15

contention
by Jenny Pritchett

One evening at the end of May she stood with one hand holding open

the refrigerator door, staring at the grid of shelves.

“We need more of something,” she said.

He looked up from the stack of essays he was grading. A blossom of

red ink, like the mouth of a geisha, had formed where his lips met.

“What are we out of?” he asked.

“Everything. There’s nothing in here.”

She hitched her jeans at both hips and squatted, the light from the

refrigerator bulb scalloping her face like a peeled apple. She had lost

the weight from the twins already; he could imagine the jaunt of her hip

cupped in his hand. She stood, gripping puckered plastic bags in both

hands—what had been dill, carrots, basil, now muddy and smearing.

“I was going to do something with these,” she said, holding up the

herbs before tamping them into the top of the garbage pail beneath the

sink. “Waste of money.” She heaved the pail to the back door, leaving

the bag open.

“Not that much money.” He bared his teeth, rapping them with his

pen.

“Still money.” She slid the crisper drawers in with her boot and

swung the door of the refrigerator closed. The condiments rattled in

their jars.

“I don’t feel like cooking tonight,” she said.

“So don’t.” He swung his head back to his stack of essays. It was

unbelievable what the kids expected him to read. He scribbled in a

margin, “Huh??”

“What do you feel like?” She pulled at the hair at the nape of her

neck. He sat before her at their heavy, all-purpose table, heels hitched

on the rungs of a splintery chair.

“Anything’s fine with me,” he said.

She sucked the inside of her lip, watching her husband. Then she

turned and left the room. He watched the far kitchen wall, listening to

her exit through the plaster and paint, the footsteps, keys, door,

gravel, the smacking shut of the car door. He looked down at his stack

of papers. The sudden silence had mired the words in front of him. He

felt untied and wasn’t certain he was capable of grading tonight. He

imagined himself running through the kitchen to the front hallway,

nabbing his jacket from the hook he’d hammered into the plywood, the

balls of his feet spinning in the gravel as he chased down the car,

panting, leaning in the driver’s side window with his lopsided grin.

“Tony’s,” he would say to her. “My treat.”

Instead, from the front window, he watched the headlights of their

car bounce into the near-dark, past the McKutcheon’s house next-door and onto the new asphalt four-way at the end of the road that led to town.

He pulled back the curtains she’d made, tiny blueberries he pinned to

the window with the tips of his fingers. It was seven-thirty. The

evening stretched before him like a marathon.

Jenny Pritchett lives and works in San Francisco with her boyfriend,
Sean, and their 140-pound English mastiff. Her fiction has appeared
in Boulevard, and she is working on a collection of short stories,
most of which reference her home state of Illinois.

William Diehl lives in Loma Linda, California.