Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle by Emma Donoghue Read Free Book Online

donating it to a charity raffle. After a couple of weeks, Margaret got the hint and stopped asking would he like a cold one from the refrigerator. She teased him a little about what a clean-living guy he’d become – but not in front of friends.
    Another thing, he wasn’t sure their friends were his friends any more. They were the same people; it was him who’d changed. For the first year ever he put down every cent he’d made on his tax return. He could only talk about things like that to his church friends, those people in cheap shoes he’d have bust a gut laughing at a couple of months back.
    What he couldn’t tell them, though, was that Margaret wasn’t his wife.
    At a church picnic he watched her blowing bubbles with a four-year-old. Mrs Oberdorf had her eye on him. ‘You and your wife been blessed with any children?’ she asked in her cracked voice.
    ‘Not yet.’
    She nodded, her mouth twisted with sympathy.
    He hoped she’d think it wasn’t their fault. He hoped she wouldn’t use the word
husband
in front of Margaret.
    One evening when she was pinning up new drapes he said it. ‘We should get married one of these days.’ But it didn’t sound romantic enough. It sounded like clearing out the garage.
    Margaret took the pins out of her mouth. ‘You think so?’ She had this way of letting words hover like smoke.
    ‘I know we used to say we didn’t need it, but recently I’ve been reconsidering.’
    She pinned up another fold of fabric.
    ‘It might feel good. It might be the thing to do,’ he added, as if he were kidding around. He hoped she wouldn’t hear the guilt behind his voice.
    ‘OK. What the hell,’ said Margaret. He winced, but not so she’d notice. ‘We’ve both done it before and it didn’t kill us.’
    Then she laughed until he laughed, too, and she came over and kissed him on the ear.
    But as he was signing his name in the register – his ballpoint pressing the paper a little too hard – he knew that this time wasn’t going to be like those other times. Neither he nor his first wife in DC nor Margaret nor her first husband in LA had had the slightest idea what they were really doing. This time would be the real thing, because now he knew what a promise was. Now he knew what the words meant.
    To show she wasn’t taking the whole thing too seriously, Margaret was wearing red. He didn’t care; it looked good on her. ‘You can bring your God buddies if you like,’ she’d told him, but he said that was all right, he’d rather keep it small, just the two of them and a pastor (not Pastor Tull, just some Unitarian) and a few friends who drove down from Seattle and Vancouver.
    After the ceremony he was high like he hadn’t been since that time he tried cocaine at the prom. He was a bank robber who’d made it to Acapulco.
    The next Sunday after church he said the word. ‘My wife and I are taking a vacation,’ he mentioned to Mrs Keilor, and relief stabbed him through the ribs.
    For their honeymoon – about ten years too late, according to his mother in San Francisco, but she sent them a cheque anyhow – he and Margaret were going to drive right down the West Coast. That first night in a motel in Mount Saint Helens he lay under the weight of his wife and moved and shut his eyes. It felt like he was running down the right road at last. But later when he was letting the condom slither off him, he wanted to cry.
    They hiked up a volcano the next day, cinders crunching like cornflakes under their feet. Later they squatted over tide pools and saw anemones blossom like green doughnuts and purple sea urchins as big as their hands. Margaret tilted her face up to the sun while he took pictures and figured out the distances between towns.
    In Eugene, Oregon, he woke up in the middle of the night and had to shake her awake. ‘Honey,’ he said urgently. Then, apologetically, ‘Honey, I just realized, we’re meant to have children.’
    The words shocked his ears.
    At first Margaret