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The Secrets We Keep

I don't know why we thought we could keep it from her. She is too smart--too aware --not to attune to the silent dirge within the nation's requiem.We know she knows, but we can't talk about it because of the reverb in our cathedral of lies. "Sometimes I see things in my head. Bad things happening to my family or friends. And I get scared I'm going to lose you," she said on the way home from school earlier this week. I looked at her in the rear view mirror. "Bad things? Like what?" "Like they're getting shot. Or...or some kind of violence." "That's an interesting way to put it. 'Violence.' Did you hear that somewhere recently?" "No," she said. Several weeks ago the house next to The Boss's school was gutted by a fire. Black window sockets still stare at the children every day. There's a tarp on the roof and the remnants of yellow police tape around the yard. One night The Boss cried in bed and said...
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It's a Boy

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Topher's minutes-old fingers were scaly-white and wizened. As I held him for the first time, I marveled at the similarity between those hands and the wrinkled ones of my grandparents, of my great aunts and uncles. I touched the creases. He was my little old man in a hospital room that buzzed with being born. Two days later, on the morning of our departure, I held my son in my lap while The Partner showered in the bathroom. I had given birth on the very same bed, in the very same room, but now it seemed a different place in the sun and the silence. I saw the brightness of Topher's finger flakes and thought again about how old his new parts shone. I cried then, not just with a hormonal surge, but with the pressure of an entire lifetime laid out on a tiny pair of hands. I sobbed so loud and long that The Partner heard me from behind the heavy institutional door. He emerged from the bathroom to ask what I was crying about. "Nothing," I said. "Nothing." Christoph...
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When a House is Not a Home

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The wind in my house-selling and -hunting sails has been cut by The Partner's declaration that "it doesn't matter how nice of a house we buy--it's still going to look like a slum once you move in." I've mentioned before that I'm not the neatest person. Housekeeping is not in my bag of tricks. I leave dishes in the sink overnight. The laundry turns into a moutainous load. Piles of outgrown clothing litter The Boss's bedroom. But I wouldn't call our house a slum. I would call it a place that takes a few hours to make presentable when we have guests over. Of course, it didn't help my case any when he awoke this morning, after going to sleep mad, to find that he had no fresh boxers to wear. The good thing about selling a house is that the showings will force me to keep our home in a constant state of clean. There will be no piles of used or unused items. There will be nary a dust ball in sight. The vacuum cleaner and Swiffer Wet Mop will get more u...
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