Hailey Rose Hanks is a writer from middle Tennessee. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, where she lives with her wife and dogs. Her other work can be found in Hippocampus and Salt Hill.

Fiction winner of the 2021 Prose & Poetry Contest selected by guest judge Lydia Conklin.

A tag sticks out of Maren’s t-shirt at the top beneath her jacket: MEDIUM. COTTON/POLYESTER BLEND. The wind blows. GENTLE CYCLE ONLY. I want to trip her—just speed up a little, stick one foot out, and catch her ankle fucking perfectly so she’ll tumble face-first into the sidewalk and get a mouthful of dogged cement dandelions that’ll tickle her throat and make her spit. Sputter. Skin up her two-timing knees real good, not too deep but fucking deep enough to make her realize I can’t look at her anymore.

But she’s holding Trent’s tiny two-year-old paw as he stumbles between us, and he, after all, has done nothing wrong—he with the sweet angel face and the dirty diaper. I squeeze his other hand and keep my pace steady.

We pass several stores and buildings as we walk to Lillian’s recital—Kline Furniture; a dozen tiny shops of “Southern treasures,” a.k.a. rusty white iron patio furniture and cotton sprigs; Mr. Zeno’s bakery, which we have to nearly drag Trent away from once he spots the giant chocolate chip cookie painted on the window; and the old classic cinema that’s had chains on the doors since 1982. We’re going the right way. But it feels like we’re traveling in circles. We are downtown technically except that we’re downtown in Cassidy, Tennessee, which means we’re fucking nowhere. But worse: we are indeed unfortunately somewhere, and that specific somewhere is a place we’ve always been and never wanted to be.

I’m excited for our daughter’s recital—really. She’s spent this whole week stressing about it and tapping her heart out practicing on the smooth kitchen floor, convincing us time and time again to leave her be directly following dinner because she just needs to nail this one move.

Like her other mother just needed to nail a DoorDash delivery person. God, I’m bitter. I should’ve noticed, I guess, how she’s become increasingly restless in this little town over the past few months, but we don’t talk the way we used to—not to each other, not about much other than clogged drains and outgrown ballet slippers. Her decision to rail a stranger who showed up at the door, porno style, is something I’d argue warranted a conversation beforehand, but maybe I’m needy. I consider hoisting Trent onto my hip so that I can really do it, trip her good, but instead I bite my lip and readjust the baby bag on my free shoulder as I contemplate the possibility that I married the wrong fucking person. Or maybe—just that she did.

I contemplate, too, the twelve hundred-dollar vial of sperm sitting in the freezer at our fertility clinic in Nashville, waiting to be injected into my uterus to hopefully make baby number three, the last one, the finale kid, the bundle of joy who was mentally conceived as the necessary completing member of our perfect family. Hilarious. I don’t know what to do with it now. I could still get inseminated, I guess, and see if it takes, but I wonder if it does whether I’ll always think of the kid in this agonizing context, as the one we went on ahead with even though we were broken, which is really no way to be thought of by your parents.

But if we don’t use the sperm, what then? We can’t get the money back unless maybe we convince Dr. Reinhardt we want to do an in-home turkey baster situation and then sell it on the sperm black market, if such a thing exists, which surely it does. The first time around, the sperm prices so affronted me that I was appraising men in the supermarket and coworkers in the hallways, wondering if they knew whether they were carriers for any diseases and if they’d be interested in selling their best (or worst) swimmers to Cassidy’s resident lesbian couple for cheap. Desperate as folks are for money in this town, we would’ve found someone. Maren and I whispered to each other often—at the pumpkin patch with our cousins or in line to order coffee, pointing—how about that sperm. We got into fights occasionally when I suggested, jokingly, that I could just find a guy to hook up with one night for free, but Maren never took it well because she’s insecure about my attraction to men. She has always been okay discussing my attraction to unattainable ones—a Charlie Hunnam, a Michael B. Jordan, or (inexplicably) an Ed Harris. But anyone who regularly walks Tennessee earth is out of bounds. We are married, after all. We said vows, even if it wasn’t in a church, and we meant to keep to them. And blah blah blah, the irony of her fucking DoorDash whoever-the-fuck in our own bed is palpable.

