The Last Thing He Told Me

“Nothing,” he said.

But he let go of my hand and started to play with his wedding band, turning it around and around his finger. I made him that wedding band. I made it to match mine, exactly: Two slim bands that, from a distance, looked like any other shiny, platinum ring. But I made ours out of brushed steel, a thick white oak. Rustic and elegant at once. I’d used my smallest lathe. Owen had sat on the floor beside me while I worked.

“Bailey also has that school trip to Sacramento coming up,” he said. “We could hightail it to New Mexico, just the two of us, get lost in the white rock.”

“I’d love that,” I said. “I haven’t been to New Mexico in a long time.”

“Me neither. Not since back when I was in college. We drove up to Taos, spent a week on the mountain.”

“You drove all the way from New Jersey?” I asked.

He kept twirling his ring, absentmindedly. “What?”

“You drove all the way from New Jersey to New Mexico? That must have taken you forever.”

That stopped him, his fingers leaving his ring. “It wasn’t during college.”

“Owen! You just said you went to Taos during college.”

“I don’t know. It was a mountain somewhere. Maybe it was Vermont. All I remember was that the air was too thin.”

I laughed. “What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing. It just…”

I look at him, trying to follow what he isn’t saying.

“It just brings back a weird part of my life.”

“College?”

“College. After college.” He shook his head. “Being stuck on a mountain I don’t remember.”

“Okay… so that’s maybe the weirdest thing I think you’ve ever said to me.”

“I know.”

He sat up and turned on the light. “Shit,” he said. “I really need that vacation.”

“Let’s take it,” I said.

“Okay. Let’s take it.”

He lay down, again, put his hand on my stomach. And I could feel him relax again. I could feel him come back to me. So I didn’t want to press him. I didn’t want to press him right then on what he’d almost chosen to share.

“And we don’t have to get into it now, but just for the record?” I said. “I spent most of college playing guitar in a Joni Mitchell cover band, attending poetry slams, and dating a philosophy grad student who was working on a manifesto about how television was the government’s attempt to control a revolution.”

“Not sure he was exactly wrong about that,” he said.

“Maybe not, but the point is, there’s not a whole lot you could tell me about who you used to be that would change anything, at least not between us.”

“Well,” he whispered. “Thank God for that.”

Bailey’s No Good Very Bad Day

When Bailey gets back from school, she looks miserable.

I’m sitting on the bench, drinking a glass of red wine, a blanket covering my legs. I try to go back over the day—a day that began and will end without Owen, as impossible as that feels. As angry and sad and stressed and alone as that makes me feel.