Car Talk

Virginia Foley

My husband and I are alone inside our car, silent. Rain is bouncing off the roof like buckshot. A navy-gray sky shrouds summer’s twilight as wipers swoosh furiously; no squeaking or sticking to the windshield tonight.

He pulls into the garage, hits the button. A steel door traps us inside. We look straight ahead at the overflowing shelves, ones he cut, hammered and hung to keep our family’s toys and tools orderly. One of them is the site where a raccoon holed up for two days while he tried to coax it down before entrapping it, transporting it to the wildlife sanctuary.

I don’t know how to begin this ending. But, he’ll take the lead, break the silence. I know he will.

“Keith said he thinks this might be it.” Keith is our marriage counselor who we’ve just seen, together and separately. “He says you don’t love me anymore.” My husband pauses. “Is that true?”

I stare at my clasped hands, blood-filled fingers, knuckles ashen.

“It’s true,” I whisper.

His body shakes, tears roll into his beard. I’m crying now too, heaving up years of confusion, of trying so hard to find the love that’s missing.

He reaches over the console and wraps his arms around me, fusing our pain, our sorrow. The heat from his body stirs a distant memory; it’s been so long since we’ve been intimate. We cling to each other like lost lovers, fueled by passion, profound, yet remote.

“But I still love you,” he sobs.

“I love you too,” I say. “Just not...”

He cuts me off. “I knew you didn’t love me when we married, but I thought you’d grow to love me.”

We’ve trudged through thickets of discontent in our twenty years of marriage, stomping down the growing weeds. The veneer we’ve projected has been shiny, the scratches hidden from all but those closest to us, even at times, to him. It was easy to bury ourselves in our three children, those bright, beautiful creatures who distracted us for so many years.

“It’s not your fault,” I say.

We’ve been team players, especially in parenting. When the kids weren’t around, we still concentrated on them. Our conversation, focus, was always them. We never fought. There was the odd burning glare, but we made sure the kids didn’t see it.

I’d wanted babies, lots of them, and he was there, a good guy, one everyone liked. He rescued me from grief, married me when I was twenty, he four years older. I’d wanted to build a family like the one I’d grown up with, the one that had been fractured by my father’s sudden death, three years earlier. I wanted happy.

“I should have held your hand more,” he says. “I didn’t hold you enough.” He’s crying again.

“We were so young,” I stammer. “We both could have been better.”

We’d tried, two years earlier. We each went to counseling, each developed new interests, but we’d only forged our own new paths.

The embrace is over. We slump back into the bucket seats.

“We should go in,” he says. “The kids are going to wonder what we’re doing.”

I nod. Blow my nose.

“It’ll be okay,” he says. “I could actually use some time on my own.” He’s smiling now, somehow trying to reassure me. He’s always been good at that.

The garage pulsates with rain’s white noise as we step out of the van in unison, me with handfuls of balled-up Kleenex. I follow him towards the single cement step that leads into our house, our children just over the threshold.

He turns around and reaches for me, his hand lightly grasps my wrist.

“We’ll have to tell them, eventually,” he says. “But not tonight, okay?”

I look away but nod.

“Tonight, let’s pretend.”

Virginia writes overlooking Lake St Clair in Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in Canada and USA, most notably, Read650, Southshore Review, Canada’s History Magazine, Talking Writing, and Dreamers Creative Writing. You can visit her at www.virginiafoley.com