“I must admit, it was not always so. No, not always. Not that I want to get into any of that, our past, but there were days in the beginning—we were so young—that I worried about what I’d done. What I might have brought on myself by marrying you. You were so quiet then, so serious, and it was hard to know what you were thinking. Feeling. I would go around with a smile on my face, spread tightly across my lips, but all the while sensing that I might not be pleasing you in some way. In any way, for that matter. And I so wanted to do that—to please you, to know how to please a man. The cooking was there, of course, those kinds of skills I possessed from the way I grew up. Having a mother like I did and a desire, too, I think, to make the best of myself as a person. As a woman. Even when the children came, though, I thought perhaps I’d done something wrong, that I hadn’t learned the recipe for making you happy. Can you imagine? That I used to lie there in our bed—remember the old bed that we bought at that garage sale, the elderly couple who was selling everything they owned, right there in their very own driveway—and worry that you didn’t love me. Or worse, even like me. I guess I couldn’t get a read on you—‘your number’—I didn’t have that in those days and I felt like I was just blundering about, wearing my housecoat and taking care of the babies but never really bringing you any kind of happiness. No kind of satisfaction beyond the common ones that a family can bring to a man. Isn’t that silly? I mean, what a waste of energy. You went to work, came home at night and brought a paycheck in at the end of a month and yet there I was, so insecure that I wondered if you really loved us. Girls can be so silly, can’t we? Oh yes, we’re certainly capable of that. A special kind of silliness.”

The first lights of the city now, Spokane in the distance. Like the fine glow of a sandy beach on a tropical night, she thinks, having seen something like it on the television. On one of the many travel shows that she watches on the weekends.

“I don’t want you to worry that anything like that goes through my head any longer—it doesn’t, so lose no sleep over that. It was a phase is all, a silly moment from my past that I suppose most young brides go through and I just thank the good Lord that he saw me beyond it to the other side. What nonsense!”