Anniversary – Alec Hutchinson

The memory stirred an odd sense of injustice, and with his appetiser gone (had he been cowering behind it?) he felt the need to speak. ‘This is hardly the way I wanted to spend the evening.’

Jane had heard her husband — it seemed she’d ignored him long enough to agitate him—but she knew from experience that he could be soothed quickly. He didn’t require much, frankly less and less as the marriage matured. Instead of snapping at him and sending him back inside that shell of his, she slowly put the phone away, making sure it was evident that she was doing it of her own accord — finishing the last sentence of the article — and smiling back up at him in a fluid motion, a smile she knew would work. It was the same smile that had sold her in the first place. ‘And how would you like to spend it, my dear?’

‘Talking, I guess. You know, the way everyone else is.’

‘And what would we have to say to each other?’ She’d meant to pitch this line playfully, as if teasing him in a friendly fashion, but she was out of practice and it came out with the wrong inflection, altogether too close to the way she actually felt. He ignored the nuance though, simply pleased he had engagement.

‘Well, I asked a question. Indulge me.’

She held the sigh and committed herself. It was about holding up her end of the bargain, after all. Philip had done his part: he’d been professionally successful, well-respected in his field, mostly tolerant of her parenting decisions. Yes, there had been hiccups. He wasn’t pleased with her diktat that Julian and Celia were to be raised as pescetarians, for example, but she’d overruled him. And that had become the way it was with most things, Philip taking a hands-off, conflict-free approach to their family and social obligations and free to dodder in the background of his own life — a man fifteen years his wife’s senior whose pockets were deep enough to fund trips to the Galapagos and keep her in Bollinger through weekday afternoons. The Galapagos really had been nice — sea turtles and marine iguanas. She was glad she’d arranged it.

‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘What was the question again?’

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