Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle Page B

brilliant plan. Necessities: those wee hours of the morning when a kid’s fever spiked and not a drop of Tylenol in the house, or times when she realized that there would be no milk for her morning coffee.
    I N ALL THE years since Abbott left, Anne has not slept a whole night through. Usually she wakes at two, sometimes three. Even with her CEO lying beside her, she often can’t keep herself from playing through the nights she laythere with Abbott, the tension between them so thick she felt she might strangle on it, so thick it forced her awake, the beginnings of the chronic habit. There is a time in a woman’s life when being a mother may be all that she can successfully be, with her mind so fragmented by thoughts of fevers and stitches and homework and Little League. Laundry and cleaning, shopping and cooking. A bath is a luxury. Sleep, the greatest luxury of all. He kept commenting on how she had changed. She knew what was going on was what had changed. She could almost pinpoint the day he came home with a different look about him. She could smell the deception, but she didn’t have proof. Night after night, she had lain beside him wanting anything he could give her: a confession, an apology, a profession of his love even with an admission of his inability to remain faithful. Now she hated the part of herself that over the years still refused to let go of a love that he refused to return. She hated the part of herself that delighted in the fate of the young unencumbered women that so many men who stray manage to find. A year, maybe two and then
that
woman is also encumbered, only this time he has someone who is too young to share his memories. She was disgusted with the part of herself that pictured Abbott in such a state of aloneness.
    Her great-aunt Rosemary was fond of saying that by andlarge marriage is an unnatural state. Anne resisted the notion and clung to the natural history of certain rare monogamous creatures in the wild—the prairie vole, the purple martin, geese—even while she secretly believed Rosemary was probably right. Why else do women so easily settle in with their litters and nests; why do the females in nature blend into the background while the males remain flashy and continue life as sexual predators? Why was man created to continue giving life while women ran out of time, ran out of eggs?
    I am dispensable
, she thought one night when the coyotes’ blood-chilling cries kept her awake.
A temporary shelter, a brief stop on a very long journey.
    N OW SHE SLIPS the cordless phone into her pocket and goes into the bathroom to call Abbott’s wife while he murmurs to himself about how great everything looks, how neat and clean. She closes the bathroom door, leaving just enough of a crack that she can see his shadow, hear his footsteps. She plans to once again whisper into the receiver
He’s here, I have him,
but then there is no answer, and his voice— strong and coherent—on the answering machine startles her and she hangs up.
    O VER A YEAR ago, her sons had told her there were problems. At first they thought he had had a stroke of some kind. Then a brain tumor. There had been a CAT scan, all kinds of tests. He was just that unlucky person, a man barely sixty in the throes of dementia.
    â€œBut isn’t he too young for this?” she had asked his young wife.
    â€œYes,” she said, her eyes lined and weary. Their children—a boy and a girl—were barely in junior high.
    â€œAnd
I’m
too young for this,” the wife added, then she caught herself and softened. She spoke then as if reciting from a medical textbook, spoke of her support group and how most of the others were a lot older and yet it did happen. One in a zillion. “Lucky huh?” she asked. “And think about genetics, will you? Your children and my children.” She said all of this with Abbott right there in the next room. She said,
“your
children