Leave It On

The anklet was meant as a joke about the one night his wife had spent with another man. Mitch chose the thinnest of the three chains on the black velvet before the woman at the jewelry counter had finished saying what the other two cost. Fourteen karat, a box chain barely heavier than thread, a spring clasp the size of a grain of rice. She asked if it was a gift. He said it was a joke. She said, "Oh, fun," in the voice of somebody who rang up a lot of gifts in June, and ran his card.

He stood there while the machine thought about it, and looked at his own hand flat on the glass, and knew. It wasn't anything dramatic. It was the way you knew, walking into a basement after a storm, that the water line on the drywall was going to be higher than the homeowner had told you on the phone. The receipt printed. He signed it. He bought a card at the drugstore next door, sat in the car in the lot with the engine running for the air, and wrote In case you ever want to tell anybody on the inside, and then sat a while longer with the pen still uncapped, because that was a joke too, and it wasn't one either.

Her birthday fell on a Saturday. She'd said no to a restaurant, no to his sister's offer of a party, and no, very firmly, to anything with the word forty spelled out in balloons. What she wanted was to be at home with a steak she hadn't cooked and a bottle of the good Rioja they'd been saving for nothing in particular, and Mitch could do a steak. He did two, on the grill out back, with the sun still high at seven and the Kowalczyks' sprinkler ticking over the fence.

Lorraine came down while he was plating them. She had changed out of the shorts she'd worn all afternoon into a sleeveless dress in a deep coppery red, knit cotton that sat close from the neckline to the hips and let go of her just above the knee. Her hair was down, parted on the side, silk-pressed and swinging when she turned her head, and she'd put on the gold studs and nothing else. She was barefoot. She saw him look and let him.

"Well," she said.

"Happy birthday."

"You said that at six this morning."

"I'm going for a record."

They ate at the kitchen table instead of the dining room, because the dining room was where you ate with his parents, and because the kitchen had the good light at that hour, coming in low through the window over the sink and laying itself across her arms. The dress was cut high at the shoulder and bare below it. Her skin was a medium, warm brown, warmer across her cheeks after the one glass of wine, and it took the evening light like it had been waiting for it. He was forty-four and pink to the elbows from an afternoon at the grill, and he had been married to her for fourteen years, and he still had to make a conscious decision to look at his plate.

She told him about work, which was her way of saying she was happy. A controlled-substance count that had come out one tablet off on Thursday and had turned out, at nine at night, to be a tablet stuck to the bottom of a drawer liner. Her staff had been afraid to tell her the count was off and then afraid to tell her it was a drawer liner. "Thirty grown people," she said. "Pharmacists. With doctorates."

"They love you."

"They count very carefully around me. That's not the same thing." She pointed her fork at him. "It's close."

He cleared the plates. He brought out the cake from the Polish bakery on the south side that his mother had insisted on ordering, which said Happy Birthday Lorraine in piped blue and nothing about forty, because he'd called ahead. She laughed at that, a real one. She blew out the one candle he'd allowed himself. Then he went to the drawer where he'd hidden the box under the takeout menus and put it on the table next to her wine glass, with the card on top.

She read the card first. She always did. She read it with her strong, straight brows level and her mouth doing nothing, and he waited for the laugh, because that was the arrangement he'd made with himself in the car: she'd laugh, and he'd laugh, and it would go in the drawer of things they'd said once and didn't need to say again. Last spring had gone in that drawer. One night at the Brindle, ninety minutes south, arranged and talked through and agreed to in plain words in this kitchen, with a man neither of them had seen again. It had gone well. It had gone better than well. And afterward they had driven home up the interstate and gone quiet about it, not unhappy, not hurt, just shy, the way you could be shy with somebody you'd been naked in front of for years, and the quiet had set like concrete. Months of it. Not a word. They'd talked about the roof and his father's hip and the new formulary software, and not that.

She didn't laugh.

She set the card face down on the table and opened the box. She lifted the chain out on one finger and let it hang, and it caught the light from the window and turned a little, the whole thin length of it, gold against her brown hand.

"Mitch," she said.

"It's a joke."

"I read the card."

"It's —" He heard himself start to explain, and heard where the explanation was going to have to go, and stopped. He had told a lot of homeowners a lot of small true things in a friendly voice. He was good at it. He had never once been good at it with her.

Lorraine looked at him. Her eyes did the thing they did when she was deciding something, when they went dark and held perfectly still, and he had seen that look pointed at a lot of things over the years — a car salesman, a surgeon who wanted something off-formulary, a contractor who'd tried to bill her for a permit he hadn't pulled — and he had not often had it pointed at him.

