“Don’t you fucking tease me,” she says. But I’m not teasing. I have manufactured an afternoon alone, the two of us. I am thirsty, very dry. “But why?” she pleads. “How?”
I can’t remember the answer to these questions. It all seems so complicated in retrospect. It might’ve been just one phone call. We deliver the children by their armpits to her sister.
We’re off like fugitives. We drive and spar. Then silence.
The mall strikes me as larger from the outside, smaller and more angular on the inside. I feel my hands needing occupation. I look around my feet, the tile flooring, certain I’ve dropped something. I pat my pockets. She demands I tell her what time it is. I am rocking from one foot to the other.
We search for things that have been needed at some point in time, but I can’t determine if the listed price of an ottoman is reasonable, or if it’s suddenly through the roof, the way it feels to me, sort of, I really can’t remember, and she can’t remember the space the ottoman was supposed to fill—do we even need an ottoman? Is it an ottoman, or was it a fish tank?
In the fish tank, fish—small carp—spawn. It’s a vicious visual experience. She’s gone instead for French lip balm, returns with nothing. She needs advice!
We lunch. Strange breadless pizza—robust, god-awful huge—is smoking in front of us.
She demands the time.
I am bored. She is tired. She naps on a leather sofa, beside an elderly man who has allowed her to place her head on the cushion next to him. The man covers her with newspapers to keep her warm, and I fix my gaze on the way in which well-waxed tile floor refracts the soles of rubber shoes an instant before the sole.
I get up to buy wrapping paper in a cheerful store. The magnetic stripe on the credit card doesn’t work.
I rouse my wife. It is time to collect the children again. The sun blazes at an odd angle. It is fall. We have started a new season. There is a light that almost fills the car.