We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

A simple, “See the game last night?” set him off. In the teachers’ lounge, he frightened people.

He only wanted to talk about things that he loved. This was a list of what he was: a good husband, a good father, a good teacher and a funny guy. He had always prided himself on his humor. It was that when he did it now, it came out deadly serious. Speaking his feelings was not the problem. No, Charles always prided himself on his effusiveness with the girls. He wasn’t like his brother Lyle, who once told him he only said “I love you” to his wife Ginny on Christmas, and even then, only every other year. He’d been good at being honest about his feelings before. He found, in the months since they split, that he was now embarrassingly earnest. He felt it keener than the systematic breakdown of his very body without Laurel. He wanted to talk to a crowd about something that he loved. Her voice was low and strangled, “What do you want to do?”Īnd now, months later, he knew the answer to that question.

She spared him that, in the end, she was kind about that. And since he couldn’t speak of Laurel and he couldn’t speak of his girls, tessellations would have to do.Ĭharles said, “I don’t think I can live here anymore.”Īnd Laurel had kept her head down so that he couldn’t see her cry.

He wanted to talk in public about something he loved. “If it’s not hard, it’s not worth it.” It wasn’t true.Ī whole class on tessellations: the subject didn’t deserve a full lesson, but that morning, crumpled on his bony couch, drinking the spit of grounds and lukewarm water that drooled from his second hand coffee maker, he’d bookmarked the graphs in his notebook, stared at the lecture notes he’d penciled for himself in his straight boxy hand, and what was left of his heart had gone out of him. But he knew the danger of those words now. It had excited him, it still excited him, that willingness to battle. She said, “If it’s not hard, it’s not worth it,” and he had believed her. “Everything has its place,” he’d said, “And when it’s in its place, it makes beauty.” Laurel said laughingly back, “That’s too easy.” She didn’t like easy. He’d told her how much he loved the idea. When Charles first met Laurel, he’d told her that. They should have been starting to graph but he just didn’t have it in him. Last period, they should have been covering sines and cosines. Charles had decided that morning that he would talk about tessellations. Her work has appeared in The Believer, American Short Fiction, Guernica, Kweli Journal, The Feminist Wire, Afro Pop Magazine, Green Mountains Review and other places. She received her MFA from Hunter College. The following is from Kaitlyn Greenidge's novel, We Love You Charlie Freeman.

We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge