met Bobby’s goodbye kiss head-on, cringing at my own blend of sleep and coffee breath. Bobby didn’t seem to mind.
He grabbed his thermos and laptop bag, patted around for his wallet and keys. “Maybe we can leave around seven?”
“Sounds good.”
I emptied the rest of the coffee from the pot, swirled it with cream and sugar and reached for the remote. These were my private moments each morning—coffee, the Boston Globe and whatever dishy gossip was happening on the Today show. At work, I would be slammed—first our weekly departmental meeting, with its twenty-bullet-point agenda, then the dozens of students I would see, some in two-minute bursts while I helped them find the right form or directed them to the right staff member, and others for long, tear-streaked discussions that began with a question about registering for fall classes and ended with a general unburdening about the difficulties of balancing work and school, the impossibilities of child care, the unreliableness of their transportation.
I flipped from NBC to MSNBC to CNN, dodging commercials. Like the rest of America, I was on election overload, but it was an itch I couldn’t resist scratching. What had happened overnight? Who had said what on Twitter? Bobby and I rarely talked politics—not because we weren’t interested in elections or invested in their outcome, but because there were sticking points, touchy subjects that led us from reason to argument in about sixty seconds flat. “I thought people from the Midwest were supposed to be conservative,” Bobby would tease.
“That’s a stereotype,” I would remind him, and besides, it was a long time since I’d been in the Midwest.
I heard news of a suicide bombing at a market in Pakistan, then the financial report. The Dow was up, and that was a good thing. Thirty-five years old and I still had only a basic grasp of the stock market, although for the first time in my life, I actually had money there, in the form of a direct transfer from my monthly paycheck. I stretched and stood, making my way back to the sink. Behind me the news had switched back to the national scene, to politics. That’s when I heard the name Mabrey and wheeled around. It was as if I could face him head-on, as if he were in the room with me, that slow grin on his face. My head went fuzzy with the white noise of memory—rushing and pulsing, things that were long buried threatening to rise to the surface.
The caption on the screen read Senatorial Sex Scandal.
I didn’t even know that I’d dropped the mug until I heard it shatter, the last inch of lukewarm coffee splattering on the tile and a small shard of ceramic nicking me in the shin.
And just like that, it all came back.
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