The marriage was good in many of the ways that matter. Mark was present, mostly. He was funny in the specific way of men who have good timing rather than good material. He was generous with the people he loved and he loved me in his way, which was a way that expressed itself through action rather than language, through the appearing and the doing rather than the saying.
The marriage was also, in ways I had learned to navigate around rather than through, organized around a set of assumptions that I had never fully examined because examining them would have required a confrontation I was not ready to have.
The assumptions had to do with what was his and what was mine and what was ours, and where the lines between those categories fell, and who got to draw them.
Mark had never been on the mortgage.
This was not a deliberate exclusion at the time of the marriage. It was a fact of the timeline: the house was already mine when he arrived, the mortgage was already in my name and half paid, and the question of adding him to the title had come up once, briefly, in the first year of the marriage, when Mark had mentioned it in a general way, and I had said something about refinancing being complicated and we had moved on and not returned to it.
I had not returned to it because I had, somewhere in the examining of that conversation, recognized that I did not want to, and had allowed myself not to want to without explaining to myself precisely why.
I understand now why.
I did not fully understand it then.
Diane, Mark’s mother, was a woman of seventy-four who had the specific quality of women who have been formidable their entire lives and who approach age as an insult rather than an inevitability. She was sharp and she was funny and she was, in the specific way of certain mothers with only sons, completely organized around Mark’s wellbeing as the central project of her existence.
She had been warm to me, mostly.
