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Reading
by Margaret A. Robinson

The wife looks up at the sound of tire crunch in the driveway. Quarter to 5:00 by the wall clock across from her armchair. The novel she ordered, Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, arrived in the mailbox today. She wants to stay with its heroine, fighting for tenure in a den of vipers and also for the man she loves, but it’s time to prepare supper.

The husband, his shirt wilted by the warm summer day, walks in the front door. “Home early,” he says, knowing his wife will be pleased. He’s usually late.

“Where’s Ann?” the wife asks.

Memory makes the husband’s smile shatter. The wife had arranged for their youngest and brightest child to be taken to the library in the city where the husband works, 45 minutes away. A neighbor was driving in to the dentist. Ann and the neighbor left right after lunch. To give Ann a whole afternoon in the library, the husband was to have picked Ann up after work.

“Omigod,” says the husband. “I forgot.”

The look the wife gives him is a blast of freezing air, like the Arctic cold in his favorite Jack London story. “I’ll go back,” says the husband. He already has the front door open.

The wife’s voice is taut. “Right. I’ll phone the children’s department. They close at six. I’ll ask Miss Porter to check on Ann.”

At her desk, Miss Porter answers the phone on the first ring. “Yes. Yes,” she says, softly but clearly. “Actually I can see her from here.” Earlier, Miss Porter had helped Ann find “anything with pirates.” Ann chews the rubber band on the end of her braid while she turns a page in Treasure Island. She’s with Jim, pinned to the rigging. Blood leaks from the pinch of skin the dirk caught, but Jim is not crying and neither is Ann. “She’s fine,” says Miss Porter. After she hangs up, she goes back to solving a mystery on Baker Street.

When the husband returns, even more wilted after his round trip, the table is laid with rolls, ham, and garden asparagus. The wife stands at the kitchen counter, tossing a salad. “You’re back,” she says, not turning around at the sound of his footsteps. “Where’s Ann?”

“Upstairs with her pile of books. I didn’t tell her I forgot. She didn’t notice I was late. I told her we’d be eating supper soon and to round up her brothers.”

The wife turns to face him. She puts her hands on her slender hips. “How,” she asks, “did this happen? How can a man forget his own child?”

The husband thinks about the last part of his day at work. He had hidden Jack London inside the newspaper and headed for the men’s room. Sitting on the toilet, he had swapped the ten-storey office building in the sweltering city for an elemental struggle between ignorance and experience, between building a fire and the Yukon cold, between living and dying. “I don’t know,” he says to his wife. “I was reading.”

The wife gives a guilty glance over her shoulder where Tolstoy Lied is spread open next to the salad, a dot of balsamic dressing on one pristine page. He realizes he has told her the only reason she would ever possibly recognize. “Ah,” she says. “Let’s have a quick gin and tonic. There are limes in the fridge. You look exhausted.”

Margaret A. Robinson has received a total of eighteen rejections from "Missouri Review," "Slipstream," and "West Branch."  She has had two rejections from "Crazyhorse" and one from "Nimrod."  Robinson expects a fifth rejection from "Runes" any day now.   She lives in Pennsylvania and receives messages here.