The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein Read Free Book Online Page B

intimacy: occasionally, when their kids were asleep, they would share a cigar on his porch. Sheila kept a walkie-talkie tucked into the belt loop of her jeans to listen for Jeremy.
    She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
    They sat together in silence as Andy cut and lit the cigar. He handed it over to Sheila, who put it briefly to her mouth—did she even really like smoking cigars?—then looked at the thing as it burned in her hand. She had pulled up her bangs with a tortoiseshell barrette, her no-nonsense glasses, jeans belted at the waist—they had never so much as kissed. Perhaps the moment for kissing had passed, but maybe that moment never quite passed. But it never came, either. Sheila had a thin-lipped smile so sincere and so chapped he could feel it scratch at his heart.
    â€œHere you go,” she said, passing back the cigar.
    â€œThank you.” Andy let the tobacco tickle his mouth, the smoke stream through pursed lips. “Dinner was really nice, by the way.”
    â€œI’m sorry about the lobsters.”
    â€œWhy are you sorry?”
    â€œYou looked like you were going to faint,” she said. “For some reason I thought it wouldn’t bother you. I don’t know. I could have done it myself, I guess.”
    â€œAre you apologizing?” Andy asked.
    She didn’t answer.
    â€œDon’t apologize. That was one of the nicest things anyone has done for me in a long time. I love lobster.”
    Sheila waved a hand in front of her face. The smoke? The false gratitude?
    â€œYou know, I was thinking—I don’t even know when your birthday is,” she said. “We’ve never celebrated anything before.”
    â€œNovember,” he said.
    â€œSo you’re a Scorpio.”
    He had probably never mentioned that he didn’t believe in astrology—that in fact he took a principled stand against it. “Sagittarius.”
    â€œI’m a Cancer,” she said. “July.”
    More silence, then another rustle through the trees. Another animal. Even though he had completed his graduate studies at Princeton, fifty miles to the north, Andy had never been aware of the Pine Barrens, the greatest expanse of virgin pine forest in the country, until he’d found himself teaching biology at Exton Reed. This part of New Jersey was all sandy soil over an aquifer so pure you could dig a hole and drink right out of it, and stunted trees that would go down in forest fires every few summers to be reborn, again, come spring. It was the only place in New Jersey where it was truly possible to live off the grid. He knew of families in the immediate area who generated their own electricity and pumped that crystalline water from wells and shot their own deer and could name every owl species from a distance of twenty yards. His daughters went to school with kids from these families; they called them “pineys” and wouldn’t invite them to their birthday parties, which was fine with Andy.
    â€œAnd you’ll be thirty-six, right?”
    â€œI’m sorry?” he said.
    â€œIn November.”
    â€œForty-one.”
    â€œReally? I always thought you were younger than that.”
    Andy shrugged, puffed on the cigar. Sheila was leaning back against the cheap green all-weather cushions of his rocking chair, closing her eyes. She slapped her hand lazily when a mosquito approached.
    â€œI turned forty a few years ago,” she said. “What surprised me was how useless I suddenly felt. I remember my mother describing that feeling when she was sixty or so, how she felt like she was just being greedy at this point—that anything she was going to do from sixty on was just marking time.”
    Andy looked at Sheila, curious. Her conversation was usually cheerful and practical; she wanted to know if she could pick up the girls, if he needed anything at the Pathmark. If he could replace the lightbulb she couldn’t quite