how many were wordless like hers?
She toweled off, scrubbed several layers of enamel from her teeth, scrunched her hair, and slipped into the bedroom without letting too much of the humidity escape into the room. Charlie was elsewhere in the house, humming loudly enough for her to hear. Like an eight-year-old prepping for his best day ever.
She dressed quickly, fairly certain an ex-worm farmer was unlikely to be a fashion critic. Did that session in the shower mean nothing to you, Lucy? You’re profiling now? She formed an apology with no destination.
It seemed rude to humanity for her to go out of the house without under-eye concealer. So she took time for that and a minimum of other makeup before heading for the kitchen. Today, she would be grateful, patient, and optimistic. Grateful, patient, optimistic. She rehearsed all the way down the hall.
“Baked grapefruit okay with you?” Charlie asked. One of his few culinary specialties. She was . . . grateful. Genuinely. Maybe this was the day the darkness would lift.
“I’ll make coffee.”
“Done already.”
Usually, coffee warmed her insides after she drank it. Charlie’s thoughtfulness started the wave of warmth before she brought the mug to her lips. “Thanks, honey.”
“You’re welcome. It’s the least I can do for my worm partner.”
To speak or not to speak? Did every marriage wrestle with that question 24/7? “About that, Charlie.” She sipped the coffee, mind racing, opening one door after another in her search for a suitable response. Doors were still banging shut when her husband slid a bowl with a caramelized grapefruit-half across the breakfast bar toward her. She stopped it before it slid over the edge. Could she stop herself soon enough?
“Oh, we’ll find a better name for you than worm partner,” Charlie said. “Executive Director of Wormology? Worm Princess? Secretary of Squirm?”
“Charlie!”
“What happened to your sense of humor, Luce? You should see the look on your face.”
She didn’t have to see it. She felt it. “I know you think you’ve found your life’s passion.”
“Which, I might add, you’ve suggested I needed for most of our married life.” He guzzled his coffee as if proving he could.
Lucy practiced her lung-filling and lung-emptying breathing warm-up. “You haven’t even talked to anybody about how that could work. If it could work. You don’t know if you’d enjoy raising worms. Or what the market’s like. Or how much it costs to get started.”
“And that’s why we’re going to meet that vermiculturist guy today after we pick up the Traverse.”
Vermiculture? That’s what it’s called? “Charlie, it’s the ‘we’ that’s a problem for me.”
He set his coffee mug on the granite, folded his arms across his chest, and made a thin, lipless line where his mouth should be. The line softened. His arms dropped to his sides. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, snatching his cap from the hook near the door, “but the ‘we’ has never been a problem for me.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll walk to the muffler shop. I’m sure you have better things to do.”
Not to speak. That was the correct answer. And yet . . .
“Charlie, I don’t mind going with you to the worm expert.”
“Sounded as if you were thrilled at the prospect. I must have misread you.” Sarcasm seemed so much harsher from Charlie than it did from anyone else. He removed his cap but didn’t put it back on the hook.
She lowered her voice. “This is your passion. Not mine. But you’re assuming we’ll do this together.”
“Would that be so horrible?”
Lucy considered herself a decent communicator in every area except this. She pressed her fingertips to her lips. The action didn’t help her think any more clearly. “I love being with you.”
“And that would be evidenced by . . .?”
How could she blame him for what lay behind that open-ended question? This isn’t the wife she wanted to be. Not who she was . . . deep down. Little of that fought its way to the surface past the oil spill of disillusionment.
“I get it,” he said.
You get it that I don’t know how to do this, how to take a breath past these cramped vocal cords, how to reconcile the fact that my husband is ecstatic because I have nothing left to do? Nothing left? And that I think that I may be slipping into an ugliness I won’t be able to crawl out of . . . and I can’t tell the man I’ve committed to love forever because it’ll look as if I don’t love him?
“What do you get, Charlie?” Her voice broke. She prayed he’d realize the cause wasn’t disappointment in him, but in the turn life had taken. The hairpin, narrow, cliff-edge, crumbling, nauseating turn.
His gaze focused over her head. Maybe he, too, saw the dollop of Berrington Blue on the crown molding. “I get it”—he dropped his gaze to her eyes—“that I never should have changed deodorants. I’d be more pleasant to be around.” He chuckled. “Come on, LucyMyLight. You have to admit that was funny.”
His comedy act proved he really, truly, most sincerely did not get it at all.
She swallowed. The simple, no-thought-involved act didn’t go well. “What time is your appointment with the Worm Whisperer?”
“Ten-thirty.”
Lucy put her grapefruit bowl, untouched, in the sink. “We’d better get moving then.”
“Look, don’t come along if you don’t want to.”
“And miss the opportunity to expand my knowledge of a worm’s digestive process?” Courage, Lucy. Courage. It’s only part of a morning. And it’ll bless him.
“That’s my girl.”
Our daughter Olivia is your girl. I’m your wife.
Chapter 7
7
Worm-casting tea?”
“Not to drink, Lucy. For fertilizer.”
He was excited about fertilizer. Passionate about it. She cinched her seat belt for the drive home. “So, worms thrive on dead things.”
Charlie glanced her way as he pulled the car onto the main highway. “You were listening?”
“Took notes,” she said, holding her phone toward him.
“Sure you did.”
He was skeptical? She opened the notes app. “ ‘If it was once living and is now dead, worms will eat it.’ ‘Fifteen dollars for eight pounds of worm feed.’ ‘It
