My Katie.

The bed is empty when I wake up. It always is. I roll over and hit the alarm that is ringing. I never wake up to her alarm but somehow she is always up before me. I roll back over and continue until I’m on her side of the bed. It doesn’t smell like anything but the Tide she uses to clean it. That used to be the best smell in the world after she had slept on it. And it used to smell like fruit. Fruit and Tide. That used to be my mornings.

It feels like I’m lifting a hundred thousand pound weight when I get up and the house is freezing. To save money, the heater is always on low. To save energy, the truth telling in this house is always on low.

I get myself ready for work quickly, a thing so routine I barely remember doing it. I hear a door open and slam across the hallway and I guess that my eldest daughter is up.

The face in the mirror looks back at me. Old and haggard with graying hair. This wasn’t what I wanted. I’m jealous of the man in the mirror because once I walk out of this bathroom he doesn’t have to deal with this life I lead until the next time I glance at my reflection for a moment.

I grab my just dry-cleaned jacket and make my way down the stairs, ignoring the closed door of the other bathroom on this floor that I know is occupied by my daughter. I wonder briefly what time she came home last night when the puking starts. I hurry down the stairs so that I can escape the sound of my failure.

She says hello to me from where she stands by the coffeemaker and she smiles at me. The smile is fake like everything we say to each other and like our whole entire marriage.

I don’t even bother with a response only give her some excuse of a smile that I know looks more like a twisted grimace than an expression of pleasure.

I sit down at the table and she scurries over to put two pieces of perfectly done toast in front of me, with jam and all, as if perfect toast will make our lives perfect and it will make our marriage seem happy, and make it seem like she is the perfect wife and I am the perfect husband when we both know that the truth is I don’t love her and she is having an affair and I can hardly bring myself to be angry with her.

But I thank her and pick up the day-old newspaper because she never brings in the new one in time for breakfast. I open it and hide behind it, hide behind bombings and school awards and ads.

It’s silent in the kitchen for a while and I hate it because it makes the sound of our daughter retching in the upstairs bathroom all the more audible.

We both hear it and so she begins to blather on about a book her book club is reading and how Martina McFay is snobby and whatever else entertains her whole little fake world. I smile and nod and add comments about my work because her fake world is my fake world.

Our daughter finally stumbles down the stairs in what when I was a child you would wear to sleep, not to school. She has a hand covering her eyes, “tired,” she says, and we instinctively lower our voices. Because we are considerate parents like that.

She places coffee in front of me and our daughter and I drink it even though it never tastes like it used to when we were younger.

Our youngest daughter bounces down the stairs even though she doesn’t have to be up for another hour and she happily dances around, getting a fake smile from her mother and a glare from her sister and I, I just stare at her. Because even thought with the age difference between her and our other daughter it isn’t hard to know that she was an accident, but she is the best thing in my world.

She twirls over to me and pulls at my sleeve and announces that she will become a firefighter when she grows up. Not wants to be, will be. It changes everyday but she never hesitates. I don’t tell her that there is a part of my brain that tells me I would rather her be a lawyer or a doctor or at least something that paid more than my job and wouldn’t get her almost killed everyday, but I smile, real, mind you, not one of my wife's fake ones, and I pull her into my lap and tell her that that’s wonderful. Because what gets me through my life everyday is knowing that maybe with her I can succeed and maybe she can become a person worth something. I have given up on myself and my wife and my eldest daughter, and terrible as that sounds, I will not, and can not, give up on my youngest. I swear to God she will never become like us because she has the potential to be someone amazing.

Her name is Katie. And she gets me through my life everyday.