Excerpt from This Angel on My Chest by Leslie Pietrzyk, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"There's a bug on the wall," you might say, pointing, hand outstretched, forcing him finally to look up and follow to see where your hand was pointing. You'd repeat: "There's a bug on the wall."

Still he'd say nothing.

"Do you see it?" you'd ask.

He'd nod.

So you'd grab a tissue and squish the bug, maybe letting out a sharp sigh, as if you knew you weren't the one who should be doing this. Or, if it were a big, messy bug like a cricket, you might scoop it up and drop it out the window. Sometimes, if you waited too long, the bug (silverfish, in particular) would scurry into the crack between the wall and carpet, and you'd imagine it reemerging in the future: bigger, stronger, braver, meaner. Bugs in the bathtub were easiest, because you could run water and wash them down the drain. You learned many different ways to get rid of bugs.

He never said, "Thank you for killing the bugs." He never said that he was afraid of bugs. You never accused him of being afraid of bugs.

FIVE

He kept his books separate from yours. Certain shelves on certain bookcases were his; others were yours.

Maybe it made sense when you were living together, before you were married. If one of you had to move out, it would only be a matter of scooping armloads of books off the shelves, rather than sorting through, picking over each volume, having to think. It would allow you to get out fast. Plus, with separate shelves, he could stare at his long, tidy line of hardcovers, undisturbed by the scandalous disarray of your used paperbacks. He liked to stare at his books with his head cocked to the right—not necessarily reading the titles, just staring at the shelf of books, at their length and breadth and bulk. You never knew what he was thinking when he did this.

After your wedding, when you moved into the new house, you said something about combining the books, maybe putting all the novels in one place and all the history books in another and all the travel books together and so on, like that. He was looking out the window at the new backyard, at the grass no one had cut for weeks and weeks. Finally, he said, "We own every last damn blade of grass."

"What about the books?" you asked. You were trying to get some unpacking done. There were boxes everywhere. The only way to walk through rooms was to wind along narrow paths between stacked boxes. There were built-in bookcases in the living room by the fireplace—two features the realtor had mentioned again and again, as if she knew that you were imagining sitting in front of a fire, reading books, sipping wine, letting the machine take the calls. As if she knew exactly the kind of life you had planned.

"I'll do the books," he said. But he didn't step away from the window.

It was a nice backyard, with a brick patio, and when you'd stood out there for the first time, during the open house, you'd thought about summer nights with the baseball game on the radio and the coals dying down in the grill and the lingering scent of medium-rare steak and a couple of stars squeezing through the glare of the city to find the two of you.

Again you offered to do the books; you wanted to do the books. You wanted all those books organized on the shelves; his and yours, yours and his.

"I never thought I'd own anything I couldn't pack into a car," he said.

You felt so bad you started to cry, certain only you wanted the house, only you wanted the wedding. "Is it so awful?" you asked.

He reached over some boxes to touch your arm. "No, it's not awful at all," he said, and it turned out that this was what you really wanted—not the patio, not the built-in shelves next to the fireplace, not the grass in the backyard, but the touch of his hand on your arm.

You did the books together, and suddenly something about keeping them separate felt right, as if now you realized that the books would be fine on separate shelves of the same bookcase, in the house you'd bought for the life you had.

SIX

He once saw a ghost. He was mowing the lawn in front, and you were in back clipping the honeysuckle that grew over the fence. Your neighbor—an original owner who'd bought his house for seven thousand dollars in 1959—wanted to spray kerosene and set the vines on fire, but you said no. You liked the smell of honeysuckle on June nights. You liked the hummingbirds flitting among the flowers in August. You even liked all that clipping, letting your mind go blank as you wrestled with the vines, cutting and tugging, yanking and twisting and pulling—knowing that whatever you cut would grow back by the end of the summer, that in the end the honeysuckle would always come back, maybe even if your neighbor burned down the vines.

Excerpted from This Angel on My Chest by Leslie Pietrzyk. Copyright © 2015 by Leslie Pietrzyk. Excerpted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.