It was not just sexual. It was semantic, emotional, architectural. There was a child somewhere in the county using the most tender ordinary word in the language for the same man who still crawled into Linda’s bed smelling of toothpaste and aftershave and county-fair popcorn.
When they got home, Linda did what many women do when reality becomes too large to contemplate whole.
She cleaned. Not because the house needed it but because hands need tasks when the brain is threatened with overload. She stripped the bed even though David had not touched it since morning. She started the dishwasher.
She wiped down the kitchen counters. Then she sat at the table with a legal pad and wrote columns: dates, names, questions, practical concerns. Mortgage. Savings account.
Whether his employer could be liable in any way if company travel covered the original event. Whether there might be DNA paperwork already. Whether there were medical records, birth records, messages. Whether Nia would be willing to talk again without him.
David stood in the doorway of the kitchen for nearly an hour like a man locked out of his own life.
Every now and then he said something useless. “Linda, I’m sorry.” “I didn’t know how to tell you.” “I swear there was only her.” Each statement rang dead on arrival. At last Linda looked up and said, “You can sleep in the den tonight if you’re too ashamed to drive to a motel, but you are not sleeping beside me.” He nodded because he had no leverage left. Then she added, “And tomorrow morning you are calling a lawyer and a paternity lab. I am not living one more day in a story with uncertain facts.”
Linda did not sleep that night.
She lay in the guest room listening to the air conditioner kick on and off and remembered all the county-fair nights of previous years. The first one after they were married, when David won her a stuffed tiger by accident and strutted like a teenager about it. The years they brought her sister’s boys and David carried one on his shoulders to watch fireworks.