15. Aster
— ? —
Aster
Amora’s next scheme arrives at dinner that same evening, disguised as an innocent suggestion.
“The bar in town does trivia night,” she announces over the soup. “You two should go.”
Flora chokes on her soup. “Mom.”
“You’ve been cooped up here for over a week. Fresh air. Social interaction. It’s healthy.”
“A bar isn’t fresh air.”
“Fine, then call it relationship maintenance.” Amora raises an eyebrow at her. “Cecilia’s interview isn’t for a few days yet. You can spare a few hours tonight.”
She has a point. Sitting around this cottage waiting for Cecilia to spin her lies is going to drive us both out of our minds.
“Some distraction might not be the worst idea,” I say carefully.
Flora shoots me a look that could cut glass. An hour later we’re walking into a bar called The Rusty Anchor, surrounded by locals who don’t give either of us a second glance.
The trivia is already underway when we get there, which means we’ve missed the first round, which Flora treats as a personal injustice within about ninety seconds of sitting down.
The place is exactly what you’d expect and somehow better for it.
Low ceiling, a hundred years of initials carved into the bar, a dog asleep under a stool that nobody seems to own.
There are maybe thirty people in here and every one of them knows every other one, and the only attention we get is a nod from the bartender and a woman near the door glancing at Flora and then away.
Two weeks ago I couldn’t get a coffee without somebody filming it, and here the only ripple in the room is the dog rearranging itself under the stool.
We claim a small table near the back. I order a beer I’m not going to finish, because I’m driving her mother’s car, and she orders wine.
“This is ridiculous,” Flora mutters.
“It’s trivia night.”
“My entire life has become a soap opera and my mother thinks bar trivia is the answer.”
“Maybe the answer is normalcy.” I lean back in my chair. “When’s the last time we did something like this? Just went to a bar and sat in it like regular people?”
She pauses with her drink halfway to her lips. “I don’t remember.”
“Exactly.”
The first question comes over the speakers. In what year did the first iPhone launch.
“2007,” Flora says automatically.
“Show-off.”
“It’s common knowledge.”
“For somebody who barely uses her phone.”
“I use it plenty. Just not for fame stuff.”
“Fame stuff isn’t a category.”
“It should be.” She takes a sip of wine. “Question two.”
The trivia continues. We’re terrible as a team, because she knows history and science and I know music and pop culture and neither of us can remember basic geography, but it’s fun. Genuinely fun.
The corner group is called Quiz Khalifa and they are running away with it.
Flora develops a personal grudge against them somewhere around question nine and starts keeping score on a napkin, which is a thing I’ve watched her do at every game night, every pub quiz, every board game we’ve ever played with people we barely know.
She is the most competitive person I have ever met about things that do not matter even slightly.
“They’re cheating,” she says.
“Nobody’s cheating at bar trivia.”
“That man just looked at his lap.”
“He could be looking at anything.”
“He’s looking at his phone, and when we beat them I want you to make eye contact with me so I can enjoy it properly.”
We do not beat them. We come sixth out of nine and she takes it extremely badly, and I sit there watching my wife be furious about a napkin scoreboard in a bar in Vermont and I’m so happy I can barely hold onto it.
Flora starts to relax, her shoulders dropping out of that defensive hunch she’s been carrying for a week, and a real smile breaks through when we somehow nail a question about nineties boy bands.
“I can’t believe you knew that,” I say.
“I had a poster of them in my room when I was twelve.”
“Cheating on me already back then.”
“Please. You weren’t even famous yet.”
“I was famous in my own mind.”
She laughs. She actually laughs, and the sound hits me like a physical thing and warms parts of me that have been cold for months.
Then some guy appears at our table.
He’s tall and built, clearly somebody who works with his hands for a living. Flannel shirt, easy smile, two beers in hand.
“Hey there.” He smiles at Flora. “Don’t think I’ve seen you around before. New in town?”
I feel my jaw go tight, which is a stupid reaction and I know it’s a stupid reaction while it’s happening.
Here is what I want to do. I want to put my hand flat on the table between them. I want to say something with my name in it, which would work, which would end this in four seconds, and which would also make me exactly the man she thinks I am.
So I don’t do any of that. I sit there with my beer and let it happen, because she’s a grown woman and this is a bar and the last thing on earth I have a right to do is decide who gets to talk to my wife.
“Visiting my mom,” Flora says. “Amora Green. She lives up on Ridge Road.”
“Amora’s daughter?” His smile widens. “She talks about you all the time. Says you’re a real firecracker.” He slides one of the beers toward her. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“She already has a drink,” I say flatly.
He glances at me, then back at Flora. “Friend of yours?”
“Husband, actually.”
“We’re working through some things,” Flora says before I can get anything else out. “It’s complicated.”
“Complicated.” His smile doesn’t falter at all. “Well, if you ever decide to uncomplicate things, I’m around. I run the hardware store on Main Street.”
His hand lands on Flora’s shoulder, casual and familiar.
