Read Online Entering Normal by Anne Leclaire - Free Book Online

woman who was a kind and good wife, a good mother, too, who took an interest in things—and then one day, an accident, a stupid goddamned accident, and nothing was the same.
    Rose closed. Just plain shut up. The first thing was she refused to drive. Just downright refused to drive. Initially, he supposed it was because she was afraid of something like getting in an accident herself. Patiently he pointed out how foolish this was, how lightning didn’t strike twice, how after the Covington kid drowned in the lake, the rest of the family hadn’t stopped swimming, for Christ’s sake. “Sell the car,” she told him. Sell the car? The Pontiac he bought her just the month before? The first new car they ever had? The car she was so crazy about she washed it nearly every day, like a teenager? He put it off, offering excuses, sure that she’d come around, until the day she told him if he didn’t sell it, she would. He knew by the expression on her face that she meant it.
    He keeps waiting for her to get over her grief. He tries to recall what it was like before. Nights, he sits in his recliner, staring at reruns of “M*A*S*H” and tries to remember Rose. His Rose. Before. He goes back to the beginning, when he and Rose were young, long before Todd. One night his brain slipped right back to a time before they were married, the picture so clear it could have been playing on the screen in front of him. A hot summer night. He and Rose in the car. A Chevy, the blue-and-cream ’63. They were heading over to the lake, to the old pavilion where they used to hold Saturday night dances, the one the town still rents out to the Polish for their polka parties. Lying there next to Rosie on the army blanket he took from the Chevy trunk, lying so still he scarcely dared to breathe, resting his hand on the fullness of her breast, feeling her heart rise and fall under his palm, feeling the life there, feeling all the promise Rose held in that sweet and perfect breast . . . Lying there he felt his hand begin to tremble, shake beyond his control. Then she put her hand over his, steadying them both. He was so in love with her then, he would have given her anything, given her the sun had she asked, so in love with her it scared him.
    Remembering never helps. It only makes the ache worse. In addition to losing a son, he’s lost his wife, too.
    Why can’t she come back to him? Doesn’t she think he misses Todd? Doesn’t she know something breaks inside a man when he buries his son? Doesn’t she know that when he put Todd in the ground, a lot of his dreams were buried there, too?
    God knows, he loved his son. And he loves Rose; he really does. He loves Rose, but she is trying that love. Things happen to people: Accidents. Illness. But people get on with their lives. Christ, it isn’t right, not normal to act like the funeral was yesterday, instead of five years ago.
    Rose’s grief, Ned thinks. Rose’s grief will kill me, too.

CHAPTER 6
    ROSE
    â€œROSE? ” She hears Ned calling her from the hall. “Rosie? You in there?” The bathroom is the only room in the house with a lock, but even this can’t prevent his questions from sliding through wood panels. “Rosie?” His voice holds a mixture of concern and aggrievement. It seeps through the door like smoke.
    She can’t make herself answer. She sits on the toilet and rocks back and forth, her arms wrapped around her midsection. She hasn’t had a spell like this for a while. Weeks. Months.
    After a while, the sound of laughter pulls her to the window, and she looks down on the neighbor’s yard. That boy is still outside. Now he is kicking a ball around the grass. She yanks the shade to the sill, as if it were possible to shut out the unfairness of it. How is it possible that Opal Gates be given a child,
blessed
with a child when she is little more than a child herself, when she doesn’t know