The Long Way Home by Karen McQuestion Page B

first saw him?”
    “Oh, he was the cutest little thing,” Marnie said. “He used to come to school with this little scrap of blanket. He called it his Biffy.”
    Laverne chortled, and Marnie realized her mistake. Jazzy had been asking about Brian, not Troy.
    “Brian was a very handsome, charming man,” she said, clearing her throat. “I just always thought of them as a package.” Odd, but she couldn’t get a clear picture of Brian from that time. Troy she remembered well. He was a shy boy, small for his age, always on the edge of the group. Cute, with brown hair that went every which way. His big, dark eyes framed long lashes.
    In the classroom, he sometimes called her Mommy by mistake, which was as heartbreaking as it was endearing. “My wife abandoned us,” Brian had said when she asked about Troy’s mom, or lack thereof. Kimberly. Even then she’d had harsh feelings about the woman. What kind of woman could leave a precious boy like Troy for even a day, much less forever?
    When Brian said he needed someone to watch Troy after school, she didn’t think twice about it. They agreed she’d babysit at Brian’s house. That made the most sense. Bit by bit, she made herself familiar and then indispensible, cooking dinner so that a hot meal was on the table by the time Brian came home from work. He was grateful and complimentary too. Her meat was perfectly seasoned; vegetables had never tasted so good; her desserts were decadent. The way he ate her meals had a sensual quality to it. He ate each bite slowly, groaning with pleasure.
    It hadn’t taken long before they became a couple. Marnie moved in when the school year ended. She was twenty-five. For a year or so she was happier than she’d ever been, happier than a human being deserved to be. Brian stopped and picked up flowers for her on the way home, complimented her endlessly, swept her into the bedroom every night as soon as they were sure Troy was sound asleep.
    After about a year, it all fell apart. He pulled away when she went to hug him, stopped complimenting her or even noticing her. When she asked if she’d done something wrong, he denied it and said she was being paranoid. The sex stopped completely. She was puzzled, he was defensive. All relationships cooled off, Brian said. Meanwhile, her family asked when there would be a wedding. As the years went by, they stopped asking.
    The permanent divide came when Brian was diagnosed with sleep apnea and had to sleep with a CPAP machine. He said it made him nervous to have her next to him when he had the mask up to his nose and the straps over the top of his head. She never understood that. What difference did it make if she was there? To make it sound like he was being selfless, he said he didn’t want the noise of the machine to bother her. Odd, because the CPAP noise was a gentle hiss of air, almost like a vaporizer, but somewhat more soothing. Certainly a better sound than the snoring he did when not using the machine. But really, what could she say? If he didn’t want to sleep with her, it would be pathetic to argue the point. Eventually she moved all her clothes and personal items to the guest bedroom. One advantage was that she finally had her own bathroom and didn’t have to look at the remnants of shaving cream and whiskers in the sink each morning.
    She should have moved out at the first sign of trouble, and she almost did, but every time she threatened it, Brian begged her to stay and reverted back to his old self. He’d rub her shoulders and whisper in her ear. “I love you, Marnie. You know that. I’m just not good at relationships. I’m working on it. Please give us another chance. Please. We need you.”
    Oh, he was charming, all smiles and flowers and nice messages on her voice mail. She usually got a few good weeks out of it, anyway. What Brian didn’t know was that his tactics weren’t what kept them together. It was Troy. That little boy adored her, and the feeling was mutual. They