Authors: Antonya Nelson

Funny Once (35 page)

“He would kill me,” Hugh said now to Stacy, still marveling at that fact. She’d had to beg to get him to meet her; she’d had to cry and plead, his fear of the husband, and the arsenal of righteousness that surrounded the man, putting a distinct damper on his enthusiasm for being with her. But now that she was near him, her warm head on his shoulder, her familiar face and not invisible scar, well, the fear began to melt, to splinter, to do something metaphorically disassembling in his body.

“Yeah, he was pretty mad at me, too, he even broke our big wooden salad bowl, but then he started crying, which is . . . unusual. Highly.”

“I don’t want him to kill me,” Hugh said.

“Me neither, that would be the worst! You’d be dead, and he’d go to jail. Then where would I be? Up a creek, that’s where.”

When her daughter came charging at her, crashing straight into her crotch, she explained to Hugh, “After my miscarriage I made three wishes: one for my first girl, next my boy, last this girl.” Mavis growled, burrowing and churning against her mother in what looked like a painful manner. “Hugh,” Stacy said, looking up from her daughter’s hooded brutal head, “if I had another wish, I swear it would be for you . . .” There was a “but” at the end of this sentence; they both heard it.

Everything starts with an “if” and ends with a “but,” Hugh thought. If his father could have stayed at home, he’d perhaps have been happier in his last days, but . . . If only Hamish would have walked out of the water, would have stuck around and overseen his siblings who needed their big brother, his parents who loved their boy, but . . . If Hugh had declined to follow Stacy out of creative writing and into her disaster, knowing as he should have not to risk falling in love with a married woman, but . . .

And everybody knows you only get three wishes.

“If . . .” she repeated.

“Yeah,” he said. “But.”

Acknowledgments

W
ith thanks to Deborah Treisman, Anton Mueller, Bonnie Nadell, Steven Schwartz, Merrill Feitell, Kathleen Lee, Lillie Robertson, Laura Kasischke, Noah Boswell, and, especially, Robert Boswell.

A Note on the Author

Antonya Nelson is the author of ten books of fiction, including the collections
Female Trouble
and
Nothing Right
and the novels
Talking in Bed
,
Nobody’s Girl
, and
Bound
. Her work has appeared in the
New Yorker
,
Esquire
,
Harper’s
, and many other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. Nelson lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.