The Stuff That Never Happened by Maddie Dawson Page A

familiar dragging down of my mood. I have more to say. My throat is clogged with the wanting. But what? What do you want to say to him, Annabelle? I can hear Ava Reiss asking me that. Could I tell him, “It’s the craziest thing, but lately I keep having these weird dreams, and you won’t believe who’s in them.… Oh, and here’s a strange thing about me: yesterday I just started crying in the grocery store! What can that have been about?” Isn’t there anything we could say to each other? Maybe there’s some stuff there we forgot to examine a long time ago, and couldn’t we just say it? Just say it?
    I hold my breath and then say softly, ashamed at how scared I am, “Would you like to, you know, skip work tonight and just come to bed?”
    He looks at his watch and sighs. “I’ve wasted too much time already. I’ve really got to knock out the rest of chapter five tonight. Seriously.”
    “Nice to be referred to as a waste of time.”
    “Oh, stop it. You know what I mean,” he growls.
    I know what I’d like to say. Now I know. When I asked him if he would ever do what Clark Winstanley did, I wasn’t really asking about him. I know he wouldn’t leave me for a younger woman, even if he could find one who wouldn’t mind his constant ahems.
    It’s me.
    I’m the one whose leaving I’m scared about.

[four]
    1977
    I t was my brother, David, who broke the news to me that Edie and Howard, as we called our parents, were in no trial separation. The unthinkable had happened: our mom—our fully domesticated, chicken-roasting, housecleaning, dental receptionist mom—had met someone, and that was the real reason she was moving out.
    “What do you mean, met someone?” I said. I was on the pay phone at the student center. If I looked out, I could see the campus lagoon sparkling in the sunlight. I almost couldn’t breathe. I stuck my index finger in and out of the rotary dial, hitting every number in rapid succession, a kind of finger hopscotch.
    “Yeah. A young guy. A stud artist guy, I don’t know.”
    I laughed. Now this part couldn’t be true. “A stud? Our mother is with a stud?”
    There was a silence. David was a freshman, but he lived at home and went to the local junior college. He’d always been kind of a stoner guy, shy and gangly, with one girlfriend he’d had since seventh grade. They’d probably been quietly and earnestly doing it since they were thirteen. Once I’d found a condom in his room. After a moment he said, “Yeah. You won’t believe this, Annie. He drives a VW bus with writing all over it, and he teaches art at some adult-ed class she went to. She’s gone off the deep end, doing this whole weird feminist thing.”
    “Feminist thing? This is the same woman who cries if Howard is even two minutes late getting home.”
    “Yeah. I told you. She’s gone off the deep end or something.”
    “Jesus,” I said. “Are they fighting and yelling and screaming?”
    “No,” he said. “Howard’s drinking again, but all he’ll say is that Edie is just taking a little vacation from being a grown-up. She’s not really here very much anymore. She’s with that guy.”
    Two weeks later, my dad called me to say he’d been demoted at the bank because the bastards there didn’t appreciate true service. I couldn’t remember ever talking to him on the phone for longer than it took him to pass the receiver to my mother. Now he was slurring his words. A man works at a place for twenty goddamn years, rises up to district manager, and then he has some goddamn personal problems and he has to take some goddamn time off to sort them out and to rest while he figures out what he’s going to do, and they just take away his responsibilities and bust him back to reading loan applications. He kept letting out little hacking coughs that I could tell he was trying to hide from me. Probably in addition to drinking, he’d also started smoking again.
    “So, unless I win big at poker, you can forget about