It had been easier, once, to just lie about having a wife. Better than trying to explain why he didn’t.
Or ask why he should. More and more, the people around him seemed to just assume it, like a wife was something he was supposed to just grow at the right age, like body hair or an extra six inches in height.
Easier than telling them the whole idea felt just as strange as willing himself to grow another six inches. Caroline was a good fiction, anyways. Cozy. She never made any trouble or kept him from going out with the guys.
And she made a great excuse when he didn’t feel like doing so. ‘Sorry, Caroline and I are going out for supper.’ A romantic, respectable way to say he planned to spend the evening on the sofa with a bowl of cereal.
When he didn’t say ‘Caroline’ and picture the rabbit-ear television blurring a baseball game, he pictured a cozy fiction of a woman. Long brown hair and eyes just a few shades darker, just enough details that he could describe her to anyone who asked.
He decided they’d gotten married on the seventeenth of September, which made it their wooden anniversary when he rolled over in his double bed, opened his eyes on rumpled sheets and a Saturday with no plans apart from football on ‘Caroline’, and found himself staring at long brown hair spread across the second pillow he never used. Eyes closed, but he knew the colour they would be, set in the mild, sleep-smiling face, the unthreatening beauty of the woman he had spent the last five years lying into existence.
