The Idea of Him. Holly Peterson

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      When I walked through my front door, I had to push every memory from that taxi ride out of my head. Lucy, in particular, would need me to focus on the excitement she’d had wearing the caterpillar costume made out of foam and pipe cleaners we’d worked on for days. Even after dinner, Lucy wouldn’t let me take off her green face paint from the caterpillar role until her daddy got to see her.

      “Wade. You have to make a big deal about Lucy’s face,” I whispered. My husband arrived home about an hour after I had that night, work forcing him to miss Lucy’s kindergarten staging of Alice in Wonderland.

      “Where’s my superstar?” Wade said to Lucy on cue, as he rushed into our bedroom with a bouquet of purple tulips he had picked up at the corner market for her. “I hate that I had to be at boring meetings at the magazine all day and miss your show!”

      Lucy jumped up onto the bed to see him at eye level. “Daddy! I didn’t forget anything this time.”

      He hugged her hard and then held her at arm’s length. “You have a little something green on your face,” he said in a mockserious way that made Lucy first furrow her brow and then break into a giant smile once she got the joke. Wade released her, and she snuggled back up beside me as he pulled off his work shirt and tie in one big motion, throwing both into the hamper.

      That’s when a very strange thing happened. A casino chip with Five Thousand Dollars written on it fell out of his shirt pocket. I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed had Wade not dove for the chip like a linebacker. I didn’t let on that I’d seen it or the more alarming amount; instead I made a mental note of his unusually athletic attempt to hide it. Something inside made my heart break for no concrete reason except that it felt suspicious.

      Once he got up off the floor and surreptitiously stuffed the chip into his khaki pants, I looked at my husband like I didn’t even know him. He grabbed Lucy and carried her back to her room sack-of-potatoes style.

      I stood in the doorway of the bedroom in our cramped New York apartment mulling over that chip. We didn’t have five thousand dollars to throw around or to keep in our pants’ pockets. Wade was the editor of a flashy newsmagazine, but that didn’t mean we had a comfortable amount of savings. New York is like that. Everyone here except the Wall Street, one-percenter crowd is living on a financial edge where close to nothing is left over. My PR firm salary combined with his editor salary didn’t pay for much beyond a small apartment and two private-school tuitions. Five thousand dollars really mattered to our bottom line.

      And Wade wasn’t a gambler. He didn’t hide things from me. We were opposites, but we came together at a safe place in the middle where I harbored a notion that trust was key. When I first met Wade, he had six people glued onto him like a snake charmer and still had enough juice to lure me across a room and into his comforting spell. And despite the distraction of a persistent flame from my past, and to be honest, partially because of that flame, I leaped into a frenetic New York City life with Wade, covering my eyes and holding my breath.

      I heard Lucy screaming from the bedroom, “Daddy, air lift!” I entered and saw Wade hoisting her skyward, missing the light fixture by mere inches.

      “Wade. Please! You’re going to hurt her on the light! And make sure you give Blake some attention before bedtime; he’s upset over …”

      “Who gets every joy of the earth?” he asked as he threw Lucy up again, giving me the eye.

      “Lucy!” she shrieked, falling back into his strong hands.

      “And who was the best caterpillar in the show?”

      “Daddy, there’s only ONE caterpillar!”

      “And what girl does Daddy love best in the world?”

      “Lucy!” They collapsed onto the bed, and Wade tickled her until she yelled out for him to stop, happy tears streaming down her face. Wade cradled her in his arms for a few more moments, singing a little song he had made up when she was a baby, then turned to me and held my face in his hands, dispelling any residual wifely annoyance over the casino chip I preferred to ask him about later.

      “Allie, I know all you do to make the kids happy—making her costume so intensely the night before and keeping all your work pressures out of the kids’ lives—and I love you for it.” He kissed my nose. “And don’t worry about Blake; I know you’re worrying about him too. I see that concern in your face.”

      “Yes, I’m worried about him. They don’t include him in so many of the little things his group does all day. All because of one kid who loves the power to exclude. I want so badly to call Jeremy’s mom again and—”

      “You cannot do that again. No way. She is going to tell the kid exactly what you said on the call even though she promises to handle it discreetly. And that’ll just make Jeremy ostracize Blake more, and then you get busted for interfering. Fourth grade is rough, but he’s got to learn to handle his friendships on his own.”

      “Wade, I know you are right, but his circle is edging him out again, and I don’t know how a nine-year-old is supposed to figure that out. They went to get snacks at the vending machine again at recess and told him he couldn’t come.”

      “Well, I’m going to help him man up a little, and then he’ll work this out for himself.”

      Another thing I loved about Wade: he knew exactly what our kids needed when they were down. What woman doesn’t love a man for that? But that casino chip would pop up again and, in time, signal a transgression no wife could ignore.