The Unremarkable Heart

June the perfect man. The perfect partner. The perfect husband.
    Before her cancer diagnosis, she had never visited Richard in prison, not once in the twenty-one years since he had been sent away. June was not afraid of losing the hate she felt for him. That was as firmly rooted in her chest as the cancer that was growing inside of her. What scared her most was the fear of weakness, that she wouldbreak down in his presence. She didn’t need a Dr Bonner to tell her that love and hate existed on the same plane. She didn’t need him to tell her that her bond with Richard Connor was at once the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to her in her life.
    So it was that the day she drove to the prison, not the day that she was diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, was the worst day of June Connor’s life. Her hands shook. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Standing outside the door to the visitor’s area, she let the fear take hold, and imagined all the horrible things that could make her weak before him.
    The feel of his lips when he kissed her neck. The times she had come home from school, exhausted and angry, and he had cupped his hand to her chin, or pressed his lips to her forehead, and made everything better. The passionate nights, when he would lie behind her, his hand working her into a frenzy. Even after almost twenty years of marriage, after loving him and hating him in equal parts, the thought of his body beside her still brought an unwelcome lust.
    He never closed drawers or cabinet doors all the way. He never put his keys in the same place when he got home from work, so every morning he was late for school because he couldn’t find them. He belched and farted and occasionally spat on the sidewalk. He took his socks off by the bed every night and left them there for June to pick up. There was not an item of laundry he knew how to fold. He had a sort of domestic blindness which prevented him from seeing dust on the furniture, carpets that needed to be vacuumed, dishes that needed to be cleaned.
    He had betrayed her. He had betrayed everything in their lives.
    This last bit was the only reason June was able to walk through the visitor’s door, force herself through the pat-down and metal detector, the intrusive rifling of her purse. The smell of prison was a slap in the face, as was the realization that five thousand grown men were living, shitting, breathing the same air in this miserable place.
    What was she worried about – her nose wrinkling, her hand going to her mouth – that she’d get lung cancer?
    And then Richard had shown up, a shuffling old man, but still much the same. Stooped shoulders, because he was tall but never proud of it. Gray hair. Gray skin. He’d cut himself shaving that morning. Toilet tissue was stuck to the side of his neck. His thick, black-framed glasses reminded her of the ones he’d worn when they’d first met all those years ago outside the school library. He was in two of her classes. He was from a small town. He wanted to teach English. He wanted to make kids feel excited about learning. He wanted to take June to the movies that night and talk about it some more. He wanted to hold her hand and tell her about the future he wanted them to have together.
    There was nothing of that excited eagerness in the old man who’d sat across from her at a metal table.
    ‘I am dying,’ she’d said.
    And he had only nodded, his lips pursed in that self-satisfied way that said he knew everything about June before she even said it.
    June had bristled, but inside, she understood that Richard had always known everything about her. Perhaps not the dropped chicken or the ugly shirt she’d gladlysent to the town dump, but he could see into her soul. He knew that her biggest fear was dying alone. He knew what she needed to hear in order to make this transaction go smoothly. He knew, above all, how to turn these things around so that he made her believe his lies, no matter how paltry the proof, no matter how illogical the reasoning.
    ‘I’m a good man,’ he kept telling her. ‘You know that, June. Despite it all, I am a good man.’
    As if it mattered anymore. As if she had a choice.
    The secret that horrified her most was that deep down, part of her wanted to believe that he was still good. That he cared about her, even though the hatred in his eyes was so clear that she often had to look away. She could snatch the truth from the jaws of a tenth grader at twenty paces, but her