They’ve planned to talk today. About their marriage. They will do this in the garage in hushed tones with the throb of the washing machine drowning their words.

But not yet.

Now, he is reading a book to their eldest on the couch, doing the voices the older children like so much. He is stalling, she knows. Savoring the last few moments of the “before” times, when their family was still complete. She can hardly blame him.

She folds the laundry that’s been dumped on the opposite side of the sectional sofa. Mismatched socks, tiny underwear, white and worn. She has an irrational attachment to these underwear that should have been replaced long ago. They are thin and full of holes, and the exposed elastic snaps the girls’ skin painfully when it catches. But she cannot separate these underwear from the image of their wiggling bodies fresh from the bath, their tiny bottoms clad in nothing but this cotton. She cannot divorce the fabric from their fleeting childhood.

At last, she clears her throat.

He looks up with tired eyes and then kisses the head of curls on his lap, shifting the child to the couch. He rises with a sigh that carries the weight of a failed marriage.

“I’m going to help your mother with the laundry,” he announces as they step into the garage.

The garage is a storeroom stacked high with packages of bulk toilet paper and paper towels, giant boxes of chips and granola bars purchased from FoodMaxx, always with a coupon. He fingers a box of generic cereal, pretending to read the label. He blows air out his cheeks, the way he does when he breathes life on a dying fire in the woodstove. There’s not enough air in the world, she thinks.

“The dish soap is on sale, ” he says. “Two for one in the weekly ad.”

She lifts an eyebrow. She is not here to speak of dish soap. “My love,” she starts.

“The children,” he interrupts.

“The children see more than we know.”

“The house,” he says.

She sighs. “We cannot stay married for a house.”

He is killing time, as he always does, grasping at anything tangible: a house, a bottle of dish soap. She will not tether her life to such material things.

But then the door opens like a burst dam, and there is the eldest, her curls bouncing wildly. “The baby!” she wails. “He’s choking!”

She scrambles for the kitchen but her husband scrambles faster. There is the baby in his highchair, eyes wide, arms flailing, his mouth round in a silent scream. She is frozen. Panic claws up her neck like a rodent.

But her husband becomes someone else. He rips away the tray of the highchair, sending bits of cooked carrot spraying across the linoleum. In one motion, the baby is in his arms and then over his knee. The baby’s tiny back shakes with the strike of her husband’s chopping hand.

One strike. Two. Three. His body is rubber wobbling with impact.

Please, God. Please. She is not a religious woman: she rolls her eyes at their smiling neighbors returning from church in their paper doll clothes. But now, she prays.

A cough. And then a scream. The baby wails, his tiny lungs filling with air.

“There we go,” her husband is saying. He shushes and soothes, lifting the screaming baby to a shoulder. The other children are laughing now, their cheeks wide and streaked with tears. Her own heart falters, nearly stopping with relief.

She stares at her husband, who catches his breath with smiling eyes, and feels the overwhelming urge to extend an olive branch—some offering to the man who has just saved her baby’s life.

He is always saving their lives, she realizes. Saving a dollar at the store or an empty jar he insists will have use. The children’s artwork, long after they’ve forgotten it. He spares them from their parents’ arguments, so they may have one more moment of bliss.

And he saves her from herself—from her foolish belief that she should have been more.

For she is not a film star; that is not meant to be. Nor a politician or writer of ambitious papers and opinions. Deep down, she knows, she is none of these things.

She is the pot roast on Sundays; folded laundry in the basket. The neat stacks of her children’s clothes, ready for their day; the warm breast welcoming them home again. She is flannel sheets and sunscreen at the beach. She is the blood flowing through the circulatory system of her family. And blood does not tire of its journey. It keeps things alive.

“Maybe I will go to the store,” she says at last. “For the dish soap.” Her husband’s eyes float to hers, his brows lifting in surprise. “Best to buy when it’s on sale,” she adds.

Something shifts in her husband’s face then. His eyes turn glassy; the creases of his forehead soften like tilled soil in the wind. The baby is still crying on his shoulder, but he reaches a hand to touch hers.

And now, she too will kill time. So they all may survive.