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She nods her head, too, hoping that is enough affirmation so he shuts up.
“I’m thinking about going back out there,” he continues.
Apparently not.
“They are sponsoring a silent meditation retreat in November out in the Santa Ynez Valley. Two weeks.”
She decides she has done her part, and doesn’t say anything else, focuses on the road. The morning is slipping away, the day carving out ahead of them: sunshine and warm air, blue skies as far as the eyes can see. This is why she was excited to move out here, originally. Days like this. Drives like this. Instead of spending Saturday afternoons the terrible ways that people in a city can spend Saturdays—shopping, eating too much brunch, seeing friends they half wish they weren’t seeing—she and Thomas would be out here together. Taking long car rides, the radio playing some forgotten song, watching the world around them. Gwyn would make sandwiches for lunch. And they would stop in a quiet restaurant for a fried fish dinner or a decent steak, good cheap wine.
She had this pair of cut-off jean shorts she liked to wear for these rides. They were white and tiny, crawling only to the top of her thighs, cutting her in just the right way so that her thighs looked brown and round and endless. Thomas used to hold her there, at the short’s edges, most of the day, his hands between her bare thighs.
The last time she put those shorts on must be eight years ago now, those Saturday afternoon rides a thing of the past. Thomas had been traveling to a lot of conferences that fall, and Georgia had just left for her freshman year of college, and Gwyn started spending her newfound free time with Moses Wilder, a dentist in town. (A divorced dentist! Could there be anything less sexy? Maybe only one named Moses.)
Moses Wilder.
It was all innocent enough at first. Moses had two big sheep-dogs, and she would go with him when he’d walk them in the morning. She would go for walks with him, and those dogs, and let him pay
attention to her. It got less innocent, she guesses, when she began going on the evening walks as well, and let them end with a glass of bourbon on Moses’s porch, and a different kind of attention. But one evening, she wore the shorts to meet him. And after he handed her the bourbon and sat down beside her, he reached for her, the same way Thomas used to, and it could have been Thomas’s hand on her thighs, it could have been Thomas, and that was too much.
She never saw Moses again. She did what she had to do. She threw herself back into her house, her home, back into Thomas in the ways she still could. She threw out the shorts. She only let herself cry for Moses once. This doesn’t make her anyone’s hero. This is just what you do. When you put a marriage first. When you remember what you promised. When you want to remember and make it count.
“Have you seen my cell phone, by the way?” Thomas turns toward her, putting his hand on the back of her seat. “I was sure I packed it, but I got to California and couldn’t find it anywhere.”
Gwyn squeezes the steering wheel. “No, I haven’t seen it.”
“Are you sure? I don’t think I brought it with me.”
“Are you expecting me to change my mind if you ask enough times?” she asks, harsher than she means to. She tries to think of a way to dial back, make it less aggressive. But this is how she feels toward Thomas—aggressive. This is what she is learning, how things shift inside when you hide the truth. They shift irreconcilably. She takes a deep breath in, forces herself to stay calm. “Maybe it will just show up.”
“How do you figure?”
She shrugs. “Lose something else, throw your keys out the window, and look for them instead. And, right then, when you really start looking for your keys, like under the bed, or in the backyard. Bam.”
“Bam?”
“There the cell phone will be.”
He smiles at her, really smiles at her, because he likes it when he thinks she is being weird, quirky. He finds it endearing, and she knows it reminds him of who he thinks she used to be, who he thinks she isn’t exactly anymore. But before she can enjoy it, the small return of affection, her cell phone starts to ring, PRIVATE coming up on the caller ID.
She motions for him to give her a minute, and picks it up. “This is Gwyn.”
“Ms. Lancaster?”
Lancaster. Her maiden name. So she knows immediately who it is. Eve. Eve, the Caterer. Finally. She has her on the phone. This is what she needed to make sure everything is on track for tonight.
Gwyn covers the receiver, sneaks a look at her husband. He is looking out the window, paying no attention to the conversation whatsoever.
“I just got your messages from this morning,” Eve says. “I’m sorry about that. I was surfing, and we had no cell phone coverage to speak of, but . . .”
But. Gwyn stops listening, wants to hear the rest of what her husband is saying instead. “You know,” she says. “I’m going to have to call you back, okay?”
She flips the phone shut, turns back to her husband.
“Sorry, what were you saying?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I was just thinking . . . it must be something about the way we were talking . . . but I was thinking about those Saturday rides we used to take, those long rides. Something about this road, maybe. Something about the way you’re taking us home is making me think of it.”
She is silent. Me too, she could have said. Because she was thinking it too. She got there even before he did. But she doesn’t want to give him this. She doesn’t want to say anything.
