Talking about Linda is difficult and loving her is a little harder still.

She’s the strangest person I

know and she always makes more sense than me. It frequently takes me too long to realize this.
It doesn’t feel like she ever really sets out to win the arguments she gets in with people but she
does anyway and then people kinda hate her for it. I think she enjoys this privately. Linda
doesn’t even have a kindergarten diploma. A lady taught her to read and write real early on her
own and so that’s how she’s got by. Now she reads books I can’t pronounce and can fire a rifle
with great accuracy from considerable distance. She has shot me in the knee with our son’s
beebee gun during an argument. When she decided it had hurt me long enough she removed the
beebee from my knee with a knife and tweezers and stitched up my knee like a surgeon while she
continued explaining her frustration with me. She touched me softly while she ran her thread in
and out of my skin and back in again until she’d sealed it shut. Linda talks to very few people
and makes most people uncomfortable. When I ask Linda if she’s upset she’ll lie to me and then
we’ll fight because I wanna help her and I can’t if she’s lying about her feelings. She dislikes it
greatly when someone says they are sure about anything. She makes every baby laugh and this
makes the parents jealous and a lot of them can’t hide it. She adores MLB baseball and even
watches the regular season, but she hates youth baseball families. She generally hates parties of
six or more, especially when the six or more are family. Even so she asks to go to a Sox game for
her birthday every year and it’s the only vacation we take most of the time. Linda is a white girl
with farm green eyes and brown hair that gets a little blonde in the summer and she hates herself
for it and wishes she was anything but what a frat boy would call sexy. She has unsuccessfully
tried to make herself less sexy many times. She is afraid our son will become one of these frat
boys. On the days that this frightens her the most I think she plots in secret to raise our son as a
sleeper agent who will infiltrate the inside of their frat boy system and kill them all off in their
drunken sleep and save all the girls trapped in their pit. Linda is so punctual it’s like an
instrument she plays. And one would not expect this given her punctuality but she is a poor
mathematician. She shot me with the beebee gun because I told her in anger that our son could
add better than her. We are the same in almost every way but different like rivals are. I wonder if
Linda hates me at least once a day and some days I am sure that I hate her but I would also
commit murder for her probably. I guess what I would say about Linda is every bowl of queso
has a layer of film you have to fight through to get to it.

Linda reads all the time. Sometimes it feels like she’s doing it on purpose because she knows it
makes me feel weird about myself. I don’t know how to talk to her about books the way she
wants to talk about them and it makes her feel annoyed and me feel like I’m in high school.
She’ll start reading in the middle of a restaurant. The youth baseball families are always the only
ones who notice and it makes her order another margarita and glare at them and say something
too loud about racists and militias and then keep reading. At this point the youth baseball
families are looking at me like a gun and barely hiding it and I wish I could make conversation
with someone to make things go back to normal but Linda is reading and I’m the subject of the
youth baseball family’s conversation now and the kids are saying Linda’s weird and the parents
are talking about what kind of husband I must be, and what kind of man. I’m a bug in a jar with
no holes poked in it until Cece gets back with that margarita. Maybe Linda feels like a bug in a
jar all the time.

Linda’s idea of a date is a grocery store. They’re like tourist sites for her, and she studies them
like they’re an art genre. The word she uses for them is ecosystems. When she starts explaining
what she means by this I get lost and it makes her lose steam and quit halfway through and then
we’re walking through the grocery silent. When it gets like this she walks faster through the store
so it looks like I’m chasing her through it because I am. This is one of those times I’ll ask what’s
wrong and she’ll lie to me and say nothing is. This is when I say I’m pretty sure something is
wrong and she looks at me this particular way with flames inside her eyes, a scary marriage of
don’t push it and try me, I dare you. She softens then and says she’s good and takes a soft hold of
my arm while she reaches for a can of chickpeas. She strokes the inside of my arm with her
fingers. Maybe it’s because I know this means I’m gonna have to eat hummus later and I hate
hummus, but this is when I ask if it was the ecosystem thing, and this makes her mad twice, and
twice as much, and Linda goes to the car to read until I’m done getting stuff. Linda told me one
time that even if she managed to avoid a bad mood all day long, she could count on me to help
one find her that night.

But Linda just doesn’t understand that I love her, that I’m trying to help her. I reckon I love
Linda more than anything in the world and I definitely know her better than anyone. That
includes her family and friends and that’s true the other way around too. Linda knows every
damn thing about me and we’ve been more comfortable with each other and seen each other
clearer than anyone else either of us has ever known or will know. I’m pretty sure Linda knows
this too, only sometimes I think it makes her a deep kind of sad like a gash that won’t stop
opening up wider. It makes me feel warm and safe.

Linda pulled me up out of one of those drug hells. I shot heroin like it was billiards for a few
years and Linda met me one night when I was a little more awake than usual, but I was sure
broken and fallen and strapped already with a needle in one hand and a pistol I stole from my
brother in the other. Linda took the gun and let me shoot my arm, and that’s the last time I did it.
She took me all shriveled up to her house and I was in Linda rehab for a month and then a year
and then we were married. I don’t think she was ready to fall in love with the person she
salvaged. I mean I wasn’t either, Linda was from Boston and had just moved down this way and
hated it and didn’t know who Muddy Waters was and couldn’t stand George Strait, and she was
a pretty no-nonsense caregiver. No-extras either. Still, we learned each other like involuntary
muscles.

Linda brought me back up to life and I helped her find hers in this place she hated and now she’s
40 and still here with me. I wonder if I’m killing her off slow the way the needle tried to kill me
off fast. I wonder if what that comfortable safe nothing space was for me, that’s what I am for
Linda and if she’s finally ready to die rather than keep living there.

Linda’s probably thinking this to herself while she reads her book and waits for Cece. Linda’s
reading a book by someone named Rimbaud, and the youth baseball family is laughing and
saying Rim-bod over and over to each other because they’ve had a few pitchers by now. This
makes Linda furious so it’s time to leave and the youth baseball family has won their second
game of the night. Cece gets back with a fresh margarita to find an empty booth and thirty bucks,
the baseball family laughing out Rimbods, me and Linda shuffling out the door.

In the car Linda is crying and I love her so much and I’m remembering what it was like to feel
my life coming back into my blood and I wish so badly I could send some back into Linda’s.
“Give It Away” by George Strait is playing on the radio when the car turns on and that makes me
chuckle to myself, and Linda thinks I’m laughing at her so she gets sadder, and this is when I
bring it up to Linda about maybe the two of us should be moving on.