Chapter 17
Bennett returned four days later with flowers and our postponed anniversary itinerary.
He called first.
I almost rewarded the improvement by agreeing to meet somewhere else, but his remaining belongings were boxed in the front hall. I told him he could come at three.
At three fifteen, he stood on the doorstep holding two dozen white roses. They were the flowers I'd carried at our wedding.
“Traffic,” he said.
“Of course.”
I let him into the hall, where his labeled boxes waited beneath the stairs. The navy sweater lay on top of his winter clothes.
“You've packed everything.”
“Not everything. There are two suits at the dry cleaner. They'll deliver to the apartment.”
He held out the flowers.
“I don't want those.”
“They're only flowers, Claire.”
“Then you won't mind keeping them.”
He set them on the floor beside the boxes. From inside his jacket, he removed a cream folder with the travel agent's logo.
“The Amalfi booking is still available,” he said. “Same hotels, same flights. I called them. We can go in September as planned.”
“We aren't going.”
“Listen before you decide.”
“I've decided.”
His thumb pressed against the edge of the folder. “I ended things with Laurel.”
“Laurel ended things with you.”
He looked startled. “She called you?”
“She came to the house.”
“Of course she did.” His bitterness arrived easily. “You two seem determined to compare notes instead of acknowledging that I was trying to be honest with both of you.”
“You told us opposite stories.”
“Because you needed different things.”
“Truth wasn't one of them?”
He exhaled and started again. “I'm willing to close the marriage. Completely. Counseling, whatever you need. I'll give up the apartment.”
“How generous.”
“Stop punishing every attempt I make.”
“I'm not punishing you. I'm leaving you.”
“After twenty years, you can't switch off what we are in three weeks.”
“I haven't.”
The anger went out of me as I looked at him. I still knew the small scar near his eyebrow, the one he'd gotten falling off a bike at nine. I knew he'd be hungry because he forgot lunch when he was nervous. I knew the roses would make him sneeze before he reached the apartment.
I loved parts of him. Perhaps I always would.
That didn't make him safe to trust.
“I haven't switched it off,” I said. “I wake up and reach for someone who isn't there. I find a television program we would have watched and forget for half a second that I don't want to call you. I packed the ugly bowl your mother gave us and cried for twenty minutes.”
His face softened. “Then don't do this.”
“Missing a marriage doesn't mean I should stay inside it.”
“We were good, Claire.”
“We were. Until being good became something you expected me to maintain alone.”
He opened the folder. Inside lay the itinerary I'd built eighteen months earlier. Capri, Ravello, Positano. A cooking class I'd chosen for him. A private garden tour he'd chosen for me. The reservations looked like evidence of people we'd meant to be.
“Come with me,” he said. “No Laurel. No Nate. Just us. We can remember.”
“I remember.”
“I'm your husband.”
“For now.”
“And you're my home.”
The sentence might once have saved him.
Now I heard what it meant. I was the person who remembered the pills, ordered the chicken, welcomed the clients and made his mother believe he'd selected her birthday flowers. Home wasn't a place he cared for. It was where he expected to be cared for.
“I don't want to be your home,” I said. “I want to be a person you could have lost before you decided to test it.”
“I know that now.”
“Yes.”
He looked toward the boxes. “Does he make you happy?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes he makes me furious.”
“That doesn't sound like much of a future.”
“It sounds like a man, not an escape route.”
I closed the folder and placed it on the top box.
“Laurel didn't end our marriage,” I said. “She entered because you'd already decided my loyalty required no care in return. That's what I can't forgive.”
“Can't or won't?”
“Both.”
The movers were due at four. Bennett stared at the boxes, then picked up the roses.
“Keep the itinerary,” he said.
“I don't want that either.”
He left it anyway.
At the door, he turned back. “I hope he understands what he's getting.”
“So do I.”
After he drove away, I carried the roses into the kitchen and gave them to Nina's youngest sous-chef, who was collecting serving platters from the supper.
The movers arrived seven minutes early. I signed the forms while two strangers carried my husband's life through the front door.
The blue bowl where Bennett dropped his keys remained on the hall table. A hairline crack ran through its glaze. I washed it and set it on the kitchen windowsill beside Nina's drying peach stones. The house didn't need to forget Bennett to belong to me.
His mother called while the moving truck was still outside.
“Bennett says you've sent all his things away,” she said.
“To the apartment he chose.”
“He made a terrible mistake, but men become foolish when they think they're getting old.”
“Women get old too. We don't all bring overnight bags to someone else's table.”
For twenty years I'd ordered her flowers, booked her trains and made sure Bennett called. I had loved her, but even that love had become another unnoticed task.
“Will I still see you?” she asked.
“Perhaps. But you'll need to call me yourself.”
“I can do that.”
“Good.”
It was a small boundary, late by two decades. I was proud of it anyway.
I kept the itinerary.
Not for Bennett.
For the woman who had planned every day and never once asked what she wanted to do alone.