The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

All those years, and he never found the right person again. Or perhaps he was thankful to be out of his marriage and vowed never to repeat. But I hate to think that way. Despite all that is cold and calculating about Logan Yates, I like to think he’s capable of love. But unlike with my mother’s magazine ads, I don’t have anything to prove that.

We had the Disney family, where the mom died young and the dad raised the kids. The deviation from the Disney story was we were raised by nannies and my father slept with as many women as his schedule would allow. This did not exclude the nannies.

Women buzzed in and out of our lives like mosquitoes over the years, attaching themselves to my father and sucking as much blood as they could until he grew tired and swatted them away. It wasn’t uncommon to find a statuesque blond sipping coffee in our kitchen as my sister and I prepared for school, nor was it rare I’d never see that person again. Dad preferred blonds, but rarely the same one twice.

As for the rest of my family, there’s only my older sister, Cora. She has my mother’s looks and my father’s venom. Cora still lives in Bury, and as with my father, she’s part of why I left this place without any intention of ever coming back.

Still, two decades later, here I am in this house. What happened here is why I became a novelist after all.

I push bad memories away and focus on unpacking the three bags I brought. The rest of our things are in storage back in Wisconsin, hastily crammed in a small unit after I broke the lease on our apartment.

“This house is too big.”

I turn and find Max standing in the doorway of my bedroom, which was a guest room when I was growing up.

“Hey, buddy. I thought you were reading.”

“I finished it.”

“You finished the second Harry Potter book?”

“Third. The Prisoner of Azkaban.”

“Wow.” Max has never been a great student but the kid is smart as hell. When he was old enough to understand Mommy was a writer, he latched onto reading, working his way quickly past his class level and the level after that. He read A Wrinkle in Time at age eight and The Hobbit at nine. I could never have read Tolkien at nine. He struggles with math and is allergic to tests of any type, but he’ll be devouring Joyce by fifteen. He’s asked to read my books on several occasions, but I always tell him they’re too adult for him right now. A few more years.

“My room is too far away from yours,” he says.

“It’s just one floor away,” I say. “There’re three floors in this house, so that’s not so bad.” I unfold a shirt and place it on the bed.

“I don’t like it here,” he says.

I nod, knowing how he feels. We could fit six or seven of our old apartments in this house, not even counting all the yard space. “I know. It’s a big change. But you’ll get used to it.”

Max looks down, as if the world suddenly got just a little too heavy. I walk up to him.

“Hey,” I say, pulling him in to me. His head fits snug against my chest, and part of me doesn’t want him to grow any more so I can always cradle him just like this. “I know this is hard, but there’s no easy way through this. There are no shortcuts through this kind of pain. It’s not fair, but it’s how it is.”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he goes into this kind of fugue state where his mouth hangs a bit open and his eyes focus on some distant world. It scared me when he first started doing this after Riley’s death, but I realized it was all part of him processing a major shift in his life. It happens to me, too, maybe without the complete withdrawal from the present. But that moment of getting stuck on a reality so profound you lose yourself in it. For Max, his typical de-animation lasts ten, twenty seconds.

Finally, he blinks. Says, “We could have stayed in Milwaukee.”

“No,” I say. “We needed a new environment. And we need help.”

“No, we don’t. We can do everything on our own.”

I shake my head as I squeeze him harder. “No, we can’t. Not yet. That’s the reality of this. Your grandfather’s helping us out, and we need to appreciate that.”

“He could have just sent us the money.”

How do I tell my son that Mommy suffers from debilitating nightmares and my only hope for relief is to face my past head-on, right here in this house? I can’t tell him, just as I can’t tell anyone else. So I do what I’m skilled at: changing the subject.

“He’s even paying for the school you’ll be going to, and it’s a really nice one. Same one your cousin goes to.”

“I know. You told me that already.”

I release and look down at him. His gaze moves back to his toes.

“Look at me,” I say.

He doesn’t.

“Max, look at me.”

He finally looks up and into my eyes for about two seconds before shifting his eyes to the right. Two seconds of eye contact is pretty good for Max.

“This is probably the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do in your entire life,” I say. “But we’re going to do it together. I’m not going anywhere. You know that, right?”

He doesn’t answer at first. Finally, he says, “I see his face sometimes. At night, when I’m trying to fall asleep.”

“Daddy?”

He nods.

I see his face, too. Blank. Dead. One eye a quarter open, pupil dry as bone.

“Does that feel good?” I ask. “To see him?”

Not an ounce of expression. “No.”

His answer tickles the back of my neck, not in a pleasant way.

“Are you missing him?” I ask.

He surprises me by not answering. Instead, he turns and plods away, dragging his feet as he leaves the room. My impulse