Page 42 of Canadian Boyfriend

I felt so much better than I had a year or even six months ago. I wasn’t so close to the abyss. The little holes inside me felt like they were letting less air through, like they were starting to seal up.

But man, now that life wasn’t just about survival anymore, I could really see where I was screwing up. If you had asked me before, I would have said Sarah and I had a pretty equal relationship. If you looked at our actual division of domesticlabor, yes, she did the cooking and the grocery shopping and I did the lawn mowing and took in the dock in the fall, but I’d always thought that wasn’t a gender split so much as a logistics split. I wasn’t home half the time, so I wasn’t going to be the guy who knew we were almost out of milk.

And it turned out you could outsource a lot of that stuff. But wow, I’d had some rude awakenings about what Dr. Mursal called emotional labor. Because some things couldnotbe outsourced. Like, the communications from the school were enough to do me in. There’s a field trip next month we need to pay for, and would you also like to chaperone? Sarah always did. Don’t forget to send some nonperishables for the food drive. And guess what, sucker? It’s Dress Like a Pirate Daytoday.

I was perpetually being taken by surprise, and I knew enough to know that didn’t reflect well on me. Christmas was an extreme example. Christmas used to just… happen. Of course I realized now that wasn’t true.Sarahhad made Christmas happen. Yeah, I wielded the saw when we cut down the tree, and I carved the turkey. (Had my contribution to Christmas just been cutting stuff?) The point is, I got the slideshow of happy Christmas memories that came with swooping in and doing that kind of photo-op stuff. But everything else, the behind-the-scenes grunt work, had not happened this year. Mistletoe. An Advent calendar. A bunch of little wrapped stocking stuffers for Olivia. Presents for Sarah’s parents. Hell, presents formyparents. Presents for the teachers—including the dance teachers, ha. So many presents.

I was having to confront a hard truth: Sarah had probably had a point, back when we’d been arguing about kid number two. Or kids number two, three, and four. Then we could fieldan entire hockey team, I would joke. Except I hadn’t been joking. Sarah and I would play defense, Liv would be the goalie, and the new generation would play offense.

I wanted it so badly, I could almost taste it.

I thought I understood when Sarah said she didn’t want to talk about more kids until I retired because she didn’t want to do the newborn thing alone again. I truly thought I’d gotten it, and so I laid out a comprehensive counterargument involving nannies and night nurses. Oh my God, I was sohappywhen she finally said we could start trying.

I cast my mind back to the shock of finding those pills in her purse. Figuring out how to log onto the pharmacy account from which she’d managed our prescriptions—more emotional labor—and seeing that she’d been on them for six months before she died. The gut punch of doing the math in my head and realizing that lined up with when her IUD had come out. That had been when we started trying. I’d thought.

But as time passed, I was remembering those feelings more than I was actually feeling them. The anger and feeling of betrayal had receded, leaving behind a residue of bewilderment. Why hadn’t she justtoldme?

As I contemplated the mountain of stuff that needed to get done for Christmas, as I thought of all the things I probably didn’t even know about that had to get done, that bewilderment was overlain with a sort of understanding.

And with that understanding came a hot, sinking feeling. Shame. Had Sarah felt coerced? The fading of my anger at Sarah had been allowing me to remember the good times without their feeling tainted. The problem now was that my memories were tainted bymyactions. By the idea that I hadn’t truly understood what Sarah’s life was like. Was it possibleshe’d felt coerced when it came to the kid issue? Not knowing the answer to that question was going to be the greatest regret of my life.

I was in the middle of heaving the ax up when Aurora appeared in my peripheral vision.

“Am I interrupting?”

She was looking at me kind of funny. Probably because I was in shambles. I’d gotten overheated and had shed my outerwear, so I was wearing a sweat-soaked undershirt and generally looked like a criminal.

She, on the other hand… Well, it wasn’t polite to ogle one’s sort-of nanny, but she had on a bright-red coat that should have clashed with her auburn hair but somehow did not. She just looked so… bright, even in the dim light being cast by the lantern I had set up.

There was that word again:bright.

I grabbed my flannel and shrugged into it even though I was so hot, steam was rising from my skin. “Nope, not interrupting.”

“And here I would have thought, given that you have pretty much everything else delivered, that it was possible to buy firewood ready to burn.”

“It is. This is…” I waved at the woodpile I had going out here because I couldn’t fit any more in the garage. “Therapeutic.”

“Ah. I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“I was out here thinking about how much has to get accomplished before Christmas. And I have to play right up until then.” We had a break in the schedule between December twenty-third and New Year’s Eve, but that wasn’t going to help me now. “I should be inside doing that stuff instead of out here splitting wood we don’t need.”

“Olivia went to Sophia’s for dinner—I’m just back fromdropping her off—and I was thinking I’d rustle up something to eat. You want to join me?”

“That sounds great.” I thought about my recent reckoning regarding emotional—and actual—labor. “Except let me do the rustling.”

She made a confused face, but I shooed her inside and, once in the kitchen, pointed to the stools at the island. I marveled, as I had pretty much every time I’d seen Aurora at home, out of her dance-teacher guise, that she hadfreckles. Not a lot, a smattering over her nose and cheekbones that you could see when there was enough light. They weren’t visible when she went out to teach—or to do anything, really. She must cover them with makeup, which was a shame, because they were so freakingcute.

“How was the game?”

“We lost.”

“Bummer.” I shrugged, and she said, “You really take losses in stride.”

“I guess I do.” It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I loved hockey, and I gave it my all whether we were playing a game, doing drills, or in the weight room. But I didn’t get as wound up about the outcome as I had when I was younger. “White wine?” I asked.

“Sure, thanks,” she said as Earl 9 rolled over and presented his head to her for scratches. She hopped off her stool to oblige. Earl 9 and Aurora were getting on smashingly. I was pretty sure he liked her better than he liked me. I couldn’t blame him.

“What kind do you want?” I asked.

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