A Good Marriage

And a wife doesn’t always know what a hubby does on the road, although she may think she does.

She continued to smile at him, but now saw him again (after that brief, loving lapse) for what he was: the Darker Husband. Gollum, with his precious.

This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward.

You’re an old bitch, but you’re my old bitch, that touch now seemed to say.

if you found enough cat hairs in a person’s house, you pretty much had to assume there was a feline on the premises somewhere.

It was a good marriage, one of the fifty percent or so that kept working over the long haul. She believed that in the same unquestioning way she believed that gravity would hold her to the earth when she walked down the sidewalk.

A successful marriage was a balancing act—that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation—t