Page 26 of The Wife
That I had never taken advantage of Ellie and that I still wasn’t.
Carol was two years older than me, a professional working vet, and exactly the type of woman I had always imagined I would be with.
Okay, so maybe I did have a type.
Anyway, we fit better than Ellie and I did in many different ways, and it was easy for anyone looking at us to see that.
This way all the gossip about me and Ellie could be shut down once and for all. Yep. This was a win-win for everyone all the way around.
“Uh hello, Jake?”
I focused my attention on Carol. “I’m sorry, I drifted there. What did you ask?”
“How long have you been doing the insemination program?”
“The last four years. I had to convince Sam first. Ellie’s father. He was pretty old school about things. Thought that cows bred from insemination couldn’t possibly taste as good as cows that came from Mother Nature.”
She laughed, maybe a little too much, and put her hand on mine. “That is so funny.”
Was it? It didn’t matter. She could touch me all she wanted. No harm, no foul. No guilt.
No. Fucking. Guilt.
It was heavenly.
“Anyway, we’ve been expanding the program each year. This year in particular because we took such a loss with the storm, wanted to get the most bang for the buck in bull sperm.”
“How bad was it? The storm?”
I had a flash of stumbling upon Ellie in the snow. Not awake. Nearly frozen to death. I forced it out of my head.
“Bad. It was bad.”
She made a noise that I guess was supposed to be sympathy. Like she understood when she couldn’t possibly. But it wasn’t like I was going to touch on my relationship with Ellie with the woman I was currently on a date with.
“What about you? How long are you in town for?”
She shrugged. “I’m helping my aunt out for a while. But probably not too long. Eventually I have get back to work.”
“Where do you call home?”
She smiled and did her head tilt thing. I knew she traveled with her job a lot. She was essentially a contracted vet who could work anywhere in the country. Small rural communities mostly, where large animal vets were needed desperately.
“I have an apartment in Denver, but I’m rarely there. I should give it up, while I’m with this job, but it’s the thought of moving everything into storage until I finally settle on a place that bothers me. I like my stuff. Even though I only get to see it occasionally, I like knowing it’s there.”
“I hear you.”
Carol talking about her stuff made me think of the scales. The scales I had given Ellie for her birthday that had sat on the kitchen counter ever since. Five and five. For months now.
After I had given them to her, when she’d recorded her first ten day, she used to change them every day.
Right was the good side, she’d explained. Left was the bad side.
She had nines and eights. She had twos and threes. She once told me day one of her period was a guaranteed four and the day could only get worse from there.
Information I hadn’t wanted at the time, but I made a mental note when the right side was below five to be a little more sympathetic.
Then after the kiss, it stopped. Five. Always five.
