The Pretend Wife Read Free

Peter.”
    Elliot shook it and shot me a look that seemed to say: Look at this guy! You are married! And he’s tall! And then he said, “Gwen just invited me to the party tonight. I’m new to town.”
    â€œGreat idea!” Peter said, and before I had a chance to clarify, he was giving Elliot directions. I was still stunned that Elliot Hull was back in my life, and that it had happened so quickly. See, it was simple. That’s what I mean: I hadn’t done anything to start it. I was just standing in line at an ice-cream shop one minute and then suddenly I was watching Peter make some gestures that might indicate that Elliot would have to make a turn out of a rotary, and then he pointed to his left, his arm straight out at his side, and I thought of the word wingspan again. Peter is tall. He has an excellent wingspan.
    But there was Elliot Hull, standing next to him, and he was not tall and he was not at all impeccably mannered and he was barely paying attention. He was being Elliot Hull, thinking his brooding thoughts, no doubt. Had we kind of thought we were in love with each other a decade ago?
    When Peter was finished, he said, “Got it?”
    â€œI’ve got it,” Elliot said, and then he looked at me. I was about to wave a noncommital good-bye, but then Elliot said, “Gwen Merchant, huh, after all these years.” And suddenly it was as if I were the rare bird. I felt a little self-conscious. I might have even blushed and I couldn’t remember the last time I blushed. “See you tonight!” he said, then took a bite of his abundant ice cream and walked out of the shop, one hand in his baggy shorts.

T HERE’S A THEORY ABOUT why people don’t remember their infancy and young childhood. It goes like this: memory cannot exist without something to refer to. You remember something because it hooks to some earlier experience. Memories start to form not because that quadrant of the brain has finally developed, but because our lives have layers. In this sense, memory isn’t a layer formed on top of experience—like a cap of ice—as much as it is formed underneath it—the way rivers can run underground.
    And my relationship with Elliot Hull is like this too. For me to truly understand that tide of joy when I first saw him in the ice-cream shop and how everything else that happened followed, I need Peter. Elliot doesn’t really exist without Peter—not fully. And Peter wouldn’t have really existed in my life without my father—a man shaped by loss, and defined by it. And his loss doesn’t exist, of course, without my mother’s untimely death.
    Let me dig at just one layer at a time.
    I met Peter in the waiting room of an animal hospital. He’d brought in his mother’s elderly cockapoo for someincontinence issues, and I was covered in blood, reading a book about the human brain. A farm dog had darted in front of me on the road that morning. I’d been on my way to an undergraduate class in psychology, even though I wasn’t matriculated. I was twenty-five and had recently quit a job in marketing that had burned me out. I was working as a waitress again—happily so—and thinking about going to grad school for psychology.
    I was enamored with talk therapy at the time—mainly because I had just started seeing a therapist, a very sweet older woman who wore thick glasses that magnified her eyes so it seemed as if she was looking at me intently. I wasn’t used to this kind of attention, and although it made me uncomfortable, I needed her. She let me talk about my childhood for an hour every week. She let me daydream about my mother—really—and what my childhood could have been like if she’d lived. We were working through these fantasies, in hopes of getting at … some elemental truth ? And what was that truth? One fall when I was just five years old, my mother died—a car accident