Tell Me How to Do This

He was not a man who could take a door off the hinges, trim it to size with a circular saw, and rehang it. He was not a man who would comfortably fist bump with other men in a room full of men who fist bumped. He was not a football player. He was not a badass. He was a man who liked lying in a hammock, who liked food and pleasure and who drank too much most nights not to gear up in a Stanley Kowalski way but to untether and unreel into bed and dreams. But in spite of what his wife, Kit, thought of him, he was not a pussy. He could rake a yard full of leaves into four lawn-and-leaf bags in under an hour. He could sit through a sleepless night on the bathroom floor cracking bad jokes while his three daughters took turns vomiting, at first every five minutes and eventually every thirty minutes until they were all asleep at dawn in a pile of pillows. He could manage a restaurant wait staff full of young and beautiful women and never once cross the line with even one of them. “There is strength, and there is strength,” is what Mike wanted to say to his wife. But months ago, years ago maybe, it seemed she had stopped listening.

He was forty-two and all his friends’ lives were crash-landing into divorce. He had spent many hours overhearing Kit’s phone conversations during which she paced around the house spot cleaning and picking through the minutiae of the demise of multiple marriages. And he’d felt smug a lot of that time, even though his marriage had troubles, even though they’d been through ten years of counseling, even though their sex had been sporadic. His fourteen-year-old daughter, Esther, his oldest, had even said to him, after eavesdropping on yet another of his wife’s phone conversations, “Name one relationship that isn’t just drama and shit,” and he’d said, “Well, look at your mom and me. We’re good,” and his daughter had rolled her eyes. “I guess so, if you think general avoidance and living under the same roof constitute good.” He should have acted parental and annoyed at the tone, but he was pleased with her correct use of “constitute” and her enviable subject-verb agreement, so he looked at her blankly and asked about archery lessons.

And so he was shocked when his wife of fifteen years, with whom he’d had three children, had had sex countless times, had traveled to forty-eight states, had been to seven funerals, and had opened the restaurant that was now his livelihood, told him it was over, that there was someone else but that the someone else wasn’t the point, that the point was that the universe was taking them in different directions. She’d really said exactly that while he’d stood in their carefully curated living room and puzzled over how he had ended up fifteen years into a marriage with someone who talked about “The Universe,” capital U. Kit wiped imaginary sweat off her face, a nervous tic he’d seen a million times. The first time had been at a Bikini Kill concert years before marriage and children, back when Kit chain-smoked and Sharpied her eyebrows and wore cutoff mailman shorts with fishnets and was always looking for an argument or at the very least a vehement debate. That Kit had been enlivening but a little scary. And, as most people’s did, her electrification level had ratcheted down as she made her way into her thirties. It had amazed him how in a decade she’d taken what seemed like an amorphous and un-encapsulated anger and energy and fine-tuned and focused it on things that at twenty-five would have mattered to her not at all. As most people did, as he did, she had actual conversations about savings accounts and desktop clutter. But sometimes, after their girls were asleep and they had a night...