Chapter 10 The Anniversary He Missed
Lesley
Our seventh wedding anniversary fell on the second Friday in December.
I didn’t forget about it. I’d been aware of it approaching for weeks, the way you’re aware of a step in the dark that you know is there.
It was circled on the paper calendar in the condo kitchen, because I’d circled it in October before any of this happened, when I’d still been planning a surprise.
I’d been going to book the little inn in Crested Butte where we spent our first anniversary and tell him about it at breakfast.
We’d stayed in the room at the top of the stairs that first December, under a slanted ceiling, with a cast-iron woodstove in the corner that Hank had insisted he could light.
He’d grown up in the mountains, he said.
He’d been lighting woodstoves since he was six.
He crouched in front of it in his boxers and a Nordic sweater for twenty minutes, building an elaborate structure of kindling and newspaper, and lit it with a great flourish, and the whole room filled with smoke because he’d forgotten to open the flue.
I laughed so hard I rolled off the bed onto the braided rug.
He opened every window in the room, in December, at nine thousand feet, and we huddled under the quilts in our coats until the smoke cleared, still laughing.
Then he lit it again, properly, and we stayed in that room for most of the next two days.
I’d thought about that trip every December since. It was one of the memories I kept for the days when I needed to remember why I’d married him.
By the second week of December, I was sixteen weeks pregnant and just starting to need maternity jeans, and I had not booked the inn.
Thanksgiving had come and gone. I’d spent it with Heather and Jo and six of their friends in their house in Park Hill, a loud, crowded, wonderful afternoon with two turkeys because Jo and Heather had never agreed on brine versus dry rub and had stopped trying.
I’d sat at the long table between a sculptor named Tomás, who made enormous steel pieces for public parks, and a nurse from Heather’s unit who wanted to know everything about the ladder rescue and then, when she saw my face, asked about my work instead.
I ended up spending forty-five minutes explaining to both of them why the Denver Public Library’s central building was the most misunderstood piece of architecture in the city.
Tomás disagreed with me loudly. I enjoyed it enormously.
When Heather stood up to give her annual toast, she thanked everyone for coming and Jo for the dry rub, which was wrong, and then she looked down the table at me and said, “And to Les, who is here, and who is okay.” Everyone raised their glasses.
Nobody asked where Hank was. Pepper stole a roll off my plate while I wasn’t looking, and Moose stole the second one while I was.
Hank had gone to his parents’ house in Evergreen.
He’d texted me in the morning to say he hoped I was having a good day, and that he was thankful for me and the baby, and that he didn’t need a reply.
I’d replied anyway. I’d told him I hoped his mother’s pie crust had turned out.
It had been the most normal exchange we’d had in weeks, and it had left me aching for the rest of the afternoon.
On the morning of our anniversary, I woke up at six, lay in bed, and waited to see what he would do.
I’ll admit that. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t wonder.
For seven years, Hank’s anniversary gifts had been extravagant and beautifully chosen and, more often than not, delivered with an apology attached.
I half expected a hundred roses at the condo door, or a jewelry box by courier, or an eight-page handwritten letter.
At seven fifteen, my phone buzzed.
Happy anniversary, Les. I’m not going to ask for anything today. I hope the baby let you sleep.
That was all.
I sat up in bed and read it several times. Then I put the phone down on the nightstand and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, because I hadn’t expected the restraint in that message to hit me harder than a hundred roses would have.
I texted back after a while. Thank you. Happy anniversary. The baby is apparently practicing gymnastics at 3 a.m.
He sent back a single heart and nothing else.
It was the fifth anniversary I kept thinking about as I got dressed for work. I couldn’t stop it, so I let it come.
Two years ago. Hank had planned that one himself, which was rare and which I’d loved.
He’d booked the chef’s table at Tavernetta, the restaurant near Union Station where he’d proposed.
He’d told me weeks in advance. He’d told Cheryl to clear his entire afternoon.
He’d bought me a pair of diamond earrings, which I knew because I’d found the box in his sock drawer and put it back without saying anything, smiling for days.
At three thirty that afternoon, he’d called me at work.
A construction worker named Dave Ortiz had fallen from scaffolding at the resort site in Telluride.
He was alive, but he’d been airlifted to Grand Junction with a broken back, and his wife was twenty-four and six months pregnant and had never flown on a plane.
Hank was going to fly her there himself, and stay until he knew Dave would be okay.
