The Best Thing for You by Annabel Lyon Page A

slaps, the backboard rattle. It was a rhythm.
    He knew.
I said sharply, “Why?”
    His eyes shifted. “Glossy green sprigs tucked around the house at Christmastime. Sure, I’m seeing it. You know the little cute berries are poisonous?”
    The assistant, shovel in hand, stood slack-shouldered, slack-mouthed, as though what we were talking about changed everything.
    Now, late-September sun sparks off the mud, tangles in the trees. I look for a conspicuous place to leave the can and the bag. Maybe it’s not so bad: five evergreen bushes, roots balled in burlap, line the fence we share with Brill. You see a bird here, every once in a while, a pigeon, wings snapping the air with a sound like laundry. Eventually it’ll all heal over. Newness and all that, new green growth.
    I drop the garbage in a wheelbarrow and pace over to the black-curtained French doors to Liam’s office. I tick on the glass with a knuckle. “Open,” Liam calls. I slide the door but there’s a new wrinkle: a sofa barring my way. As usual my husband is watching a movie. I let myself slide over the back of the sofa, landing with my spine on the seat and my feet in the air. I could have managed better but there’s mud on my sneakers and the sofa looks new.
    “This is not good.” I stare at my feet in the air. “In my condition.”
    “You have a condition?”
    “Officially.”
    “Well,” Liam says. I can’t see him – I’m upside down, I’m in the sun, and he’s not. “You going to close that door?” I kick my shoes off and close it with a sock foot, sliding us both back into the dark. “Come here.”
    I go stand behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. He puts his hands on my hands and we watch his movie together for a while. Gangsters are planning a heist; they talk fast and mean. In the background a pretty moll fixes drinks and slips a baby revolver, a gunlet, in her garter when no one’s looking. She has a white face and black lips – the movie is black and white. Liam uses the remote to squiggle through a few scenes. We watch an interview between the moll and a detective, him struggling to light a cigarette, her looking bored. Liam freezes the frame on her heart-shaped face. “Livia Claire,” he says.
    On an impulse, I reach down between his legs. He’s hard.
    “Where’d that sofa come from?” I ask.
    “Bought it,” he says, swallowing. It’s a futon on a pine frame, with a black cotton cover on the mattress. “Lately I want to nap.”
    “Tell me she’s dead.”
    “If she weren’t, she’d be older than my granny. It’s 1941 in there.”
    We watch a little more. “I’d question your placement,” I say finally. “If you’re ever planning to use that door again as, you know, a door.”
    “Never.” I wander over for my shoes and try to tug straight some diagonal creases in the futon cover. “Leave it.”
    From the bookcase I collect a dirty coffee mug and the lifestyle section of this morning’s paper. “You jerk off in here, don’t you?” I gesture with the shoes, but he doesn’t answer. “Just like old times. I’m telling Ty about the baby, okay?”
    He shrugs.
    I find Ty up in his room with some kid I’ve never seen before. Ty’s sitting on the floor and the new boy’s ape-limbed all over the bed. The window is wide open.
    “This is Carl,” Ty says. “He’s the one who hit me in the face.”
    “Don’t like you, Carl,” I say.
    “It’s all right, Kate. We worked it out.”
    Ty giggles. After a second I place it: the meat-voice of the late-night phone calls.
    “Tyler, sweetie, it’s almost time for you to go watch your favourite shows, okay?” I say.
    Carl tells me he loves my T-shirt.
    “Get your fucking shoes off the quilt.” Downstairs the doorbell rings. “And put those cigarettes out!”
    On the doorstep are Officer Stevens and another officer, taller, a man. “Dr. Clary, is Tyler home?” Officer Stevens asks.
    “Hi,” I say.
    Their cruiser is parked in the