Then she pushed her chair back from the table, turned it a quarter toward him, and put her bare foot up on his knee.

It sat there, warm, in his lap. The hem of the red dress slid back along her thigh with the movement, above the knee, higher, and she didn't fix it. Her toenails were painted a dark wine color, fresh from the salon that morning; he'd driven her. Her calf was round and hard from years of the six a.m. class at the gym by the hospital, and it narrowed to the ankle in a line he'd have known in the dark. She held out the chain.

"Go on," she said.

He took it. His hands were square and thick and not made for a clasp the size of a grain of rice, and she knew that, and she waited. He cupped her heel in one palm to steady it. Her skin was warm from the day. He brought the chain around the narrowest point of her ankle, just above the bone, and it lay there against her like it had been measured for it, which it had, by his eye, at a glass counter, three days ago, while he told a stranger it was a joke. It took him three tries to catch the ring with the spring. She didn't help. She didn't say anything at all. When it caught, he felt it catch, and he kept his hand where it was a second longer than he needed to.

She turned her foot on his knee, slowly, one way and then the other, and watched the gold move.

"Thank you," she said.

That was all. She took her foot back, smoothed the dress down over her thigh, and asked if there was coffee. He made coffee. She ate a second piece of cake. They watched half a movie on the couch with her feet in his lap and the chain lying across the top of her foot where it had slipped, and he looked at it more than he looked at the movie, and she let him do that too. Nobody said Brindle. Nobody said anybody. It was the best birthday either of them could remember, and he had no idea what had happened at it.

On Monday she wore it to work.

He saw it at six-forty in the kitchen, while she stood at the counter with her travel mug and her keys. Charcoal slacks cut narrow to the ankle, low heels, her hair drawn back into the smooth low bun she wore at the hospital, the Oakvale General lanyard with her badge on it flipped face-in the way she always flipped it. And at the bottom of all that exactness, between the hem of the slacks and the strap of the shoe, a line of gold.

He didn't say anything. She didn't say anything. She kissed him on the corner of the mouth, said, "Don't forget the gutters guy," and went out through the garage.

Tuesday she wore it to the gym, a quarter to six in the morning, in leggings cropped mid-calf and the black running shoes, so that the chain sat on the one bare strip of skin between the two. He was up because she was up. He watched her back the car out and thought about thirty people in a gym by the hospital who had never once looked twice at a woman's ankle, and who might now.

Wednesday she wore it to the grocery store after work, and he went with her, because she'd asked him to carry the water softener salt. She had changed into sandals at home. He pushed the cart and watched the chain flash on her ankle in the frozen aisle under the white lights, and watched the kid restocking yogurt look down and then look up at her face and then look away fast, and felt something in his chest go warm and tight at once, like a hand closing. He didn't examine it. He put the salt in the cart.

And every evening, when they came in through the front door, she did the same thing.

She stopped on the mat. She bent, one hand on the edge of the little hall table his grandmother had left them, and unclasped the anklet. It took her one try; her fingers were quicker than his. She straightened, held it a moment, and laid it in the blue glass dish on the table, where they kept the spare key and the garage remote and the loose change that came out of his pockets. Then she went on into the house without a word about it and asked what he wanted for dinner.

Monday he thought it was habit. Tuesday he thought it was the gym, the sweat. By Thursday he knew it wasn't either. She didn't take it off in the car, or in the bedroom, or at the kitchen sink. She took it off at the door. Out there it was on. In here it was off. And he could not ask her why, not without saying out loud what the card had meant, and he'd written the card precisely so he wouldn't have to.

Thursday night, late, with the dishwasher running and Lorraine already upstairs, he came back through the front hall to lock up and stopped at the table.

The chain lay in the dish in a loose gold coil, on top of the garage remote and a quarter and a receipt from the hardware store. It looked like nothing. It looked like something you'd find down the back of a couch. He stood there in his socks with the deadbolt half-turned and looked at it for a long time, and understood that she had answered him, clearly and every single day, in a language she was fluent in and he apparently was not. He had asked a question in a greeting card, dressed up as a joke so he could take it back. She had put it on and walked it out into the world and brought it home again every evening, and set it down right where he'd have to see it.

He turned the deadbolt the rest of the way. He left the anklet where it was. He went up the stairs to his wife with the feeling of a man who'd been handed a very clear answer and couldn't read a word of it.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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