Read Online The Pretend Wife by Bridget Asher - Free Book Online

momentary hesitation? Did he know at this moment what he was really going to ask for, what he hoped would come of it? Or was he just confessing drunkenly on a balcony while a party died down all around him? I don’t think it mattered. In the end, we would all have to play a role in the conversation to make all of the gears click to get from X to Y. He said, “This last visit with her, I told my mother that I’d, well, that I’d gotten married.”
    â€œMarried?” Helen said disdainfully.
    â€œYou lied to your mother on her deathbed?” Peter said. The conversation made me think of my own mother. Lucky, I thought, to have had a mother on a deathbed, to have had the opportunity to lie to her.
    â€œShe was out of it, doped up on morphine,” Elliot said, not defensively as much as explanatorily. “She was in a state; sometimes when she’s in these states she talks to her dead sister. It was that kind of a state.”
    â€œBut why would you tell her you’d gotten married?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn’t she be upset not to have been invited to the wedding and that you’d married someone she’d never met?”
    â€œMarried!” Helen said. “I mean, why not tell her you’ve got gangrene and have to get a leg amputated!” And then she whispered, “Marriage can kill you limb by limb. Don’t you know that?” Helen enjoyed disparaging the institution of marriage in front of married people. It was a petty, almost charming kind of vengefulness.
    â€œWell, she was in this state and she started to obsess over the fact that I wasn’t married and that I’d go through life without anyone to take care of me and without anyone to take care of. She was getting more and more worked up. And so I just gave in and I lied to her. I told her I’dmet someone and that it had been a quick decision—like in the old days.”
    â€œPeople used to do that kind of thing,” Peter said. “They’d meet and get married in two weeks.”
    â€œBecause they weren’t allowed to have sex,” Helen said. “You’d have done the same thing if you’d been in that boat, but how many years did it take you two to get engaged?” Helen pointed at the two of us.
    â€œThree years,” Peter said. “A little slice of heaven!” This was an old joke between us. We’d been to an anniversary party for a couple who’d been married twenty years and this was how the man referred to their marriage—over and over, toast after toast, conversation after conversation. By the end of the evening, it sounded like a death knell. Peter and I started to use the phrase about everything—office meetings, gym workouts, trips to the grocery store—trying to keep its awfulness at bay. We’d never used the phrase to actually describe any part of our relationship, though, and this seemed like a breach of the rules.
    â€œMy mother and my father had gotten married like that,” Elliot said, “a couple weeks after they met. She respects decisions like that even though they got divorced.” Everyone was looking at him now and he was suddenly aware of our eyes on him. “I don’t know why I said it. It was some kind of weird impulse.” He shrugged. “I didn’t think she’d remember it when she calmed down, but she did.”
    â€œAnd now what?” Helen asked.
    â€œAnd now, of course, she’d like to meet her before she dies,” Elliot said, as if kind of mystified by his own predicament.
    â€œOh, what a tangled web,” Helen said. “Tsk, tsk.”
    â€œIf you met her, you’d understand,” Elliot said. “She’s a force. She’s unwieldy. She’s an unwieldy force.”
    â€œI understand mothers like that,” Helen said, scratching her wrist a little angrily.
    â€œUnwieldy like waves,” I said.
    â€œLike tsunami waves,”