I’m on my feet before I consciously decide to move.
“She’s not interested.” My voice is low and controlled but there’s enough edge in it to draw attention, and the couple by the fireplace looks over.
His eyes narrow. “Maybe she should tell me that herself.”
Flora stands, putting herself between us. “Okay, let’s all calm down.”
“I’m perfectly calm.” I’m not calm at all. I’m vibrating with something ugly and possessive that I haven’t felt since the early days, when other men would look at her and I’d want to break things. “But her husband is standing right here, and your hand is somewhere it shouldn’t be.”
“Estranged husband,” he says. “Means not really a husband anymore, right?”
Flora’s voice goes sharp. “I appreciate the drink offer, but I’m going to pass. My situation is complicated and it’s mine to handle. Okay?”
He hesitates. He looks at her, then at me, and whatever he sees on my face must register, because he steps back.
“Sure thing.” He raises his hands. “No offense meant. Enjoy your night.”
He goes back to the bar and says something to his friends and one of them laughs, and it isn’t a cruel laugh, it’s just a laugh, and that somehow makes it worse.
Nothing happened here. A guy bought a woman a drink in a bar and her husband stood up too fast. That’s the whole event.
In LA it would be four photographs and a headline about my temper, and here it’s going to be forgotten by Thursday.
Flora rounds on me.
“What the hell was that?”
“He was touching you.”
“So what? He was being friendly. This is Vermont. People are friendly here.”
“He was hitting on you.”
“And? It’s not like I was going to go home with him.” She stares at me. “You’re jealous.”
“I’m your husband.”
“Estranged husband. Which you keep forgetting.”
“You’re the one who filed for divorce.”
“And you’re the one who didn’t fight for me until I did.”
We’re both breathing hard. The trivia announcer has stopped talking, clearly sensing drama.
“Dance with me,” I say.
“What?”
“There’s music playing.” There is, something slow drifting out of the jukebox in the corner. “Dance with me. Please.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to hold you and it’s the only acceptable way to do it right now.”
She stares at me for a long moment. Then she sighs and takes my hand and lets me lead her to the tiny dance floor.
We sway more than dance, because there isn’t much room and neither of us is really moving to the music anyway. We’re just standing close, her head eventually resting against my shoulder and my arms around her waist.
Her hands come up to my chest and stay there. That’s the whole thing. Her hands on my chest and the smell of her hair and the fact that she hasn’t stepped back yet, and I am standing in a bar in a town with one traffic light having the best three minutes of my year.
I’ve played stadiums where sixty thousand people sang my own words back at me.
I’ve walked out onto a stage in Tokyo and had the sound hit me hard enough to move my hair.
I have spent six years chasing a specific feeling and telling myself it was the biggest one available, and it does not touch this.
It isn’t in the same category as this. It’s the difference between being warm and being loved, and I only get to know that because I lost the second one and had to go somewhere with no cell service to find out.
“You’re thinking very loudly,” she says into my shirt.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, just stop doing it.”
So I stop doing it.
“I was jealous,” I admit quietly. “When he touched you. I wanted to put his head through the wall.”
“I know.” Her voice is muffled against my shirt. “I saw your face.”
“Is that terrible?”
“It’s complicated.” She pulls back enough to look at me. “You don’t get to look at me like that anymore. Like you own me. Like I’m yours.”
“You are mine.” I catch her chin and tilt her face up. “And I’m yours. That hasn’t changed.”
“Everything has changed.”
“Not that.” I lower my forehead to hers. “Never that.”
Her breath catches. For one perfect suspended moment she’s going to let me kiss her, and I can feel it in the way her body softens and her eyes drop to my mouth.
Then she steps back.
“Not like that,” she whispers. “Not until you’ve earned it.”
“Then I’ll look at you like that until I’m dead,” I answer, “so you’d better get used to it.”
She doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t argue either.
We leave before last call. She says goodnight to the bartender by name, which means she’s been in here before without me, which is a small stupid thing to feel anything about and I feel something about it anyway.
We drive home in charged silence, every accidental brush of our hands near the gear shift sending sparks up my arm.
We’re almost at the cottage when Flora says quietly, “You still haven’t signed the papers.”
I stop the car at the end of the driveway.
“Because the day I sign them is the day I stop being your husband, and I have no idea who I am after that. I’d rather not find out.”
She doesn’t respond to that either. She just gets out of the car and walks toward the cottage.
Amora is waiting on the porch. In her hands she’s holding an envelope I recognize, the divorce papers, the ones I shoved into a drawer the day I arrived and haven’t looked at since.
“I was putting fresh towels in the cabin,” she says simply. “These were in the drawer. Thought you might want them.”
Flora stops walking. Turns around. Looks at the papers, and then at me.
“You’ve had them this whole time,” she says. “Just sitting there. Unsigned.”
“I told you I wasn’t signing.”
Her eyes are unreadable in the porch light.
“I know you did,” she says. “That’s the problem. I’m starting to believe you.”