Six
Six
Sunday
Ellie’s phone vibrates across the nightstand, pulling her away from sleep. Confused and still half dreaming, she briefly believes she’s at home, the whole weekend just a terrible dream. The phone continues to gyrate. Ellie blinks her eyes open. Several familiar objects take shape: the ceiling fan droning above her, the beach art, her suitcase, her mother’s heating pad still warm beneath her back. She reaches for her device and notes the time: 4:16 a.m. Great. She’ll never fall back asleep. Maybe not ever again.
Ellie presses her body against the headboard and swipes through the pesky notifications that have woken her, nearly all of them from her weather app. Apparently, a bad storm is brewing back at home. There are flood warnings, thunderstorm warnings, high-wind warnings. Ellie instantly panics as she imagines the turbulence they’ll no doubt experience on their return flight—the overhead compartments flying open, the emergency oxygen masks dropping from the ceiling. Super. The way things have been going, she won’t be surprised if their plane just falls like a dead bird from the sky. Before she paints the catastrophic scene any further, she notices one more alert from the airline. Their flight—thankfully? regrettably?—has already been delayed. Twice.
Her mind too busy for her to lie back down, Ellie slides on her sweatshirt and breezes through the condo. In the living room, Maggie and Jonah are asleep—feet to feet—on the sectional, the muted television still aglow. Ellie clicks it off and then adjusts Maggie’s blanket, pausing long enough to softly trace the curves of her brilliant, freckle-marked face. Next to her, Jonah releases a throaty snore, half his thick body sliding off the couch cushions. Ellie sighs, wanting to walk away. But she can’t help herself. Before she moves on, she adjusts his blanket for him, too. Some habits—despite the situation—feel impossible to break.
The condo quiet, Ellie navigates back toward the kitchen, figuring she’ll brew herself some coffee, maybe watch the sun as it rises from behind the palm trees through the window. She steps into the darkness of the room, opens the fridge to pull out the bag of ground beans.
“It’s already prepped,” a voice announces from behind her.
“What the—” Ellie jumps, instigating a fresh wave of pain in her back. “Mom?” She blinks. Bunny is seated at the table, wearing her tropical-motif robe, her gold cross, like always, dangling at her neck. “What are you doing?” she asks. “Why are you awake?”
Bunny doesn’t answer. Instead, she stands and clicks on the coffeepot. “Your flight’s delayed.” She pulls two mugs down from the cabinet. “There’s a bad storm. You’ll probably spend half the day stuck in the airport,” she reports, the bearer of excellent news. “For whatever reason, Maggie’s flight is still on time.”
Ellie sits. The coffee machine hisses and sputters, like a caffeinated dragon.
“What are you going to do when you go home, Ellie?” Bunny joins her daughter at the table. Her thinning, dyed-blond hair is brushed back away from her face, her skin a map of wrinkles and time.
“Well, to start, I plan to spend a few days wrapping my head around everything,” Ellie explains. “On Monday, Jonah and I agreed that I’ll call the attorney first thing, and then I plan to give myself a little personal day, maybe read, or take a walk, or do something for myself to help decompress and—”
“You’re missing my point,” Bunny interrupts. “What will you do ? Things won’t be the same when you go back. Your life. The house. Everything will be different.” The room begins to fill with the scent of her mother’s favorite breakfast blend, a comforting contrast to the current conversation. “I don’t think you realize how much of an impact your marriage has had on your life.” She exhales long and slow, like an accordion that sighs with an extended note. “You won’t be you without it.”
Ellie lowers her eyelids, wishing she could fall back asleep—a hopeful fantasy. “That’s a slightly outdated view of things, Mom,” she points out and flutters her eyes open again.
“Oh, don’t give me that,” Bunny snaps. “I don’t want to hear all that modern-day, patriarchal nonsense.” She clears her throat, settling herself. “You know what I mean. And you know it’s true.”
In recent weeks, Ellie has spent more time than she’d care to admit visualizing what life without Jonah might be like. She envisions quiet evenings enjoying some television without the two of them fruitlessly bickering over what to watch. Simple dinners for one (certainly less cleanup) that will not involve them arguing about Maggie and the ways she’s changed or this foolish trip she continues to plan. No time wasted tidying up the mess of personal items—keys, used dishes, dirty socks—Jonah has left all over the place, like a breadcrumb trail he creates in case he ever gets lost and needs to find his way back.
Yes, Ellie thinks. Her world will be different. Finally, she will have time to herself to sit and to think and to breathe. Maybe she’ll have the space to do something for herself, to make something of her life, to carve out a more significant and noteworthy—a more appreciated—second act.