Finally, we arrive at the community center with its decrepit gym housing a collapsible miniature stage that looks like it’s meant for mice to perform on. There’s half an index card on each of the foldable chairs that’s been reserved, and we find ours pretty quickly—Maren Davis next to Westie Hall, my name being accompanied by a cartoonish drawing of a dog because since my fellow Cassidy folk realized when I was young that I was named after a little white dog they can’t not go there. Their jokes got old right around the time I got braces, but once people in Cassidy latch onto something there’s no letting go.

Without looking at her, I tell Maren I’ll be back and head to the bathroom on the other end of the building with Trent babbling in my arms. He screams when I almost walk past a photo of our high school champion soccer team, in which Maren kneels in the front with the ball next to her. He knows where the photo is—halfway between the water fountains that don’t work and the bright red Coke machine that occasionally does. I stop so he can kiss his fingers and touch them to his other mother’s young face, which he will undoubtedly make me stop for again on the way back from the bathroom. He is, at least, no longer insisting on putting his lips directly on the dirty glass, so I can’t complain too much. I manage to let him kiss her without looking at the photo myself this time, the picture of my wife young and happy too much for me to handle today.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket while I’m changing him. I remind him as he cries that if he would start using the potty, we wouldn’t have to go through this mess he hates, an old message, but I’m sure he can tell that at the moment I don’t really care where he shits. He’s pretty when he cries—all that anger and those shining eyes. He and Lillian resemble each other barely at all, my genes having been pretty submissive with her donor while soundly overpowering Trent’s. But they both, unfortunately, are little hotheads. Just like me, Maren often teases. Once he’s dressed again, I throw the dirty diaper away and wash one hand at a time as best I can, my other hand keeping him from rolling or jumping off the counter between the two sinks where I’ve changed him on top of a fuzzy Mystery Machine blanket because the changing table in this bathroom broke sometime in the ’70s and was never replaced.

Just before I pick him up, I take my phone out of my pocket and read a message from Maren. Can you get me a Coke on the way back if the machine’s working?

I think she must be joking. Or maybe it’s God who is. But yes, of course, getting fucked by not-me in front of our turned-down family photo on the nightstand must be quite exhausting. I grind my teeth and think at my wife, hard, You must still be parched after all of that, so—no, no, really I’ve got it—let me bring you a cold beverage. I’m tempted to just tell her the machine’s not working, but angry as I am, I can still see that if another person walks into the gym with a Coke it’ll be clear I was lying, and I feel determined not to do anything that will give her ammo for our surely impending argument this evening. Besides, a Coke sounds kind of nice. Excited as we are to watch Lillian, in reality most of the next few hours will be spent watching other people’s children dancing poorly and trying to keep Trent contained to a space the size of two folding chairs without a tantrum while we pretend not to smell the mold that’s been festering in this place for decades.

The Coke machine is finicky, and I end up getting one Coke for the price of three, plus a couple of kicks and some toddler slaps from Trent. I’m feeling overheated and hold the can to my neck as we walk back, stopping once again to let Trent kiss Maren and then to throw away a crumpled Dorito bag someone tossed on the hallway floor. I can tell as we approach the gym that more people have arrived given the noise level and the absolutely atrocious acoustics of this place.

Too many people say hi to me on my way to my seat—my old middle school music teacher, Ms. Turner; Lillian’s friends’ parents; and Mr. Britter, my fellow librarian at the (finally) newly updated town library whose sperm, yes, I did think about on one or two slow desperate days sitting beneath the library skylight. When I finally reach my little chair, I see that Maren’s dad and both my parents have arrived, occupying the reserved seats all around us. This feels simultaneously like a burden given my present state of mind and a relief because it means we can hot potato pass Trent amongst a wider group to keep him interested and happy.

