He closed the door and headed to the kitchen at the end of the hallway to begin preparing dinner. The lights were off in all rooms, the lounge room and the study on the right, the main bedroom and Angie’s old bedroom on the left, dark chambers that reminded him more of hidden caves in the bush than the living quarters of a house, places he just didn’t seem to care about nor want to do anything with. Thankfully, there was still one place left he felt a modicum of peace and belonging, but before he entered the kitchen he stopped to wash his hands in the bathroom opposite the grandfather clock, a habit his hygienically minded father had drilled into him since childhood. Once done, he spent the next half an hour busy at the kitchen divider mashing the potatoes and spicing the mince for a cottage pie, keeping half of it heated in the oven for Angie when she arrived home.
“Whenever that’s going to be,” he said with a snort, sitting down at the dinner table. Some nights he didn’t even see her at all.
Lifting the fork to his mouth, the telephone shrilled from down the hallway. He half stood, then sat back down and continued eating, letting the answering machine pick up the call. It wasn’t until after he had cleaned the kitchen and washed the dishes that he went to the lounge room to check if the caller had left a message. Someone had. On the foot table next to the Steinway, the answering machine’s red light was flashing on and off. He pushed PLAY.
“Michael, hunni. Are you there? Pick up the phone.” It was Angie. Her voice sounded huskier than normal, the voice of someone working themselves far too hard. There was a pause, then she must have realized that he wasn’t going to answer and continued with her message. “I’m still at the office. Something’s come up. Stephen wants me to go through one of his divorce cases with him. It’s kind of messy and I don’t know how long we’ll be, so don’t cook for me, okay. I’ll try to be home as soon as I can. Love you. Bye.”
The news was disappointing, but half expected, really. He ran a hand through his hair and glanced over his shoulder at the couch. Yesterday’s Adelaide Sun was lying folded on the cushions. Picking it up, he flicked on the TV and turned down the volume so that it was no louder than a hushed background murmur. Then he slouched lengthways along the couch, resting his head on one armrest, his feet on the other. Like the TV, the newspaper was merely a distraction to bar any thoughts of his problems with Angie getting through to his surface consciousness. He wasn’t really reading the paper, not really taking in the story on the front page about the baby that had been abducted from the mall and was now feared dead, and it wasn’t long before his eyelids began to droop.
At some point he dozed off, woken only when a beam of light swept over the lounge room ceiling some time later, headlights shining through the crack between the curtains. As he stirred, a car engine idled briefly before switching off. He glanced up at the Elvis Presley clock on the wall near the door. Strumming a guitar, Elvis sang into a microphone, his black legs swaying at the hips, his torso dressed in a blue jacket with black lapels. He was saying it was nearly ten, early for the likes of workaholics like Angie. Michael heard the car door shut, then silence as she crossed the lawn, then her hassled footsteps on the porch. After the keys wrestled with the lock, the front door opened and then slammed shut, shaking the Elvis clock on the wall. Almost immediately, her briefcase, heavy with cases and files she often brought home after a day in court, thudded onto the floor of the main bedroom, followed by the clomp, clomp of her shoes being removed.
Seconds later Angie appeared in the doorway, frowning. Michael could feel the stress surging from her like the pressure wave at the bow of a ship, and he braced himself for a rough ride; it had been another frustrating day at Sugarman Klein & Pickering. The blue suit jacket sagged on her slender frame, as if two sizes too big, and there was a large run riding up her black stockings, disappearing beneath the hem of her skirt. Her hair, normally held into a taut bun, was falling in loose strands around her face, and he caught her big brown eyes staring at him through the large rimless glasses perched on the tip of her nose, which she pushed to the bridge with a terse shove of her forefinger. The other hand was holding a woman’s magazine. It was obvious something other than work was on her mind.
“What’s the matter?” Michael asked, folding the newspaper onto the floor beside him.
Angie shrugged, a noncommittal twitch of the shoulders that Michael associated with apathy and disaffection. She glanced briefly at the magazine in her hand. “I, I saw an ad in the Woman’s World that might help us with,” and she paused, hesitant to continue, “with, you know, our problem.” Her voice sounded even more tired than on the answering machine. Angie flicked through the pages to the ad, after which she stepped forward, the magazine splayed out.
Michael used his elbow to prop himself up and took the magazine. Her hands dropped to her side like a little girl awaiting approval from her father, and she continued to stand like this at the foot of the couch while he read the ad.
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Michael felt a cold finger of dread stroke his spine. Elbows on knees he stared at the words, unmoving at first, then ran a hand through his hair. “Do you think this is what we need to do?” he asked, glancing up at her over his shoulder. “It’s going to cost a fortune.”
Her hands shot to her hips and her scowl deepened. “Is that all you ever think about, money?”
“Of course not, but we’re not exactly swimming in cash at the moment, are we?”
“It isn’t going to cost us a thing,” she said, sliding a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “I’ve read the health insurance package from work and in the fine print it says that if there’s a legitimate cause of infertility, then the policy will cover the expenses of any treatment.”
“You’ve obviously checked it all out,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. Her rimless glasses had slipped again. “I have. I just don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.” Then thoughtfully, pushing her glasses back to the bridge of her nose, she said, “But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re going to do something constructive about it. I’ve made an appointment for next Thursday. Five o’clock.”
To Michael, this was all a bit of a surprise. He also felt left out. She had obviously been planning something like this for quite some while and he hadn’t even had so much as a clue. They had never discussed the option of medical intervention at all before now, not even with his father, who was a doctor. Why now, suddenly? What was the rush? He needed time to think about it, long and hard, certainly longer than a week. This wasn’t something they should just jump recklessly into. The situation wasn’t nearly as desperate as she was making it out to be.
He suddenly remembered an appointment he had to attend, just the excuse he needed to delay matters. “I have a staff meeting after school that day,” he said. “The headmistress won’t