The coffee machine beeps, pulling Ellie back into the moment. “Look, Mom.” In need of a task, she stands to pour them each their hot morning brew. “I know this seems unfathomable to you.” She sets the mugs down on the table. Curls of steam rise from them. “But that’s not because Jonah and I are monsters. It’s because you and Dad have never gone through something like this, all right?” Ellie looks to her mother, in search of a sign on her face that maybe, even in the faintest way, some shred of her understands.
Bunny shakes her head. “Your marriage is important. Not just for you and Jonah. Not just for Maggie.” She sucks in her cheeks, like she knows something that Ellie has not quite figured out yet. “It’s important for all of us.” She exhales through her nostrils. “I’m not sure you realize this.”
Ellie’s chest feels like it’s been cast in concrete. “Things between us have just been so hard since Maggie left, Mom,” she tries to explain. “We’re not the same. Our marriage—I don’t know ...” Ellie trails off to collect her thoughts, though they’re scattered. There are too many of them. It’d be like scooping her hand across the beach with the goal of picking up only a single grain of sand.
“You two made a vow to each other, Ellie,” Bunny recounts, her mug still untouched. “Until death do you part.” She allows her words to float, like buoys for them to cling to for safety. “You don’t turn your back on something like that.”
Ellie sips her coffee now and thinks back to their wedding. They were so young, practically children, though they’d felt so grown up—so very adult—that day. The ceremony was held in their town at the Adams’s church, with Bunny’s preferred priest back home, Father Donovan, officiating. Ellie held a bouquet of magnolias—her favorite flower, which would later come to serve as her future daughter’s namesake—and wore a simple tea-length dress. Jonah was dressed in a navy-blue suit and a matching dapper bow tie. They were purely infatuated with each other that day, their love like helium. It lifted Ellie up, sent her floating in the clouds. She never wanted to come back down.
Father Donovan started the ceremony. Soon, the time arrived when he asked them both to repeat the vows back to him, like a pair of stylishly outfitted parakeets. All was fine until he arrived at the end of his script. That was when Ellie froze.
The priest sighed in a knowing fashion. He’d seen this sort of thing before. “There’s no reason for nerves.” He spoke slowly. “The line reads, ‘Un-til death ... do ... us ... part.’”
Ellie had understood him perfectly. She’d heard the line a million times in movies and at other people’s weddings. She knew it word for word. Still, when it applied to her own relationship, she couldn’t fully comprehend the somber sentiment contained within it. The idea of the end, the thought of them ever not being together and married, it was too much.
“Ellie?” Jonah had shifted on his feet. He suddenly looked a little pale beneath the church lights. “Are you okay?”
Ellie snapped to, shook her head—dismissing her feelings—and then quickly rattled off the line, desperate for them to hurry up and kiss.
I do, I do, I do, she thought as his mouth pressed into hers. Forever and forever and forever.
Back in Florida, Jonah exhales a loud, snorty breath in the next room. Across the table, Bunny finally pours a spiral of creamer into her coffee. “From what I can tell,” she continues while tapping a spoon against the rim of her mug, “thankfully, neither of you are dead yet.”
Their bags packed, the family steps outside into the swampy morning. The Bakers’ car has arrived. Ellie instantly notices that it’s the same driver (What are the chances?) and then does her best to mentally prepare herself for another video game–inspired joyride across the highway and back down a bustling International Drive.
“Thank you for everything,” Jonah says after he’s piled everyone’s respective baggage—some larger than others—into the trunk, as if he’s casually acknowledging a weekend’s worth of hospitality and not offering up one final bit of gratitude for the decades of kindness and love and memories that have come before it. He extends his arm and shakes Frank’s hand. The two men somberly lock eyes. “Really,” Jonah insists, not knowing when he’ll actually see these people—his family—again. “I mean it.” He steps away from Frank and pulls Bunny in for a long embrace. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it,” he whispers into her neck.
Following a few more hugs, the three of them gather into the car, like members of an impossibly sad parade. The doors hardly closed, their driver—who has zero time for pleasantries—zips backward out of his parking spot before any of them have even clicked their seat belts on.
Jonah wears his sunglasses, though it’s unclear if their purpose is to block out the sun or to conceal his watery eyes. “Everyone okay back there?” he asks from the front seat, not because it’s the appropriate question but because it’s habit, and some habits are not easy to break.
Maggie doesn’t say anything in response, only stares down at her lap. Ellie’s back throbs, but she turns to look through the rear window anyway. Bunny has her head dropped down on Frank’s shoulder, a soiled tissue in her aged hand. Ellie offers her parents one last pathetic wave— I’m sorry —before their driver, who fails to come to a full stop or to click on his blinker—erratically pulls the car out onto the main drag.
“We’re fine,” Ellie lies in response to Jonah’s question. She turns back around to face forward, pulls her seat belt strap over her body. “Everyone is fine.”