The Stonemason’s Wife

JOLINA HAS been hearing voices of men she’s never met. Voices like water, clear and cold, eddying at the back of her mind. They’re not real. She knows this. As in, she’s not crazy. They’re only the voices she’s heard on the phone, voices of men who buy the magazines she sells, or, more often, who don’t and tell her instead all the things they could do for her. Low and babbling and swelling voices.

They arrive each night with the darkness, after Barry has gone upstairs, and maybe this is why it feels like a betrayal. A muddying of their marriage. She is here, after all, sitting on the back porch, face to the stars, listening to these strangers while her husband is asleep in their bed.

Jolina isn’t always honest with Barry. She doesn’t, for example, tell him what the men say. Or that their voices return to her like this. It would only make him worry, and she doesn’t like to make him worry. So she tells him