Chapter One That summer when I first became Elliot Hull's pretend wife, I understood only vaguely that complicated things often prefer to masquerade as simple things at first. This is why they're so hard to avoid, or at least brace for. I should have known this--it was built into my childhood. But I didn't see the complications of Elliot Hull coming, perhaps because I didn't want to. So I didn't avoid them or even brace for them, and as a result, I eventually found myself looking out of a broken window in winter watching two grown men--my pretend husband and my real husband--wrestle on a front lawn amid a spray of golf clubs in the snow--such a blur of motion in the dim porch light that I couldn't distinguish one man from the other. This would become one of the most vaudevillian and poignant moments of my life, when things took the sharpest turn in a long and twisted line of smaller, seemingly simple turns. Here is the simple beginning: I was standing in line in a crowded ice-cream shop--the whir of a blender, the fogged glass counter, the humidity pouring in from the door with its jangling bell. It was late summer, one of the last hot days of the season. The air-conditioning was rolling down from overhead and I'd paused under one of the cool currents, causing a small hiccup in the line. Peter was off talking to someone from work: Gary, a fellow anesthesiologist--a man in a pink-striped polo shirt, surrounded by his squat children holding ice-cream cones melting into softened napkins. The kids were small enough not to care that they were eating bits of their napkins along with the ice cream. And Gary was too distracted to notice. He was clapping Peter on the back and laughing loudly, which is what people do to Peter. I've never understood why, exactly, except that people genuinely like him. He's disarming, affable. There's something about him, the air of someone who's in the club--what club, I don't know, but he seemed to be the laid-_back president of this club, and when you were talking with him, you were in the club too. But my mind was on the kids in that moment--I felt sorry for them, and I decided that one day I'd be the kind of mother not to let her children eat bits of soggy napkin. (I don't remember what kind of mother mine was--distracted or hovering or, most likely, both? She died when I was five years old. In some pictures, she's doting on me--cutting a birthday cake outside, her hair flipping up in the breeze. But in group photos, she's always the one looking off to the side, down in her own lap, or to some distant point beyond the photographer--like an avid bird-_watcher. And my father was not a reliable source of information. It pained him, so he rarely talked about her. I was watching the scene intently--Peter specifically now, because instead of becoming more comfortable with having a husband, after three years I was becoming more surprised by it. Or maybe I was more surprised not that I was his wife but that I was anybody's wife, really. The word wife was so wifey that it made me squeamish--it made me think of aprons and meat loaf and household cleansers. You'd think the word would have evolved for me by that point--or perhaps it had evolved for most people into cell phones and aftercare and therapy, but I was the one who was stuck--like some gilled species unable to breathe up on the mudflats. Although Peter and I had been together for a total of five years, I felt like I didn't know him at all sometimes. Like at that very moment, as he was being back-_clapped and jostled by the guy in the pink-_striped polo shirt, I felt as if I'd spotted some rare species called husband in its natural habitat. I was wondering what its habits were--eating, chirping, wingspan, mating, life expectancy. It's difficult to explain, but more and more often I'd begun to rear back like this, to witness my life as a Excerpted from The Pretend Wife by Bridget Asher All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
