The Unremarkable Heart Read Free

fact, a tunnel – a narrowing of life, so that stories as simple as what the elementary school was serving for lunch this week took on infinite importance.
    ‘What’s that?’ Richard was staring at her, expectant. ‘What did you say?’
    She shook her head. Had she actually spoken? She could not remember the last time she’d participated in a real conversation beyond her grunts for yes or no. June was capable of speech, but words caught in her throat. Questions caught – things she needed to ask him. Always, she said to herself – tomorrow. I’ll ask him tomorrow. TheScarlett O’Hara of dying high school administrators. But there would be no tomorrow now. She would have to ask him today or die without knowing.
    ‘Harris Motors has asked for a side set-back variance in order to expand their used car showroom. Those wishing to speak either for or against the proposal can—’
    His shirt was buttoned to the top, the collar tight around his neck. It was an affectation he’d picked up in prison. The pursed lips, the hard stare – those were all his own, conjured during the lead-up to the trial, when June had realized with shocking familiarity that for all their attempts, they had become the one thing they set out not to do: trapped in a loveless marriage, a cold union. Lying to each other to make the day go quickly, only to get up the next morning to find a whole new day of potential lies and omissions spread out before them.
    She remembered glancing around the prison visiting room, seeing the other inmates with their stiff collars of their blue shirts buttoned snug around their necks, and thinking, ‘You’ve finally found a way to fit in.’
    Because Richard had never really fit in. Early on, it was one of the things she loved about him. Friends joked about his lack of masculine pursuits. He was a voracious reader, couldn’t stand sports and tended to take contrary political views in order to play devil’s advocate. Not the ideal party guest, but to June the perfect man. The perfect partner. The perfect husband.
    Before her cancer diagnosis, she had never visited Richard in prison, not once in the twenty-one years since he had been sent away. June was not afraid of losing the hate she felt for him. That was as firmly rooted in her chest as the cancer that was growing inside of her. What scared her most was the fear of weakness, that she wouldbreak down in his presence. She didn’t need a Dr Bonner to tell her that love and hate existed on the same plane. She didn’t need him to tell her that her bond with Richard Connor was at once the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to her in her life.
    So it was that the day she drove to the prison, not the day that she was diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, was the worst day of June Connor’s life. Her hands shook. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Standing outside the door to the visitor’s area, she let the fear take hold, and imagined all the horrible things that could make her weak before him.
    The feel of his lips when he kissed her neck. The times she had come home from school, exhausted and angry, and he had cupped his hand to her chin, or pressed his lips to her forehead, and made everything better. The passionate nights, when he would lie behind her, his hand working her into a frenzy. Even after almost twenty years of marriage, after loving him and hating him in equal parts, the thought of his body beside her still brought an unwelcome lust.
    He never closed drawers or cabinet doors all the way. He never put his keys in the same place when he got home from work, so every morning he was late for school because he couldn’t find them. He belched and farted and occasionally spat on the sidewalk. He took his socks off by the bed every night and left them there for June to pick up. There was not an item of laundry he knew how to fold. He had a sort of domestic blindness which prevented him from seeing dust on the furniture, carpets that needed to be