Other People's Husbands
The baby was the size of a lemon. That’s what she said when she slid the slick summer fruit into my palm. Last year she had lost a baby, but now it was back. She said this one was her baby coming back to her.
Yesterday there was a dead cockroach in her fridge. Four doors down I tiptoe around my table and slowly open cabinet doors to let the light peek in before me. My own cockroach waits behind the glasses.
Next year I’ll lose a baby, too. Mine will be the size of a bean.
But before the babies, we laid with the stars over us on the neighbor’s trampoline as our husbands wandered down the street. I knew she was short, but I was still surprised when I had to bend down to kiss her. I didn’t know lips could be that soft.
I swallowed vodka and silver cans of beer and whatever was handed to me. Someone else’s husband found me alone in the kitchen. Over the sink, his wife appeared on the other side of the window, her long black hair lit up by the bonfire as she laughed at the adults cramming themselves into the kids’ Power Wheels. My body hummed with power and fear when he said he wanted to kiss me. I filled his shot glass with Grey Goose and mine with water. I smiled as we tilted our heads back.
Soon the baby will be the size of a potato. She holds the dusty brown vegetable in front of her stomach. We talk in her kitchen all afternoon as she shows me how to make the things she ate growing up alongside the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain.
People have to work hard to be my friend. I avoid phone calls. I will not go out. I let people down. She didn’t mind hard work.
We go to lunch with our husbands. We hold their hands as we cross the street. She reaches over and grabs my hand and now the four of us are a chain.
The next May I lay stretched on a bed when a nurse hangs over me to confirm the procedure. I count backwards behind a mask and then my bean-sized baby disappears. My husband’s friend stops by the house. I try to describe the soupy emotions sloshing around inside, how relief and guilt and sadness and loss are bumping up against each other, and I can’t untangle the matted thicket that sits behind my heart. He says I look good.
August comes, and I am standing alone outside a bookstore when I see videos of Louisiana drowning. I buy a Time magazine and scan each page looking for familiar words, the names of places she folded into all her stories. That December she sends me a box with an embroidered blanket inside. For years I pack and unpack that Time magazine and shuffle the box from house to house, filling it with pictures of smoky kitchens and other people’s husbands and nights that unfold for years.
There’s a picture of the husband who sang to me on my birthday that my body was a wonderland. There’s a picture of the husband that called me baby when he was drunk. There’s a picture of the husband who pulled a gun on his wife.
The night I left her, it was cold. We hugged. Our husbands hugged. The baby was the size of a cabbage.
Heather Butcher
Heather Butcher is a writer living in southwestern Pennsylvania. She holds a BA in English Education and works as a support teacher in special education. You can reach her at habutcher@gmail.com.