Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
OCTOBER 21, 2011
– Diary entry –
N
ick’s mom is dead. I haven’t been able to write because
Nick’s mom is dead, and her son has come unmoored.
Sweet, tough Maureen. She was up and moving around
until days before she died, refusing to discuss any sort of
slowdown. ‘I just want to live until I can’t anymore,’ she said.
She’d gotten into knitting caps for other chemo patients
(she herself was 
done done done
after one round, no
interest in prolonging life if it meant ‘more tubes’), so I’ll
remember her always surrounded by bright knots of wool:
red and yellow and green, and her fingers moving, the
needles click-clacking while she talked in her contented-cat
voice, all deep, sleepy purr.
And then one morning in September she woke but
didn’t really wake, didn’t become Maureen. She was a bird-
sized woman overnight, that fast, all wrinkles and shell, her
eyes darting around the room, unable to place anything,
including herself. So then came the hospice, a gently lit,
cheerful place with paintings of women in bonnets and
rolling hills of bounty, and snack machines, and small
coffees. The hospice was not expected to fix her or help her
but just to make sure she died comfortably, and just three

---

days later, she did. Very matter-of-fact, the way Maureen
would have wanted it (although I’m sure she would have
rolled her eyes at that phrase: 
the way Maureen would
have wanted it
).
Her wake was modest but nice – with hundreds of
people, her look-alike sister from Omaha bustling by proxy,
pouring coffee and Baileys and handing out cookies and
telling funny stories about Mo. We buried her on a gusty,
warm morning, Go and Nick leaning in to each other as I
stood nearby, feeling intrusive. That night in bed, Nick let
me put my arms around him, his back to me, but after a few
minutes he got up, whispered, ‘Got to get some air,’ and
left the house.
His mother had always 
mothered
him – she insisted
on coming by once a week and ironing for us, and when
she was done ironing, she’d say, ‘I’ll just help tidy,’ and after
she’d left, I’d look in the fridge and find she’d peeled and
sliced his grapefruit for him, put the pieces in a snap-top
container, and then I’d open the bread and discover all the
crusts had been cut away, each slice returned half naked. I
am married to a thirty-four-year-old man who is still
offended by bread crusts.
But I tried to do the same those first weeks after his
mom passed. I snipped the bread crusts, I ironed his T-
shirts, I baked a blueberry pie from his mom’s recipe. ‘I
don’t need to be babied, really, Amy,’ he said as he stared
at the loaf of skinned breads. ‘I let my mom do it because it
made her happy, but I know you don’t like that nurturing
stuff.’
So we’re back to black squares. Sweet, doting, loving
Nick is gone. Gruff, peeved, angry Nick is back. You are

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supposed to lean on your spouse in hard times, but Nick
seems to have gone even further away. He is a mama’s
boy whose mama is dead. He doesn’t want anything to do
with me.
He uses me for sex when he needs to. He presses me
against a table or over the back of the bed and fucks me,
silent until the last few moments, those few quick grunts,
and then he releases me, he puts a palm on the small of my
back, his one gesture of intimacy, and he says something
that is supposed to make it seem like a game: ‘You’re so
sexy, sometimes I can’t control myself.’ But he says it in a
dead voice.
Quiz: Your husband, with whom you once shared a
wonderful sex life, has turned distant and cold – he only
wants sex his way, on his time. You:
a) Withhold sex further – he’s not going to win this game!
b) Cry and whine and demand answers he’s not yet ready
to give, further alienating him.
c) Have faith that this is just a bump in a long marriage – he
is in a dark place – so try to be understanding and wait
it out.
Answer: C. Right?
It bothers me that my marriage is disintegrating and I
don’t know what to do. You’d think my parents, the double
psychologists, would be the obvious people to talk to, but I
have too much pride. They would not be good for marital
advice: They are soul mates, remember? They are all
peaks, no valleys – a single, infinite burst of marital
ecstasy. I can’t tell them I am screwing up the one thing I

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have left: my marriage. They’d somehow write another
book, a fictional rebuke in which Amazing Amy celebrated
the most fantastic, fulfilling, bump-free little marriage ever
… 
because she put her mind to it
.
But I worry. All the time. I know I’m already too old for
my husband’s tastes. Because I used to be his ideal, six
years ago, and so I’ve heard his ruthless comments about
women nearing forty: how pathetic he finds them,
overdressed, out at bars, oblivious to their lack of appeal.
He’d come back from a night out drinking, and I’d ask him
how the bar was, whatever bar, and he’d so often say:
‘Totally inundated by Lost Causes,’ his code for women my
age. At the time, a girl barely in her thirties, I’d smirked
along with him as if that would never happen to me. Now I
am his Lost Cause, and he’s trapped with me, and maybe
that’s why he’s so angry.
I’ve been indulging in toddler therapy. I walk over to
Noelle’s every day and I let her triplets paw at me. The little
plump hands in my hair, the sticky breath on my neck. You
can understand why women always threaten to devour
children: 
She is just to eat! I could eat him with a spoon!
Although watching her three children toddle to her, sleep-
stained from their nap, rubbing their eyes while they make
their way to Mama, little hands touching her knee or arm as
if she were home base, as if they knew they were safe … it
hurts me sometimes to watch.
Yesterday I had a particularly needful afternoon at
Noelle’s, so maybe that’s why I did something stupid.
Nick comes home and finds me in the bedroom, fresh
from a shower, and pretty soon he is pushing me against
the wall, pushing himself inside me. When he is done and

---

releases me, I can see the wet kiss of my mouth against the
blue paint. As he sits on the edge of the bed, panting, he
says, ‘Sorry about that. I just needed you.’
Not looking at me.
I go to him and put my arms around him, pretending
what we’d just done was normal, a pleasant marital ritual,
and I say, ‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘Yeah, what’s that?’
‘Well, now might be the right time. To start a family. Try
to get pregnant.’ I know it’s crazy even as I say it, but I can’t
help myself – I have become the crazy woman who wants to
get pregnant because it will save her marriage.
It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once
mocked.
He jerks away from me. ‘Now? Now is about the worst
time to start a family, Amy. You have no job—’
‘I know, but I’d want to stay home with the baby anyway
at first—’
‘My mom just died, Amy.’
‘And this would be new life, a new start.’
He grips me by both arms and looks me right in the
eye for the first time in a week. ‘Amy, I think you think that
now that my mom is dead, we’ll just frolic back to New York
and have some babies, and you’ll get your old life back. But
we don’t have enough 
money
. We barely have enough
money for the two of us to live 
here
. You can’t imagine how
much pressure I feel, every day, to fix this mess we’re in. To
fucking 
provide
. I can’t handle you and me 
and
a few kids.
You’ll want to give them everything you had growing up, and
I can’t
. No private schools for the little Dunnes, no tennis
and violin lessons, no summer homes. You’d hate how poor

---

we’d be. You’d hate it.’
‘I’m not that shallow, Nick—’
‘You really think we’re in a great place right now, to
have kids?’
It is the closest we’ve gotten to discussing our
marriage, and I can see he already regrets saying
something.
‘We’re under a lot of pressure, baby,’ I say. ‘We’ve had
a few bumps, and I know a lot of it is my fault. I just feel so at
loose ends here …’
‘So we’re going to be one of those couples who has a
kid to fix their marriage? Because that always works out so
well.’
‘We’ll have a baby because—’
His eyes go dark, canine, and he grabs me by the
arms again.
‘Just … No, Amy. Not right now. I can’t take one more
bit of stress. I can’t handle one more thing to worry about. I
am cracking under the pressure. I will snap.’
For once I know he’s telling the truth.

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