s wrong?” Craig repeated. Alice shook her head, looking, to Craig, as if she were about to cry. “I’ll call in late,” Craig said.
    He deputized Scott, the managing editor, to proof the final pages, then got Annie in gear to head out and walked her the block and a half to school, while Alice drove Malcolm over to their friends Chris and Lisa’s for a playdate with their two-year-old, Bonnie.
    Forty-five minutes later Craig and Alice sat down across from each other in two living room chairs. Craig looked at her seriously. They had learned some things from therapy. One was to never interrupt. Another was to not raise your voice. Another was to closely monitor your own facial expressions for annoyance, exasperation, etc. Things could arc quickly out of control in accelerating, centrifugal curves; chain reactions in which the way the other person spoke or looked, matters of tone and inflection, became the topic of argument rather than the supposed actual topic. They both realized that that was the sure road to dissolution. But managing a conversation despite all the stored-up anger and frustration was not easy.
    Craig waited for Alice to begin speaking, since she had called for the talk; this was the unspoken rule. For all that he was hurt and frustrated by what he thought of as Alice’s distancing, Craig was never unmindful of her intelligence, her strength, her total commitment to the children. He wasn’t sure what the problem was thismorning, but he felt the glow and fizz slipping away, and reflexively, as if to try and hold on to it, just as she was about to speak he said, “Okay, wait, can I say one thing really fast? I wanted to say that last night made me really happy. I felt like we found a place that we hadn’t visited in a while, and I felt like it brought us closer together, and I am really happy for that.”
    Alice nodded thoughtfully, pressed her lips together and looked him in the eyes. The remark made her furious. Craig had a way of framing their conversations, a kind of presentational aspect, as if he were reading a proclamation, that drove her crazy. Plus he had violated the unspoken etiquette of their conversations by speaking first when she had been the one asking to have a talk, which she read as a way of him discharging his anxiety about what she had to say by taking some kind of control, and