The air felt different.
“What? I don’t feel anything at all. It’s just like it is everywhere else around here.” He said.
Except that wasn’t true. She couldn’t explain it as anything more than a sucking presence that filled the stale air. They were at the apartment the kids had rented only a few months ago. She’d been hesitant to see them move out, her husband Roy not so much. The boys, 19 and 21 now were not what she would call adults. She didn’t think anyone would call them that. Grown, sure. Yet not adult. More and more she’d come to realize there was a difference between those things that marred this generation in a way that had not impacted her own generation–merely a quarter century removed from that of their children. What she saw as a problem to be observed Roy read as a hand to be forced. He’d done so more gently than she’d seen him do anything in his life. This, she suspected, was entirely on her behalf. She had wanted them to stay home–till they were each legally able to vote and perhaps even till they were sensible enough to do so. He’d been trying to move them out the door since the last of the pair had flipped his tassel and flung his square cap into the late evening sky.
But Roy loved her more than anything, so she won. Even when she didn’t ask to, she won.
But what had winning brought her in this situation. Standing in the doorway of a house that smelled of complacency and indecision she wondered not about their next steps but her own. What would she do? How could she fix it? Love is, after all, quite demanding in that sense. It was why she so rarely gave it. The cost of the exchange was an unending anxiety for the person to whom it was given. First Roy and now her boys.
“You’re going to act like you don’t feel it?” She wondered aloud.
“I’m going to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about, because if I do, that makes it real, which means we become engaged in the matter.” His voice was barely a whisper. Further into the bare space the boys were trying to microwave something resembling a meal. Her face soured. She caught herself and rearranged it into a smile.
She said, “Boys, how about Dad and I take you out for dinner?”
They looked up and nodded lazily, their eyes drifting back to the microwave and then refocusing on her like searchlights seeking some escaped thing. The smile glitched. She nodded vigorously now and said, “Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Get your coats.”
Outside the air felt normal again. The world was moving, growing. She’d feed them. She’d make sure there was enough for leftovers for the weekend, staving them off the thin diet of frozen meals for just a bit longer. It wasn’t real change but it was a small win. Sometimes those were enough to get you started. Sometimes those were enough to hold yourself together.