In your dream Dave will pass a note up front to your wife and she will look at you like, could you get that please, I’m trying to drive here, and you will take the note which says that it seems only fair that he should be able to have more sharing time with her.
The only dream you will have about him will be this one.
In the summary of your dream he will have begun spending more time with you and your family. Mostly you will not see him, but you will know he is there. You will feel him there. At dinner, for instance, he will not exactly be at the table eating with you. Or when you are on the patio and your son is shooting baskets and your wife is looking around the garden for something that is not perfect—something she can trim or clip or cut so that maybe her sadness will go away—he might not exactly be sitting on the wrought-iron swinging love seat with you but he will be around somewhere. Lying on your side of the bed for instance, with his feet crossed at the ankles, switching the top foot now and then and reading a Rolling Stone magazine. Or he might be in your son’s room watching TV with his fingers locked behind his head. Or he might be in the basement looking around for heavier dumbbells to do curls with.
In the scene of this dream, though—in the first scene—you will be in your wife’s old Volvo and you will not be able to see into the back seat from the passenger side because of how gigantic the car is in your dream, and because of your limited height, but you know that he is in the back seat entertaining your son like a very fun uncle.
It will be quiet in the front seat as it always is. In your dream Dave will pass a note up front to your wife and she will look at you like, could you get that please, I’m trying to drive here, and you will take the note which says that it seems only fair that he should be able to have more sharing time with her. That is how he will put it in your dream: sharing time. When he passes the note to her you will think this is a term they have used with each other before, that it is one of the things they talk about, one of their terms. After the line about how it only seems fair that he should have more sharing time with your wife, the note will also say this: not just time, but bed time, time in bed together. The note will also indicate specific days that should be considered for his sharing time in bed with her. Her birthday is one of the days, and there is one other day stipulated on the note, but when you awaken from your dream you will not be able to recall what that day was. Some other special day.
Wait, wait, wait. It is not a note. He is asking this out loud from the back of her Volvo where he mostly sits when he is with your family. She will put her tortured forehead in her hand while he asks this aloud of her (it is not a question for you). She will rub her temples with her thumb and fingers as if to say in your dream, I can’t believe Dave is asking this aloud in this car with you there riding shotgun, as if to say: this is getting difficult, this living together with both of you.
This request of his will hover over the rest of your dream. It will be as if you and Dave are waiting for her response, going about the day and wagging your tails in anticipation for her response when she comes in the room.
In the next scene of your dream Dave will be making breakfast in the kitchen, but not your real kitchen on Marengo Street. You will be thankful, when you wake up from your dream that it was not your real kitchen on Marengo Street in which he was making breakfast. He will make breakfast first, for her.
When he walks past you to bring your wife her breakfast you will think two things in your dream. You will be a little surprised at first that he seems pretty comfortable being so present in that house these days—not being in another room or being hidden behind the gigantic front seat of the Volvo. When you see the breakfast he has cooked for her—sunnyside-up eggs and wheat toast—you will think the second thing, you will think, Sunnyside-up eggs? Wheat toast? In all the years you have been married to her, plus the six months you knew her before you were married, she has never even forked one bite of egg into her mouth.
In your dream you will almost be laughing at that breakfast. You will think, she’s going to absolutely hate that breakfast, and you, Dave, are going to have to turn right back around and march into that kitchen and make her something else. And you will be like, where did you even get the wheat bread from? We are not even a wheat bread family.
But then you will be surprised, in your dream, to find that she seems to like sunnyside-up eggs. She seems to like them very much. And she will look at you as if to say, Yes, Petey. Okay? I like eggs like this. I like sunnyside-up eggs, okay? I like wheat toast.
You will watch her eat while Dave returns to the strange kitchen to continue making breakfast. It will almost make you sick to see her wipe the wheat toast through the bleeding yolk of the eggs. That is how much you thought she hated eggs and wheat toast.
In your dream, then, Dave will offer you some of his breakfast, right off his own plate. And like an idiot—maybe because you do not want to be a bad sport, and maybe because you are hungry—you eat around the yolk of the eggs and you eat most of the toasted wheat bread, and he will stand there holding the plate for you while you eat, and he will look at you when he thinks you are done and he will leave you then with the remainder of the food and sit next to your wife and finish the breakfast he has made.
In your dream, it will be as if you are waiting for her to make up her mind. To decide what to do about the request he made of her out loud in the Volvo, about it only being fair that he gets a little more bed time with her on special days—on her birthday and what was that other day? For the life of you, you will not remember what that other day was. That other special day.
Billy Lombardo is the founder and Artistic Director of Polyphony H.S., a student-run national literary magazine for high school writers. He is the author of The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories (BkMk Press 2005). His novel-in-stories, How to Hold a Woman (OV Books) was published in June 2009. Billy teaches English lit and Creative Writing at The Latin School of Chicago.
For more on upcoming readings and events, visit billylombardo.com
