Anna From Away by D. R. Macdonald Page B

ask.”
    “I wouldn’t anyway,” Anna said.
    “More my foolishness than his, really. He looked good, God, I’ll say that for him. All flash handsome. Clothes on his back or clothes on the floor, he wouldn’t hurt your eyes any. I wasn’t after a baby, or a husband either. Blind passion, eh, Anna? It all goes cozy dark for a while and then you stumble out into the daylight and you think, wow, so
that’s
what it’s like. Happened to you, I suppose.”
    “Not exactly like that, but close. Hard to remember now.”
    “My little girl, she comes first. Any man who can’t see that, I don’t want him in the house.”
    “I wonder how much they do see sometimes.”
    “I didn’t yearn for a kid, you know? Not like some, you’d think mothering was the grandest thing in the universe. And maybe it is, if you’ve got nothing else going. But after all, just about any woman can have a baby if she wants, can’t she? It’s not like some special talent or some kind of genius. Anyway, she’s my darling.”
    “It’s hard to want one and not be able,” Anna said.
    “That’s you, is it?”
    “I’m past all that.”
    “You’re not that old, girl.”
    “Oh, but I am. I couldn’t have a child in my life now. Not anymore.”
    “Because you’re here, you mean, because you’re not home?”
    “It’s complicated, Breagh.”
    “Your husband? Sure.”
    Anna did not want to get into Chet, it was enough to have him dropping in and out of her mind without the prospect of sharing their history with someone else, even Breagh, whom she liked and was inclined to trust. Any details of their troubles seemed only tiresome on this particular morning, and the less they knew around here about her private life, the better, it seemed an advantage she did not want to lose. But she could have told her that in a marriage watch out for things that stop: Chet stopped kissing her good morning, she couldn’t remember now precisely when, it just happened, a small thing, really, forgivable if she hadn’t known by then just why—there was another woman on his mind so early in the day. Then he stopped discussing with her books he was reading, as if he had talked them out somewhere else. He stopped showing her what he had written unless she asked, a manuscript would lie open on his desk as if for any passerby. He stopped wandering into her studio room to pause at her work and offer a critical frown or a smile or a comment. He stopped taking her to their favourite Indian restaurant once a week, once a month or two seemed enough, and when he did, he often gazed past her face, his conversation dutiful but straying. Then he stopped fitting her into anything that interested him, and his courtesy—he was always courteous—felt patronizing. Chet had always believed that confessing frankly to his sins, the very act of candidness, absolved him in some way, mitigated at least his deceit, but he stopped that too: Alicia was no ordinary lover, no rocket affair, and, after the spelunking chapter, what he did with her was not open for discussion. Anna of course had long ago ceased sharing with him anything intimate, any secrets of her own. She had always been discreet where he was careless, reticent where he was garrulous and self-dramatizing.
    So Anna skated over her marital circumstances with a bland summary, almost blushing at the clichés she resorted to in order to close down the subject—they’d each needed “their own space,” she and Chet, and felt that this time apart would be good for each other’s creativity, his writing, her art.
    “I could see that, I suppose,” Breagh said with a skeptical smile. “I split from Gordie because he wanted to run my life. No thanks, buddy.”
    She insisted that Anna needed to eat and she set about making her an omelette. “As a girl I wasn’t great for the kitchen,” she said over her shoulder, cracking eggs into a bowl. “I learned to cook on my own. I was grown up by then, of course.”
    “Funny what