Part One
Chapter 1
2007
I woke up this morning and thought that winter had returned. Yesterday was nearly sixty degrees. Still, anything can happen in March. When I pulled back the curtains I saw that it wasn’t snow, but a low, blizzard-white hovering of fog, weighty as souls, settling on the city. Adrian was still fast asleep beside me. “I thought it was snow,” I whispered. He didn’t move.
We were in his sister Alexa’s guestroom, clean blonde Scandinavian furniture with pale blue everything else. We switch houses with her for a few weeks whenever she and Adrian get restless, which is at least a few times each year and for longer stays each time. At this point we leave our shampoo and soap in the bathroom here since we know its next visitors will probably be us. I hate to sleep in when we’re in Madison. It feels like I am wasting precious time.
“Going out for a coffee,” I whispered to my sleeping husband.
There is a clarity that comes with being here, being anywhere north actually, something in the air that descrambles what Savannah does to my brain, and I need to get some of it. In a moment, I am on Alexa’s old bicycle, coasting downtown. Being here makes me feel young again, and free of all the layers that pile up over time and make us all so grubby. When I am in Savannah, I feel completely connected to Adrian and would never dream of leaving him. My lack of friends or roots there makes me cling to him. But here, I am stronger, more independent. Sometimes I feel like he and I have no connection whatsoever. And I like it. It’s like one less layer to weigh me down.
I know I am really just enjoying the freedom to pretend I am not satisfied. One part luxury, one part affliction, reserved exclusively for spoiled wives. I suppose you could call it the burden of having everything; Instead of worrying about paying rent and finding love and being fat, I daydream about being free.
I arrived at the coffee shop, locked the bike to a bench outside it, and went inside. Even though it was only eight o’clock in the morning, it was crowded. People were sitting around with their laptops, connected to something far removed and unknown. For a fleeting instant I felt jealous, until I remembered that it was most likely work they were connecting to. Yuck. “No woman of mine will ever have to work,” Adrian told some friends at a party once while he was drinking. (Normally he’s very refined, but people can be completely different when they’re intoxicated.) I pretended to be horrified at his tackiness, but in reality it’s no more embarrassing than my three-carat diamond ring.
I turned away from the people with their computers and caught my reflection in the mirror next to a coffee mug display. It reminded me to pull back my messy hair into a ponytail.
“What can I get you?” asked the boy behind the counter. He was probably about nineteen. He smiled, ignoring a woman in her fifties with a briefcase who looked like she was ready to order.
“Do you have any fair trade coffee?” I asked him.
“It’s all fair trade.”
“I’ll take the Kona blend,” I said after studying the list of flavors for a moment. I pretended not to notice the frantic tapping of the businesswoman’s heel on the floor or her irritated, exaggerated sigh.
“The Kona blend is our best seller,” he told me.
“Wait,” I said after he filled the cup, “I think I want the Arabian Mocha Java instead.”
“No problem. That’s my personal favorite, by the way.” He poured the first cup down the drain and got a new paper cup for me. He took care, nestling it in a cardboard java jacket, whistling a little ditty as he did so. At this point the tapping woman said, “Unbelievable,” and left.
I know, I know, that will be me someday. Old and having to work and not even able to buy a cup of coffee. I can see it coming like a big gray storm rolling in, even if no one else would ever suspect such a thing for me. That storm has been there since the day I got married, heavy and watchful on the horizon, perhaps waiting for me to lower the checkered flag, but willing to plow over me if I should forget to do so. It lingers and I live here in the sunshine just outside of the shadow it casts. So that is why I am taking advantage of the here and now.
The boy passed my drink to me kind of slyly, and said nothing of the total. I set a five-dollar bill on the counter and he pressed it back into my hand. His hand was hot and sweaty, very nineteen. Nothing at all like Adrian’s dry, smooth man hands.
“It’s on me,” he said.
It’s a good thing I didn’t have this thing, this aura or skill or whatever it is, ten years ago, because I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. I would have abused this kind of power. The way all the girls around me used to do, as if it was the God-given right of college girls.
I took a sip of the coffee and smiled. It was very, very strong.
“Like it?” he asked.
“I do.”