“They were lucky, but they did not know that theirs was beginner’s luck.” Fiction by Yiyun Li.
The second word might be easier. Nina waddled around the ottoman.“Baby duckling? That’s what I would call redundancy,” Ethan said. His voice had a grating quality, like sandpaper, but Katie didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps even the coarsest sandpaper would leave no damage on a night smoothed by drinks and youthful optimism, Nina thought. “Ugly duckling?” Katie tried again.“Oh, I know, I know!” Katie shouted.
Twenty years had passed since that game of charades. Katie had not married Ethan, who had not reciprocated her love. Nor had she married any of the slew of men after him, all seemingly suitable yet each exhibiting flaws that were intolerable to Katie. Sometimes Nina thought about the Matthews and the Jakes and the Dustins whom Katie had dated, and wondered where they were in their lives. Harmless bores, Katie called them.
Was boredom a good reason to divorce Raymond? No reason would be bad, Nina thought. “All right. What can we do to help?” she said. “Do you need a place to stay?” Their house was a quarter the size of Katie and Raymond’s house, up in the hills, but they could make room for Katie. The girls wouldn’t mind, and Daniel had foreseen this inevitability for years.
The exchange had gone on for a while, Katie talking, Nina listening, the husband complaining, and the wife, who spoke no English, smiling at them while carrying a giant watering can up and down the steps. “You should buy her a garden hose,” Katie said to the man.On Nina’s porch, Katie reproduced their exchange with the innkeeper, altering her voice and accent and acting out his grudge.
Raymond had had two childless marriages before Katie. He had never wanted children. Katie had offered this up as an argument in support of his candidacy as a husband. A marriage has to start with some consensus, Katie said, as though that could explain away the impulsiveness of her decision. She had seen several aunts devastated by their sons’ inherited illness. She herself did not want any heartache from her marriage, she said. Nina preferred to think that Katie had been spared that.
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