I blindly drop the can of Coke into Maren’s lap without warning and try to decide if I think that means I’m being petty and whether or not I care in the least. I pass Trent to my mom, who is reaching for him, and unshoulder the baby bag before sitting next to my wife. I try not to let my thigh touch hers, but they have the seats squeezed in so tightly together to fit everyone in for this fucking fire code-breaking performance that it’s impossible not to touch her. Unfortunately, the can doesn’t explode when she pops the top. She offers me a sip after taking one, and I keep my eyes on Trent fidgeting in my mom’s arms while I take a drink and pass it back. I almost say, Hope you enjoy it because it cost six fucking dollars, but that’s the kind of comment I might make, that we might laugh about, if our world hadn’t just fallen apart, so I stay quiet, trying to decide what to do about the sperm, my marriage, my life. I examine the facts.

Here’s how it happened: she first fucked the DoorDash person last week on Tuesday. I was at work, Lillian was at school, Trent was at my parents’ house, and Maren had the morning off for a dentist appointment. Her teeth cleaning ended early, so she went home to relax for a while and ordered some food to reward herself for having gotten her teeth cleaned and to get the fluoride taste out of her mouth. You know how I hate that taste, she’d said to me when we talked about this yesterday, trying to commune with me over dental unpleasantries while revealing the unsavory details of her extramarital activities. Anyway, the delivery person arrived with Maren’s pizza from Nino’s in town and, oh no, realized they had placed Maren’s extra sides of marinara—without which she cannot eat pizza—on the top of their car and then drove off without remembering to get them. This spilled-on-the-concrete marinara was, as I understand it, the catalyst for a nearly unbelievable flirtation or some such about how said delivery person could make it up to Maren. And what they could do, apparently, was my wife. Amazing. A meet cute if I’ve ever heard one. I should be happy for her. It’s hard to meet new people in Cassidy, after all.

I would, it’s important to note, know none of this had the DoorDash fucker not satisfied Maren so thoroughly that she required another visit yesterday when she apparently called in sick. They were still in the middle of it when I got home from work—earlier than most days because the library closes early on Fridays, a fact which Maren knows. She knows, too, that every Friday I come home right after closing to change and go for a walk at the park before picking up the kids. But she was mad with desire, I suppose. How romantic. Or she wanted me to see them, which would be unkind but effective because if Maren had simply told me she’d fucked someone else I wouldn’t have believed her. But I don’t think Maren would be so deliberately cruel. If only we’d gotten a house with a garage, she might’ve heard the door grinding open so I could be spared the catastrophic visuals, but no—we chose the house with the lovely garden instead.

. . .

The recital doesn’t begin on time, and even when it does begin it’s not what anyone wants to see. The kids’ dance instructor, Mrs. Richter, is performing a solo opening number, dancing in a bright yellow adult tutu and singing some bullshit about sunshine, which we rarely see now since it gets dark at four p.m. Some of the parents have bewildered looks on their faces, while others offer ingratiating smiles, and some teens who are unlucky enough to have siblings performing today surreptitiously take Snapchat videos on their iPhones.

My mom mutters something about these children’s instructors always making it about themselves while my father-in-law insists not for the first time that we should be taking Lillian to the fancy dance school in Nashville where the lessons cost an arm and a leg, but the kids get to do their final recital in a massive community center auditorium flanked by an indoor heated pool and a Starbucks. That’s, after all, where Jake and Zoe go—his other grandkids whose parents have the combination of an architect’s salary and a dermatologist’s, as well as a million-dollar home and season box tickets to Predators games. We have explained to him many times that a librarian and a VA civil servant cannot afford the same luxuries, especially when they’ve had to pay thousands of dollars just to have each kid, not to mention the expenses afterward and saving for college or wherever they choose to go in adulthood. My father-in-law is well-acquainted with a lack of extravagance though. He only realized fancy places existed when his son made it out of Cassidy, got rich, and started inviting him to them. Maybe that’s where Maren’s restlessness began, too.

