Read The Daylight Marriage for Free Online Page A

reasonable idea so many years ago. The price was low, the town quaint and pretty. In the summers, they could bike to Walden Pond or go apple picking in Stow.
    They, or Hannah really, “could not have anticipated the obliterating quiet, the aloofness but at the same time awkwardness of so many of the people here, the deep homogeneity and stunning averageness,” as she once put it in an e-mail to him on a particularly low day. Lovell had not been around enough over the years for these things to really bother him. “The ruddy-faced men in finance, the athletic stay-at-home moms, the fucking Boy Scouts, the golden retrievers, the gas-guzzling minivans, the holiday-themed flags near the front door for any and every holiday.” She had gone on writing in this manner, as if for some phantom reader who did not in fact live in the same town. “Time must have stopped moving forward here in this suburb. It seems like the civil rights movement and sexual revolution never reached this place.”
    Most of the women she had met here were nice enough. They seemed to want to be her friend—they eagerly approached her at school events and music classes, they invited her to moms’ nights out and various in-home parties where kitchenware or makeup was being sold, but in the end they seemed to Hannah more like coworkers than friends. She certainly never lit up when with them the way she did with Sophie or the others. She’d had a small gaggle of close friends from her high school and BU, these affable, generous, funny women. Most of them lived elsewhere now; only Sophie was still in Massachusetts. A few times Hannah had suggested trips to visit the others in San Francisco or even London, but Lovell reminded her that they could never afford the flights, not if they expected to pay their mortgage and save for the kids to go to college.
    He turned back to his house, the stained, angled modern that held three solar panels across its slanted roof. Yellow plastic rain barrels sat under drain spouts and dribbled water onto the mulch beneath. In this neighborhood of pristine Cape Cods and Victorians, each set squarely on an identical plot of plush green grass, their house sometimes looked to him as if it had been dropped here by mistake.
    LATER THAT EVENING, the three of them and his mother, who had come with dinner, sat over a game of Scrabble. Joanne Hall, a lanky woman with a cap of coarse gray hair, set down tiles that spelled quantum. So far, she had spelled subset, zeta, and zero. She was a theoretical mathematician at MIT.
    â€œYou’re kicking ass, Grandma,” Janine said.
    Joanne shrugged with false modesty.
    â€œMom,” Lovell whispered to her. “Can’t you let one of them win right now?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œDo I have to explain it?”
    She reached for the box of Entenmann’s brownies that she had brought for dessert and set it beside them. “I told your father I’d check in with him around now,” she said to Lovell, and she went off to the living room to make the call.
    â€œDo you miss Mom?” Ethan asked him, as if they had just been discussing Hannah. “Are you worried about her?”
    â€œYes. Eth, of course I do,” Lovell said.
    â€œYou don’t talk about it,” Janine said.
    â€œDo I have to?”
    â€œNo, you don’t have to, Dad,” she said.
    â€œ You guys miss her right now,” Lovell said.
    Ethan nodded. Janine watched her father.
    Lovell added, “She never liked Scrabble. She was more of a card game person.”
    â€œWe know,” Janine said.
    â€œShe slept in my bed with me on her last night,” Ethan said.
    Lovell had not really broached with them the daunting subject of that night. He held his hands tight together in his lap and began: “I wish that night had been different. You guys have to know this. You can love someone and be angry at them. Grown-ups fight sometimes. Married people argue.