The Prize by Jill Bialosky Page A

payments, meaning that in reality the house was only partially his. The house and a few thousand dollars in the stock market, and the shares he owned in the gallery, and whatever was in his 401(k)—this was what the last twenty years had amounted to?
    As he inserted his key, still groggy from the flight, everything felt strangely foreign. He had loved coming home to Annabel in her playpen when she was little, lying on her back, her feet in the air, enchanted by her toes, and Holly in another room talking on the phone to one of the volunteers at the refuge or out in the garden returning to him with dirt underneath her fingernails and smudged on her face. He liked coming home to the smell of baked chicken or a hearty sauce cooking, and the anticipation of making a fire in the living room, where he and Holly ended the evening with another glass of wine. He liked to check in on Annabel in her room with the pink-and-white polka dot wallpaper that Holly had carefully picked out once she discovered she was having a girl, to make sure she was asleep on her back, because they’d heard that you should never let a baby sleep on her stomach. Annabel’s childhood could be mapped out and charted in every room in the house. The rug they’d bought for the living room when she was just an infant, learning to crawl, because Edward was worried she’d topple over and hit her head on the wood floor. Or the coffee table, purchased for its height, so that their daughter could learn to pull herself up by it. Or that little china figurine, a ballet dancer, on the bookshelf in the den, which they’d given to her for her fourth birthday, when she’d just started taking ballet.
    In those early years when Edward opened the door after a long day in the city he thought only of making love to his wife, this person who seemed so sure of herself, who had been born into privilegeand felt guilty for it, who possessed a love and gentleness and sixth sense for creatures great and small, marveling that this woman, who loved taking a long walk with the dogs at her heels and found sustenance in the shades of color in a sky, had chosen him.
    Getting remarried had thrust him back into life. They’d been happy in those early years. He liked how she pressed against him when they stood together at cocktail parties, or the way she slipped her hand into his arm, or the look of her as she entered a room. Or the way she had of describing the tenderness of a sheepdog she’d rescued off the road. He liked the wildness in her eyes.
    When Annabel was born his devotion to Holly deepened. He could never get over how she had carried his child inside her, and given birth to someone for whom he felt the deepest love. It seemed to him that he had little to do with her accomplishment and he felt profoundly obligated to her for giving him a prize he didn’t feel he deserved.
    He liked taking long walks with her and the dogs and Annabel in her stroller on a Sunday, and then later in the afternoon making love on their bed with the cool breeze coming through the window. He wanted Holly to know how she grounded him and gave him a reason for living, but he never knew how to tell her. The years passed and he grew to accept that she wasn’t going to leave or tire of him. She wasn’t the kind of woman who needed him to articulate in words what she meant to him, she did not expect him to be a poet; it would undermine what they had. But in the last few years something had shifted. After dinner Holly withdrew to the den to read one of her obscure magazines or journals—the latest was called Horse Husbandry —and he wandered upstairs to work. They moved around the house as if on their own private vessels.
    On the evening he returned home from Berlin, things felt different. The key no longer turned with ease, he had to jiggle it, just a little, and then turn it again before the door swung open, and this time there was no smell of a home-cooked