My leg is still touching Maren’s, unfortunately, but I’m holding the baby bag in my lap, hugging it like it’s my maybe soon-to-be finale child, so she can’t mistake unavoidable touching for an invitation to hold my hand or anything else. As Mrs. Richter’s performance thankfully ends and the first children’s dance begins—a bunch of little ladybugs with bent antennae dancing what the recital program claims is hip hop as we all for some reason desperately pretend it’s fucking springtime—I’m thinking about a Sedaris essay from Holidays on Ice about bad children’s theater. I read it last week on I can’t remember which day, maybe the one during which Maren was taking an axe to our marriage. I recall thinking it was funny, wondering whether or not someone could still feel a performance was truly awful if their child was a part of the broader production, and praise be to He the answer has arrived. This is torture.

The Coke we’re sharing is warm by the time Lillian’s first song comes up. It’s tap, the one she’s been most nervous about, clanking her toes all over the kitchen amidst dirty dishes and stale cereal. She left a few scuffs, but they weren’t hard to clean, and I didn’t want to discourage her passion, so I scrubbed them away each night after her bedtime with my knees crackling and my nostrils full of vinegar. And it was all worth it because my love, my firstborn, my daughter is ecstatic. She is, objectively, the best dancer on that little mouse stage, even if the kids’ tap shoes sound something much too like drum beating atop that cheap surface. Her dimples—the same ones that made us choose Donor 72048, the mechanical engineer with a contagious laugh and an affable demeanor—never stop showing.

But when the song ends and she is shepherded to the holding area behind an Oz-like curtain to await her next song, I’ve suddenly got donors on the mind again and can’t help thinking about that goddamn vial sitting in that freezer waiting for me. We had been so excited when we ordered it, speaking our credit card number into the phone to a stranger across the country asking us whether we’d like our receipt mailed or emailed, our sperm washed or unwashed—questions that had never entered my mind when I was five and dreaming about being a mom and naming my babies ridiculous things like Potato and Sweet Potato Pie. (They were going to be siblings, after all.) With this finale kid sperm, we’d scored on the first attempt for the first time. For both Lillian’s and Trent’s donors, there was a weeks-long battle with all the other couples in America (and sometimes Canada and the UK) who were in need of donor sperm. I would receive an email notification about a new donor who’d been added, we’d look him over and decide he was perfect, and then all the goods would be sold out by the time we found our phone to dial up the coast and order. We’d curse the fucking nimble-fingered vultures who’d beat us to him and keep looking. It would feel like a waste—and maybe a betrayal—to cast aside this vial whose donor had, in weird ways, reminded us of both Lillian and Trent and was, therefore, the one, if such a thing exists.

Maren leans into me and asks if we can talk. I ignore the smell of peach and lavender, usually so comforting. I look around the room like hello, we’re kind of in the middle of something, and out of the corner of my eye she gestures toward the center of the gym. There’s a piece of yellow construction paper taped to the back of a folding chair on the stage that reads INTERMISSION in probably off-brand purple marker. For Christ’s sake. I look at the clock above the gym exit, the one that keeps ticking despite never having come down as far as I know. I read it and then count backwards an hour because when the rest of our clocks fell back an hour a couple weeks ago, this one didn’t. We are an hour-and-a-half into the production. I realize I must’ve lost some time and wonder briefly if I was abducted by aliens. I ask Maren if we can please not talk right now, but she says we need to, so I stand up and leave the baby bag with my mom and Trent, who screeches for Maren till we’re out of earshot.

