The way the corners of her mouth turn up into something like a smile pours salt along the gut wound.
This house was a bad idea.
Everything between me and Kim over the last year was a bad idea.
Band-Aids over Band-Aids over Band-Aids, so we didn’t even know what pus-filled wounds they covered, or if there was even anything left beneath the scab.
“How did you sleep?” she asks, her attention back on her iPad. She doesn’t care how I slept. The question is just noise to fill the silence between us, like the drilling and the hammering and the power sanding.
“Okay,” I say cautiously—her question was benign but that doesn’t mean it can’t lead to another pointless argument. “It’s getting way too hot up on the top floor, though. I need to upgrade from the box fan to an AC.”
“Summer’s almost over. You really can’t ride out a few more weeks?” There’s that expression again—not so much a sneer as the absence of the ability to pretend to care. “Besides, I saw you with a new camera. Maybe you should’ve spent that money more wisely.”
I grunt, ruffling my hair with one hand.
Kim has a top-of-the-line AC unit in her bedroom, where she sleeps on the three-thousand-dollar mattress she purchased shortly before banishing me upstairs.
She sleeps in comfort on the first floor while I sweat in the attic, with all of her reasons for our separation-in-deed-but-not-name populating the two floors between us:
She was scared I’d cheat on her, and that hurt her.
She still had feelings for David, whom she’d actually fucking cheated on me with, and that hurt her.
She couldn’t be sure I wasn’t using her for her money.
She couldn’t rely on me.
She needed time to figure things out.
I’d swallowed my frustration as I carried my stuff upstairs, almost breaking my neck three times and unsure if she’d care if I did.
I hadn’t pointed out that she’d been the one who pushed for homeownership to begin with—who’d talked about the house as an investment for both of us, as a way to reconnect and reaffirm her commitment after the David situation. She’d insisted that we were going to get married anyway, despite everything, and also pressed that prices wouldn’t stay low in this neighborhood for long.
I’d stayed with her and gone along with the house purchase in part because, hell, no one had ever pursued me like that, and in part because she was the one from a wealthy family and she was going to take care of all the hard money stuff.
God, it all seems so stupid when I lay it out like that. She didn’t trap me; I was just an idiot with something to prove. I had no fucking idea what buying a house entailed—Mom and I had moved from apartment to apartment, outrunning evictions and the fists attached to her bad decisions.
I had no idea what a good relationship was supposed to look like, either. Mine and Kim’s seemed so normal, like in sitcoms where the wife nitpicks and the husband is slightly dismayed with the state of his life and that’s fine. That’s just how things are.
Now, as I look at her, there’s a challenge in her eyes. One that says she knows she’s hurting me with her late-night and early-morning renovations, with her jabs about my unemployment, and she enjoys it.
Maybe this is normal.
There are worse things. Black eyes and bruises and holes in walls made by fists instead of hammers, for instance.
I walk over to the coffee maker sitting on a barstool and rest my knuckles against the carafe to see if it’s still warm.
“There might be some paint dust in there,” she says in that tone between playfulness and contempt.
“You didn’t use lead paint, right?” I joke.
She rolls her eyes and it’s almost like old times, which makes me wonder whether the old times were ever really that good.
I brew a new pot.
AN HOUR LATER, I’ve wrangled the kitchen into some semblance of order while she’s painted cabinet doors in the backyard. It feels a little bit like when we used to do things as a couple, without the hair-trigger contempt that led to our upstairs/downstairs living arrangement.
When she steps back inside, her face flushed and her expression serene, I get hit with the sudden, naive belief that we can get back to how we were before.
I think we can.
Maybe?
I don’t know. But some part of me, probably the self-destructive hopefulness that I inherited from my mother, drives me to say, “There’s a new brunch place three blocks down, where that Dominican restaurant used to be. I heard they make this amazing vegan steak and eggs scramble. Wanna try it?”
Her shoulders draw closer to her ears as she tenses in annoyance. “Look, Theo—”
“It’s just food,” I say, then wave toward the space where the oven is supposed to be. “You have to order out anyway.”
“You need me to pay or something?” she asks coolly, as if me demanding to pay for things wasn’t one of our longest-running petty fights.
“My treat,” I say, not rising to the bait. “Or we can just go to the corner store. They have vegetarian options.”
She nods, but there’s no excitement or interest in her eyes. She grabs her phone, unlocking it and scrolling as we head out of the house.
We used to go for long walks together all the time, just because. Kim used to go on runs. Now? She has a treadmill in what was supposed to be my game room and she Ubers everywhere.
It started a few weeks after we moved in. She came home with tears in her eyes, saying a group of teenagers had followed her out of the train station, harassing her, after she’d told them to stop laughing so loud in the train car. I’d wondered why she hadn’t just put on her sound-canceling headphones, but she’d been shaking when she walked in, so it hadn’t been the right time to ask.
“It was terrifying! And I looked around and realized everyone was . . . I don’t know if anyone would have helped me,” she said. “There’s just so few of us here.”
I was confused. “Us?”
She pulled her head back to look at me and I realized that she wasn’t shaking with fear. She was furious.
“You know what I mean,” she snapped. “The neighborhood better change as fast as the realtor said it’s going to, because I’m not gonna put up with a bunch of—”
She sucked in a breath.
“I was perfectly within my rights. And their response showed that they were dangerous.”
“Yeah.” I’d rubbed her back, a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach.
She’d stared into my eyes, still angry. “You would have done something, right? If you were there and they tried anything?”
“Like what?” I’d asked.
She’d pulled away from me and stormed off.
Kim has a framed portrait of Michelle Obama in our living room, so she’s not . . . you know. She was shaken up, that was all, and at that point our relationship was held together by dollar-store glue. I didn’t want to push. Maybe I didn’t want to know what she would’ve answered.
Now, as we walk to the corner store, there’s a foot of humid air between us. It’s already super hot, and the sun hasn’t even reached the highest point in the sky. Air conditioners drone in every window we pass under, the sound mocking me, but I find it hard to be annoyed when I’m walking down our street.