December

I turned up, knocked on the door bearing nothing. No flowers, no bottle of wine, no melt-in-your-mouth truffles to carry her through one tedious moment to the next like a bridge. I was bundled against the winter night wind, it blew up my jeans and found my ankles while I waited. When she opened the door I saw immediately the sorrow, how weary she’d become from the pain of a floundering marriage. We embraced tightly.

It took some time to get the children to bed. The excitement of my presence fueled them, miniature whirling dervishes, playing out their energy in loose, free spins. She put dinner together on a chartreuse tray: baby carrots, kalamata olives, hummus, guacamole, blue corn chips, sharp cheddar. She poured sparkling wine into two glasses and we arranged ourselves with pillows by the smoky fire and talked while music played too loudly and children feigned sleep. We talked around her pain giving it wide berth.

As I was leaving she gave me a chocolate orange, it was heavy and smelled like Christmas. This is like her, giving and giving to those she loves, a heart always ready and open to love.

When I got home, he was still awake.
“Hi.”
“How’s it going?” I said, nodding to the stacks of papers surrounding him.
“Boring...” He smiled sleepily.

We hugged. I kissed his ear, smelled him. In the kitchen, I pounded the chocolate orange hard on the linoleum floor. It segmented inside the wrapper like magic. I peeled it, put a wedge in my mouth, and put the rest in the refrigerator so the ants wouldn’t find it in the night.

At 2:30 AM I lay awake. I got up and walked through the dark house. The full moon lit up the backyard, shone down brightly on the frozen banana trees. Crumpled old men of the backyard. The leaves turned in on themselves, brown and papery. I couldn’t imagine how they would ever recover.