Page 2 of The Husband Diet
Was that the right way to introduce the news? How was I supposed to know?
A glance in his direction told me it probably wasn’t, because his red face went snow-white.
‘Well,’ he tittered. ‘It’s a bit too soon to talk about that. Maybe one day – who knows?’
My heart thudded against the bottom of my stomach, dead still.Geronimo. ‘Ira… I’m pregnant.’
‘What?’ he said.
It wasn’t a ‘What did you say?’ what. It was a ‘Please tell me you’re joking’ what.
‘Three weeks at the most.’
Ira scrambled and slipped on the ice. I steadied him. Not a good start. His face was sweaty, his eyes wide.
I sighed. ‘Look, I know you’re shocked. Even I can’t believe I’m going to be a mother. But it’ll be OK.’
He looked at the ground for a long time, as if trying to find insect footprints in the snow. After what seemed like forever, he glanced up.
‘I’m not sure I’m ready to be a father just yet, Erica,’ he said quietly. ‘I think we should consider our options.’
I blinked. ‘Options?’ I whispered, understanding but hoping I hadn’t.
‘We’re much too young to start a family. We have a company – our livelihood to nurture. How is a baby going to get our lives into gear?’
And then, the realization. The painful truth. I was too numb to move. But I could still think, and I could certainly still speak.
‘You don’t love me, do you?’ I whispered.
Any man in love with his woman would have been overjoyed to learn she was expecting a baby from him. At least the men in my historical romances would.
He looked at me for a long moment, like when you examine fruit at the grocer’s before buying it.Please say you love me, I silently willed.Please don’t tell me I’ve thrown my heart away.
Ira sighed and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. ‘Of course I do, silly. Now why would you get so dramatic?’ And then he kissed me tenderly and broke into a grin. ‘Let’s do it. Let’s get married and have kids.’
I stopped holding my breath. ‘Really?’
Ira tapped my nose gently. ‘I love you – you love me. Hell, how hard can it be?’
1
Comical Visions of Murder
Time: fast-forward to a few years later, to any night of the year. It doesn’t make a difference.
‘Ow! For Christ’s sake, Erica! Can’t you keep this place tidier?’ Ira grumbled as he tripped over our son Warren’s baseball glove in the hall.
Oh, God. Here we go again. I could have sworn Warren had put the glove away when I told him to. I did tell him to – didn’t I? I bared my teeth at Ira in a lame effort to smile. One of these days I’d get lockjaw besides migraines. Had I subconsciously left that glove there to trip him?
Place: our new large white-brick house on 3566 Quincy Shore Drive, Boston. Good piece of real estate. It had taken many years and a lot of sacrifices to buy it and make it our home. Ira’s company still didn’t earn enough to keep us afloat, despite what he always said. And I was happy to do my bit.
But who knew I’d end up like this? Married with children at thirty-four, with thoughts of comic murder drifting through my mind – like clobbering my husband over the head and shoving him in the oven to roast for a couple of days before anyone asked about him. Not that anyone would miss him.
Have you ever, just for a moment, wished your husband would disappear into thin air, or at least to another country far, far away? Or, more simply, go back to being the guy you married ages ago? What the hell had happened to us? I wondered every day. What had started out with a promise of love had in the end become routine, mundane, deathly dull.
I remembered the days I used to serve him his espresso coffee (in bed) in an elegant cup and saucer, but then we’d gone on to just the cup minus the saucer and after Warren was born, Ira was making his own and using styrofoam cups.
And now I was having murderous daydreams, in which I wiped him out of my sight with a single swat of my hand, or pushed him off a cliff (not that there were many on my daily route to work, back from work, picking up the kids and grocery shopping).