I hadn’t argued. I’d told him to go. Of course I’d told him to go. A man was badly hurt on a job site Hank owned, and his young wife needed help. If Hank had stayed in Denver for dinner, I’d have thought less of him.
What happened next was the part I needed to remember clearly.
At nine that night, he’d texted to say Dave was out of surgery and stable, and that he was going to fly back to Denver and be home by midnight. We can still do dessert. I’ll bring something from that bakery on Larimer. We can salvage the night.
I’d been sitting in our kitchen in my nice dress, which I’d put on out of stubbornness at six o’clock in case he somehow made it back. I’d read his text and felt the whole evening go cold.
I’d called him instead of texting. I told him I was proud of him for going to Grand Junction and I meant it.
I also told him that he shouldn’t bother racing home at midnight to pretend the evening could be saved.
I said our anniversary had been today, and today was over, and I wasn’t going to sit up waiting for a consolation prize so he could feel better about it.
I told him to stay in Grand Junction, get some sleep, and fly back in the morning like a reasonable person.
Then I’d hung up, called Heather, and gone out.
We’d gone to the jazz club on Welton Street and I’d had one glass of very good champagne and danced with a retired dentist named Harold who told me I had excellent posture.
I’d gotten home at one in the morning to find Hank asleep on the sofa in his suit, having flown back anyway.
He’d bought a slice of every cake the bakery had left.
In the morning, we’d had it out properly.
I’d told him that his going to Telluride had never been the problem.
The problem was that it was always something.
That the Telluride accident was genuinely important and I didn’t resent it for a second, but it had come on top of four years of things that were less important, and I was tired of being the easiest plan to cancel.
He’d been devastated. And he’d done what Hank always did when he was devastated.
He’d made a grand gesture. In the spring he took me to Tuscany for two weeks, a villa outside Montepulciano with a pool and a cook and no Wi-Fi.
He’d left his work phone with Neil. It had been one of the happiest times of my life.
For months afterward he’d been different, attentive and present and home.
Then slowly, so slowly I could never point to the exact week it happened, he’d drifted back.
That was the whole story of my marriage in one anniversary. Something legitimate. Me responding like an adult. Me refusing to wait around. A beautiful apology. Real change for a while. And then the undertow pulling him back out, and me standing on the beach again.
I had never been passive in that story. I’d said what I needed. I’d gone dancing. I’d refused to reward the midnight dessert. And I’d still ended up here, sixteen weeks pregnant, in a condo I’d bought when I was twenty-six, reading an anniversary text over my morning toast.
The restraint in his message this morning was new. I could see that. I didn’t know yet whether it meant anything.
I went to work. I ran a three-hour coordination meeting with the structural engineers on the Larimer Street project and caught an error in their load calculations that would have cost the client ninety thousand dollars.
My boss, Gail, took me to lunch afterward and asked, carefully, how I was holding up, and I told her the truth, which was that some days were hard and today was one of them, and that I was glad to be at work.
That night, I had dinner with Heather and Jo and Amy at a Thai place in Highland.
None of them mentioned the date, which I suspected they had agreed on in advance.
Amy told a long, funny story about Neil trying to assemble a crib for his sister’s baby shower and accidentally building it inside out.
Jo laughed so hard she had to put her head on the table.
I laughed too, more than I’d expected to.
Near the end of dinner, Jo raised her glass of Thai iced tea and said, without any particular emphasis, “To Lesley, who caught a ninety-thousand-dollar load error before lunch.” I’d texted Heather about it from the office.
We clinked glasses. Nobody said anything about Hank, and nobody said anything about anniversaries.
It was the kind of kindness that only works when people know you well enough to know exactly which thing not to say.
When I got home, there was a small box on the mat outside my door.
My first thought was that he’d broken his word already, that he’d come to the condo when I’d told him not to. Then I saw the shipping label. It had come by regular mail from a bookshop in Boulder.
Inside was a secondhand copy of a book I’d mentioned wanting months ago, a guide to native Colorado wildflowers with watercolor illustrations, the kind of thing I’d pore over on a Sunday morning.
There was no card from Hank. There was only the bookshop’s printed receipt, dated the week before Thanksgiving, with a requested delivery date of today.
He’d ordered it weeks ago and timed it to arrive now. And then he’d sent it without a note, without asking for a response, and without a single word about what it meant.
I sat on the sofa with the book open on my lap, looking at a watercolor of blue columbines, for a long time.
I didn’t text him about it. Not that night.