said, and flicked him with her jean jacket.
“The tent was packed. Kids and parents and balloons and—they even had an elephant the kids could feed. You should have seen him sling his trunk around a banana. Ate the whole thing—peel and all.”
Last night the elephant wandered India again / and tore the darkness to shreds. One of the five passages her father had underlined. Elephants always made her think of Rumi.
“I just stood there, and kids came up and laughed and hugged me. And the parents would take our pictures. I love kids.”
Cass loved Ethan.
And she loved the views from the bridge, especially at dusk—to the right, the old Atlanta Water Works smokestack with faintly lit downtown Atlanta behind it, and to the left, tracks that led into grass and trees and sky. She paused at the top looking away from town.
He came up behind her and rested his chin on top of her head.
She pulled his arms around in front of her and ran her fingers over his knuckles. As she stared at the undeveloped land, she tried to visualize Ethan done with Afghanistan but couldn’t do it. What if he couldn’t do it—what if he couldn’t stop going? Ever since Tidal Flats, she’d been thinking of the agreement as something that would keep them together, but as a breeze swirled around them, releasing the overly sweet smell of tea olives, it occurred to her instead that the agreement could be the end of them.
11
The day after the circus, Cass arrived home with a small bag from the market. Ethan was sitting on the sofa facing the door. “Hey,” she said, “Wheeler’s fund-raiser gave me the idea of having a small thing at Howell—balloons, music, games, Fanny’s chocolate chip cookies. Saturday morning. I handed out flyers on the way home. And I included the GoFundMe info …” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ethan’s travel camera bag on the wheelbarrow.
He stood. “I’m going back,” he said. “Friday.”
“Oh,” she said. He wouldn’t be here Saturday.
He stepped toward her.
She held up her hand to stop him, and they just stood there miles apart. On the table she’d set that morning—two plates, two napkins, two wine glasses. She let go of the bag of groceries and heard the crack of breaking glass, smelling the wine before she thought of it and turning away from Ethan and the mess and going around the other sofa toward the French doors, which she threw open. She just had to hold on a little longer. Soon, it would always be two.
He squeezed in beside her on the tiny French balcony, but she scooted as far as she could to the right, jamming herself against the edge of the railing.
“It’s nothing to get upset about,” he said.
“You don’t get to decide what I’m upset about.”
“Cass—”
“I suspected you were going back. When you mentioned the cameras. But I was hoping you wouldn’t.” Unable to reach out and touch him, unable to stop him—she wrapped her arms around herself. “I agreed to three years,” she said, “and three years isn’t up yet.”
Then she stepped inside, away from him, to get used to that space between them. Again.
But she could feel him behind her. The front door was so white. Too white. She knocked into a plant.
“Today CNN decided to back us. Which is huge. Now we have money for more cameras, several large printers, and photo paper. They’ve hired me to document the project. One last trip. Three weeks and I’m done.”
She stopped in front of the fireplace.
“These people, they don’t have anybody,” he said. “They need me.”
“But you said you wanted to be with me.”
“I do want to be with you.” And he added, so quietly she almost missed it, “It’s not like your mother.”
But she couldn’t hear this from anyone else, not even Ethan. It belonged to her. She looked into his still blue eyes. “Don’t bring my mother into this.”
“Talk to me, please.”
She sat down on the fireplace ledge. “I don’t want you to go,” she said, tracing rectangle after rectangle of hard red brick.
He sat down across from her. “It’s just one more trip,” he said.
But that wasn’t the way it felt. She picked at the cracked mortar. Everybody in her life always chose there. A crumb of mortar popped out, right into the center of the rug, right into the eye of the blue storm. Now there was a hole in the mortar, and when she touched the brick beside it, it shifted.
After dinner, Cass called Vee, but she didn’t answer. It had to be over two weeks since they’d seen each other. They had talked, but they’d mostly texted, and here was another one. With Dillon. See you Saturday. Can’t wait to catch up!
Cass put her phone down and then picked it up again to check on the Fates, something she rarely did, wanting to leave work at work, but with each day that passed, the money problem seemed more real and their security at Howell, more fragile. When she clicked off, she headed down the hall to the bedroom.
Ethan was pulling a clean gray bottom sheet around a corner of their mattress.
“Do you miss sleeping on a real bed when you’re in Afghanistan?” she asked, picking up the top sheet.
“I never think about it,” he said. “But I miss sleeping with you.” He glanced at her while he covered another corner. “That, I do think about.”
She just stood there watching him on the other side—intently making up the bed.
He straightened. “Actually, I never think about it anymore. When I was first over there, I loved the pallets, being so close to the ground. I preferred that.”
She tossed him the clean, dark gray top sheet—which he let fall to the mattress.
“Sometimes,” he said, “it feels like you don’t like the part of me that loves Afghanistan.”
She looked at all the gray. “At first, I was afraid of it.” She looked over at him. “But I married all of you. I moved in here. With the blue wheelbarrow. And I hung your photos.”
It sounded, even to her, as if she were trying to convince herself.
“I want all of you. I just want all of you here.”
He swooshed open the top sheet. A storm cloud descending over the bed. Then he stopped again. “Cass, I need to go one more time. And, yes, I want to go, too. But you are the life I want. I don’t want a life over there.”
The bed was still between them, and something else was coming, she could feel it.
“Sometimes,” he said, more slowly this time, “it feels like you’re against me. Like Afghanistan is this part of me that
