The Most Fun We Ever Had Read Free Page B

her left shoe. “Next time you think a woman’s funny? Don’t tell her she’s funny.”
    “What do I do instead?” Something about the way his perfect face crumpled in confusion tugged at a place deep in her belly and she couldn’t help but smile at him.
    “You laugh,” she said, and before she realized what she was doing she was reaching to press a shock of hair away from his forehead. “The next time you meet a funny woman, you laugh at her jokes, okay, Conrad?”
    “Carson.”
    “Carson. Good luck, kid.”
    The room spun again. Kid made her think of her parents, suddenly, of her father bowing theatrically to her mother at Wendy’s wedding, hearing Otis Redding—“win a little; lose a little”—and declaring, “It’s our song, kid.” Every song belonged to her parents, it seemed; everything recorded in the last six decades had something to do with David and Marilyn, those two inexplicable people from whom she hailed. She’d thought, when she met Miles, that she’d finally found someone in the way that her mom had.

    There were suddenly tears in her eyes, a familiar tightness in her chest. She wasn’t supposed to leave this early but she knew that if she stayed things would continue to go south. She left her coat in the checkroom and spun out onto the street.
    Some people told you it took a year for everything to get back to normal; other people said things only got worse after a year. She was a member of this latter camp, she supposed, because Miles had been dead since 2014 but she still hadn’t cleaned out his nightstand; she still bought things at the grocery that he liked and she didn’t; she still operated exactly as she had before, as a member of a unit, as a person who was contingent on the active participation of another person. You couldn’t untrain yourself from that. She’d tried. She’d moved to the condo in River North, but she set it up a lot like their house in Hyde Park, and she’d taped up the drawers of all his furniture—his desk, his dresser, his nightstand—so that the movers could transport them intact, full of his possessions.
    Some people took a year; it was probable that some other people besides Wendy were still complete trainwrecks after two.
----
    —
    I t swept in with the spring like a melting. Quietude, a kind of solace Marilyn hadn’t known since—well, ever, honestly; in utero, maybe, but probably not even then, given her mother’s penchant for Tanqueray, given the laxity of the 1950s, whichever you wanted to blame. Life was good. Her life was good. The hardware store was doing well, and she was sleeping better than she ever had, and her legs had nearly regained the limber give of her girlhood because she rode her bike to work, and her pansies were flourishing, a bright vermilion burst in the built-in box on the front porch.
    She, for once, would have been flying high, were it not for the tethers of her family. Marilyn Connolly—who’d’ve thought? A business owner, a certified nonsmoker for nearly fifteen years, an occasional churchgoer, proprietess of the most beautiful rosebushes on Fair Oaks. She was wondering if perhaps she was in her prime, although she wasn’t entirely convinced that one was allowed to have a prime when one was the mother of four. She was, instead of flying high, like one of those giant kite people they flew outside of the gas station on Ridgeland Avenue, a big vinyl body swaying in the breeze, trussed to the ground by thick umbilical ropes. A few minutes of bliss and suddenly it was the irritating jangle of her phone and an Oh my God, Mom, or a knock at the kitchen window with a mouthed Where’s the rake, honey?

    She put her bike on the porch and stopped to pull some dead leaves from her potted plants. Loomis was waiting for her inside.
    “Hello, my darling,” she said, rubbing deep behind his ears. They’d become those clichéd empty nesters who turned desperately to the Labrador the second the last kid shipped off to