People are milling about in the hallways and congregating outside the community center doors smoking, chatting, commiserating. We walk next door to stand outside of a closed failing used bookstore that will probably soon be replaced by something fancy and fucking unnecessary like a loose-leaf hot tea shop or a goldfish spa—something brought along with the tides of people who want to move from across the country to Music City, USA, and, instead, have to settle for Cassidy when they realize how much real estate costs in Nashville. I lean against the bookstore’s dirty glass window, which is sloppily and desperately advertising a Walmart bag’s worth of paperbacks for a quarter. I wonder briefly if there’s anything I could bag, something rare and holy perhaps, that I could use to go back in time and stop all this from happening—the DoorDash fuckery, Maren’s general discontent, this joke of a recital.

I still don’t look at her, but I listen. She says something like, You can’t avoid talking about this forever. At least, I think that’s it. It’s all, everything, an approximation at this point—how much money we’ve spent building our family, our chances of coming out of this intact, how much time we have left before the recital from hell (excluding Lillian’s performances) resumes, even what we’re saying to each other. But she’s acting, it seems to me, like I’ve had weeks or even months to process what’s happened, like it wasn’t just yesterday that all this fell on me, like the awkwardness of this moment is somehow my fault.

I don’t want to do this.

I study the background. The street is behind her, the lanterns decorated with weather-beaten wreaths like they always are come the first of November and the door of the Cassidy soda shop peeking over her left shoulder from across the street. When we were younger, on Tuesdays when Maren didn’t have after-school soccer practice, we used to jog the short mile from the high school to buy milkshakes there, which we’d slurp as we meandered back to my falling-apart car. I’d drive us to some desolate shady spot in the park so we could make out without getting caught. It didn’t occur to us that perhaps we spent so much time together because we were the only two queer girls we knew of in our high school. That possibility never entered my mind until now, watching the wreaths tap against lantern poles in the wind and wondering whether Maren has always felt stuck with me—like I was her only option.

The thought makes me sick.

Embarrassed.

Sad—deep in my gut and down to my toes.

Still. I can’t make this moment go away.

I look at her. Like she’s been wanting me to all day.

I try to decide whether she looks appalling or beautiful or both. But all I can come up with is that I’m not looking at my wife. She is—for all intents and purposes, whatever it means, irre-fucking-futably—the love of my life—in that really frustrating hopeless sort of way that crushes a person’s chest and makes them wonder whether or not they can live without the other. That hasn’t changed. Neither has the staging, really. We have been here before, standing on the sidewalk, staring and waiting for the other to blink, to speak, to apologize for whatever dumb thing has been said or done—a misconstrued angry word or the purchase of a way-too-expensive gift for the kids. This is, in some ways, a pattern.

But the look on Maren’s face is new—she with the worried brow and the scuttled lips, the tangled hair and the tarrying sense of unhappiness. Her facial features are literally the same, of course, but they’ve rearranged themselves. Her nose is crinkled the way it is when she laughs or cries. She’s chewing her lips but from the inside, perceptible only in the little undulations of her jaw. I don’t even know what the fuck she’s doing with her eyebrows, but they’re out of place. I feel like I—a person who is known for understanding words, not images—am trying to make sense of The Weeping Woman.

But this is all I can come up with: She looks exhausted. Almost annoyed.

And it’s clear—she doesn’t want to fix this. We, as we were before—the whispered jokes about football players we went to school with still being douchebags, the shared orders of curry, the laughing uncontrollably while we roll down the hill in the backyard with the kids—are done. There will not be an apology or a plea. There will be, possibly, a negotiation. Nothing more. My eyes refocus on the background because I’ve done what I needed to.

I’ve looked.

The wreaths remind me that my favorite time of year is coming—post-dinner cocoa and Christmas movies and Trent dressed like a little Rudolph next to a snow-Lillian posing in front of a not-nearly-believable background in my photographer friend’s garage. And this time next year, maybe a tiny bundle in a knit Santa cap between them, depending on how our negotiation goes. Maybe God—all of a fucking sudden, I’m back into Him apparently—will even bring some snow to Cassidy for the first time in years. That would be nice.

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