For Love by Sue Miller Page A

in their bedroom – with an intensity that seemed to startle him
if he caught her eye.
    She didn’t say anything now.
    ‘I know it’s been hard, Lottie.’
    ‘Nothing we didn’t expect,’ she said. She gestured vaguely upstairs to where Megan had shut herself in her room, away from them. They had been in family therapy, all three of
them, for several months, and only the day before, Megan had announced that what really bothered her about Lottie was her habit of clearing her throat repeatedly in the morning. She’d
imitated it, sounding like a motor trying to turn over:
hrmm, hrmm, hrmm
. That, Megan said, and the perfume she wore. ‘Gross,’ Megan had called it. Then her eyes had swiveled
wildly toward her father: had she gone too far this time? ‘It’s just, you know, a bunch of small stuff like that, really.’ She raised her narrow shoulders. ‘No big deal at
all. I don’t know why we all have to keep coming here,’ she said.
    For once Lottie was in agreement with Megan. The family therapist had an office on Michigan Avenue, where they all met weekly. He kept the venetian blinds closed, presumably so they
wouldn’t be distracted by the view out over the lake, and they sat in the artificial dusk and leveled this kind of charge at each other over and over. The therapist seemed unable to move any
of them beyond these petty gripes. But it was just this kind of complaint that pained Lottie most, of course. And it seemed clear that Megan somehow knew this. How much more easily, Lottie felt,
she could have confronted accusations about being a liar, or an adulteress. Why couldn’t the therapist force them to talk openly about that stuff? she wondered.
    ‘I don’t mean just Megan,’ Jack said. ‘I mean me.’
    ‘Ah!’ Lottie said.
    ‘Ah!’ he echoed. He looked sternly at her. ‘
Don’t
say “ah,” please.’ Lottie smiled. Jack was a doctor. ‘Say yes, Lottie,’ he said
gently. ‘I know it’s true.’
    And of course it was. Lottie looked at him. She thought of him as beautiful. Beautiful, and inaccessible to her. ‘Okay, yes,’ she said.
    He twisted his head away as though she’d struck him. She swallowed some of her coffee and, over the rim of her cup, watched him compose himself again.
You said it first
, she
thought.
    Jack’s wife had died almost a year before, after what is called ‘a long illness.’ In her case, a major and catastrophic stroke about ten years earlier, when the children were
all young, followed by periodic smaller strokes. Lottie had been involved with Jack for six years before his wife died. The night of Evelyn’s final stroke, Megan had called Lottie’s
apartment.
    ‘Is my father there?’ she asked. Lottie knew instantly who it was, though she’d never talked to Megan on the phone. She had waited a beat before she could answer. And then she
made a terrible mistake. ‘I think you must have the wrong number,’ she said.
    ‘Look, just get my fucking father on the phone,’ the girl’s voice had said. ‘This is an emergency.’
    Jack hadn’t called Lottie for more than a week after Evelyn’s death. He hadn’t been able to make love to her again for more than a month. They had waited seven more months to
be married. The night of the wedding, Lottie woke up and heard him pulling on his clothes in the dark, then leaving their hotel room. She looked at the bright numbers on the digital clock. She
watched them change through the long hours. Each digit made a nearly inaudible click as it shifted its shape, became a new number. He hadn’t come back until five-thirty.
    And he’d continued to get up at night through the months of their marriage, often staying awake for two or three hours. At first Lottie would get up, too, and sit with him in the living
room, sometimes with the lights on, sometimes in the dark. Always he smiled when he saw her, always he apologized. Once, early, he talked about it. He told Lottie he’d been so relieved when
his wife