Survival Kit
I married Andy Morrison four months after we met. It was a mistake, the marriage, but I didn’t realize it until after the wedding weekend and by then it was done. Andy had gone along with the marriage plan gamely, though I guessed that was because I was only his second real girlfriend, an initially gratifying position that turned sour when, a few months after the wedding, I ran into Girlfriend Number One at the car wash. We recognized each other immediately, and while I would have been content to simply hide behind the spinning rack of air freshener trees, Girlfriend Number One took off her giant sunglasses and said, “I just want you to know, I don’t envy you.”
“Are you cold?” Andy asked as he arranged pieces of newspaper over his legs. He was the only person I knew under the age of fifty who read newspapers on actual paper.
“No,” I said, though I could feel the wind blowing through the cracks of the car window. It was still light out—just barely—but the late winter weather was bad enough that all I could see was a gray-white wall of snow. The cold was settling under my skin, around my bones, threading through my blood.
“I’m glad we don’t have the girls,” he said. “Can you imagine?” His newspaper blanket fluttered. He was wearing children’s earmuffs and gloves that couldn’t cover his hands. Andy and the girls loved the desert-dry heat of Arizona. All three wore winter coats if the mercury dropped below sixty.
“What do you think they are doing right now?” I asked. It was a game we played when we were alone, a conversation without stakes, one that never ended, even when it grew old. “I think Natalie has already announced that she wants chicken McNuggets.”
His turn: “Natasha has colored on the walls and eaten glue at least twice.”
I laughed, but only to be polite. Natasha would never do either of those things. It was Natalie who ate anything she could wrap her grubby hands around. It was Natalie who once ate my birth control pills and required a trip to the emergency room.
My parents pretended to love babysitting the girls, but they would all four be watching the driveway, waiting for Andy and me to pull up. I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to imagine a world without the girls, without Andy. It was a picture that came easily and faded slowly; one by one the figures disappeared.
“How long do you think we’ll be here?” Andy asked.
“It’ll be fine.” I said some version of that line to Andy a hundred times a day. Everything will be fine. I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry. I’ll do the heavy lifting.
A snowstorm this bad wasn’t going to let up any time soon. We were stranded, completely stuck, under a deep underpass in a flimsy rental car—a powder-blue Toyota hatchback—and the snow was endless.
Andy’s parents attended the beachside wedding in Maui, but they had not been
