As the jeep rocks over the snow berm and climbs the driveway, the snow starts up again. A bad omen, Sky thinks. He watches Aubrey wrestle their daughter, Keely, in her car seat from the back. Aubrey was rail thin when they married, and just beginning to show. The marriage lasted all of a year, and now Aubrey is thicker, sterner. Her cheeks circle the storm of her mouth. “Your parents told me you’re straight. That true?” Aubrey says, as she swings Keely in her car seat toward Sky.
“Straight as a string,” Sky says.
Aubrey’s new boyfriend, Marcus, sits in the front of the jeep and looks on through camo Oakleys. The cold, dark, gray of February and still he wears them. He and Aubrey started online in that blurred period when Sky was still married to Aubrey but no longer sharing their one-bedroom apartment. Marcus. An ex–navy SEAL. A 250-pound Iraq War vet trawling Tinder. Or maybe he was in Afghanistan. Marcus is everything, according to Aubrey, that Sky is not—reliable, paternal, honest, sober. Nothing about the sex, Sky notes. He and Aubrey fucked like depraved jackrabbits, or whatever animal it is that fucks a lot. Got them into this mess in the first place.
