His fingers turn the coffee mug. Turn and turn and turn. He leans forward, shoulders hunching, and rests his elbows on the table.
“Yeah. About that.”
Before he can say more, my phone trills. I didn’t program that ring tone, Jacqueline did, to set her apart from her sister and, I suppose, from everyone else. I’d ignore the call, but the look on his face says he’s expecting me to take it. And the truth is, I’m glad for an excuse to stall this conversation, because I’m not at all sure where it’s going.
“Hi, honey.”
Jac walked at nine months and talked at eleven, and she hasn’t slowed down or stayed quiet since. She is my in-charge child, bold and opinionated, capable of compassion but not so great with tact. She resembles me more than her sister does, but she’s absolutely her father’s girl.
“I wanted to wish you Happy Birthday today, because I’m going to be camping on the weekend. No cell service.” She launches into the conversation without much preamble, but I can hear the smile in her voice. “Happy Birthday, Mama! Sorry I won’t be home for it.”
“It’s fine. When you get to be my age, birthdays aren’t such a big deal.” Ross is the one who believes that, not me. I’d make my birthday a month-long holiday if I could, but it’s kind of hard to celebrate it alone. “Thanks, though. Who’s going camping?”
“Just me and Jeff. State park. Roughing it.” Jac’s laugh is almost identical to the trilling tone she programmed into my phone, all burbling bubbles, the warble of a bird. “Tents and everything.”
“Sounds fun. Be careful,” I add, because I have to and she expects it, not because I fear my daughter will be reckless. She always knows where she’s going and how long it will take to get there.
I envy her that.
“Gotta go. Happy Birthday!”
“Thanks.”
“Make Daddy take you to dinner or something.”
“I will,” I tell her, though at that very moment I’m not sure I’ll be hungry for a long, long time. “Bye.”
Call disconnected, I give Will a small smile. “My daughter.”
“It’s your birthday?”
“Sunday,” I tell him with a small shrug.
“Got any big plans?”
“No. It’s kind of a milestone birthday,” I say suddenly, revealing something I wasn’t expecting to tell him. “Not a big one. Halfway to the big one, I guess.”
Will’s smile crinkles lines at the corners of his eyes. “Forty?”
I’m so convinced he’s pulling my chain, I burst into laughter I hide immediately behind my hand. He looks confused, still smiling, his head tilting a little to look me over. “No?”
“Um, no. Thanks, though. Not quite. I’ll be forty-five.” It doesn’t sound so bad out loud, though in my head I’ve been testing it out for the past few weeks. “Seems like a lot bigger step from forty-four than it did from forty-three.”
The number five to me is the color Crayola used to call burnt sienna and we always called “baby poop brown.” It could be why it’s my least favorite number. Why this birthday, perhaps, has hit me so much harder than the last few, because when I think of being forty-five, the four—which has always been a nondescript and inoffensive cloud-gray—is overshadowed by that ugly color. I learned not to tell people that numbers had color and flavors had shape, about the prickly sensation in my fingertips when I drank wine. I’d never even told Ross, not really, although I was sure Katherine had a least a little bit of the same thing. We never discussed it, but once when she was a child she’d told me very seriously that the colors on her building blocks were wrong. They didn’t “match.”
“Wait for forty-eight,” he says. “That’s when you really look fifty in the face.”
It’s my turn to be surprised. I’d been sure I was older than him, and by more than a few years. “You’re kidding me.”
“I could show you my driver’s license,” he offers, but I wave my hand.
We stare at each other as if this new knowledge has changed things, and maybe it has. We’re both too old to behave like kids, maybe that’s what we just learned. Or maybe it’s that we’re both adults who know what they want and how to get it.
“So,” Will says after a few more seconds. “About what happened.”
The memory of feeling his skin unfurls in my mind like a flower, and I can’t stop the hitch of my breath or thump of my heart. Will has no more smile. There’s definitely no flirting in the gaze he cuts so carefully from mine. The table between us is so small his knees bump mine every time he shifts, and yet I feel so very, very faraway. When he looks at the plain gold band on my left hand, I know what he’s going to say.
“We shouldn’t have,” Will says.
“Of course we shouldn’t have. But we did.”
The veneer tabletop is patterned with interlocking circles, orange on cream. It would be retro if it wasn’t probably legitimately from the fifties. Will traces the circles, one to the other, making a figure eight. When he looks up at me, his gaze is flat, and I don’t know him well enough to tell if this is one of his usual expressions.
He waits a few seconds before answering. “I just don’t want you to think I’m trying to cause trouble for you or anything. That’s all.”
“I didn’t think that.” Of course I didn’t, just as I never dreamed I’d be sitting across from him, watching him struggle with how to tell me he doesn’t want to fuck me again.
“Good.” Will shifts, clearly uncomfortable and maybe more than a little relieved that I’m not...what? Going to go all Fatal Attraction on him?
If he knew me, he’d know that would never happen, but Will does not know me. We are strangers who shared an unexpected intimacy. Nothing more.
“I just don’t think that it would be...good.” He clears his throat. Awkwardness. I’m blushing just watching him work at finding the right words, his struggle as painful as if it were my own. “Um, you know. Long term. For either one of us. To keep on with this.”
“No.”
“I don’t think married people should fuck around,” he says suddenly, harshly enough to set me back.
There’s something important I need him to know. To make myself clear. “I wasn’t out looking to be unfaithful, Will. It just happened.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and I believe he means it.
“Don’t be,” I tell him, when I get up from the table and put a few dollars down to cover the cost of our order. “I’m not.”
Chapter Eight
The restaurant has been our favorite for a long time, since we moved
