June
I wake up on my birthday and lie very still for a moment, listening.
The climate system. The vents. And, from the kitchen, the grinder, which he has never operated in a
year in this apartment, and a cabinet door, and a word I'd fine a student for.
It's six-forty. Matt’s side of the bed is warm. His phone is on the nightstand on his side, face down,
and I reach over and turn it face up, because I'm allowed, and the screen is dark, and I turn it back.
He comes in with two cups. Black for me. He's in the t-shirt he sle eps in and his hair's flat on one side,
and he stops in the doorway when he sees me sitting up.
"You're supposed to be asle ep." "I'm a teacher. I haven't sl ept past six-thirty since October." "I had a
whole thing." He crosses the room and hands me the cup and sits on the edge of the bed on my side. "You
were going to wake up and there'd be coffee on the nightstand and I'd be back in bed pretending I'd been
there the whole time. It was going to be very smooth."
"Was the swearing part of it?" "The grinder's broken." "The grinder's fine. You have to hold the lid
down." "Nobody told me that." "Nobody's ever seen you use it." He drinks his coffee. I drink mine. The
skyline's out the bedroom window, gray going to gold at the edges, and there's a truck backing up
forty floors down and I can just hear it.
"Happy birthday," he says. "Thank you." I wait. I don't mean to. It's a habit with a lot of years in it and
it takes a second to remember I've stopped, and he sees me remember, and he puts his cup down on the
nightstand next to the phone that hasn't lit up.
"There's nothing coming," he says. "I want you to know that before you go to school and spend the
day waiting for a courier. There's no bag. There's no plane. Denise doesn't have a table on hold under her
name, and I checked, because I know her. I took the day off. I'm going to walk you to the cab and I'm
going to be on the sidewalk on Eighty-Ninth Street at three- fifteen, and after that I thought you could tell
me what you'd like to do with a Wednesday, and I'd do it."
"You took the day off." "Helen's got it. Helen's had it since January. Helen says she'll manage." I look
at the phone on the nightstand. "You didn't set anything." "No." "Denise didn't." "Denise didn't." He picks
up the cup again. "I asked her in January to take you off the calendar. All of you. Every date. She fought
me on it for a week. She said she's watched me forget your birthday twice and she wasn't going to be the
reason for a third. I said if I need software to remember my wife, my wife should know that, and she'd
rather know, because she told me so. Denise said that was the first intelligent thing I'd said since 2019 and
took it off."
"Since the fifth of October," I say. "Your handwriting. On the monitor." He stops with the cup
halfway up. "She told you about the sticky note." "In October. In the lounge. She said she didn't put it
there." "She didn't." He drinks. "It's still there. It says JUNE. That's all it says. Helen asked me what it
meant in February and I said it's my wife's name, and she said, you need a note for that, and I said,
apparently, and she let it go, which is why I hired her."
I put my coffee down on the nightstand. I move over. He lifts his arm and I get under it, and we sit
against the headboard with the skyline going gold and his phone dark and the truck done backing up.
"Athens," I say. "What about it?" "You said, then we'll go. On the couch. And then you did, badly,
with a courier and a plane and a missing persons r eport, and I stood on the hill and felt nothing, and I've
never told you that, and it's my birthday, so I'm telling you."
He's quiet for a second. "Nothing." "I had your hand. The rest of you was on Fifty-Fourth Street. The
whole trip."
"I know," he says. "I knew at the time. I told myself you couldn't tell." He turns his head and looks at
me. "Would you go again?"
"Not for a birthday." "For nothing. Some July. With the phone in the safe at the hotel and no Denise
and a middle seat if that's what's available."
"You'd take a middle seat." "I took one from Frankfurt." "You told me." "I told you the seat. I didn't
tell you it was eleven hours and the man next to me ate fish. You'd have made a face."
"I'd have made a face." "Some July," he says. "Say yes or no now and I'll never bring it up again. I'm
not going to plan it as a surprise. I've learned about surprises. I'm asking."
I look at the skyline for a while. "Some July," I say. He nods. He doesn't reach for the phone to put it
in a calendar, because there's no calendar anymore, there's just him, and I watch him not reach for it, and I
think: he'll remember or he won't, and either way I'll know, and that's the deal I made on a rug in January,
and it's holding.
Tanya's in Portland. She went in March, when the nurse contract was up, as she said she would on a
sidewalk in December, and the sale on thirty- eight B closed the same week, at a loss Matt won't name
and Ruth would
enjoy telling me, and I've never asked. The house has the yard. The spreadsheets are, per her texts,
"honestly kind of fun." Rose has teeth now, two, on the bottom, and I've seen them in a photograph from
Tuesday with no caption at all.
She texts me about once a month. Never about Matt. Once, in April, at eleven at night, she wrote she
was sorry, and that was the whole conversation, and it was enough.
The women's line launched the second week of March. I saw it on the side of a bus on Lexington on
my way to school, a woman in a coat with the collar up and the shoes that finally looked right, and under
it the company's name and nothing else, and I stood on the corner and looked at it until the light changed
and thought: that's his, and I'm not in it, and I don't want to be, and I went and taught The Crucible.
He's on the sidewalk on Eighty-Ninth at three-fifteen.
I see him from the third-floor window of room 314 while Laurence is packing his bag, a man in a
sweater on a school sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and no phone in either of them, looking at the
door.
"That your husband?" Laurence says. He's at the window too. "That's my husband." "He's just
standing there." "He's waiting." "For what?" "For me." Laurence looks at the man on the sidewalk and
then at me, and he does the thing fourteen-year-olds do where they decide whether a fact is worth their
interest, and he decides it isn't, and he says, "Cool," and, "Happy birthday, Ms. T,” which I've never
told him, and which means Wren told him, and which means Harold told Wren, and which means Priya
told Harold, and I stand at the window and let all of that have happened without me.
"Thank you, Laurence.” "You still do the voices wrong when we read.” "I know."
He goes. I put my coat on and my flat shoes are already on, and I take my bag and my keys and I go
down three flights in the noise, with a girl with purple hair running past me shouting sorry without
looking, and I put my hand on the painted cinderblock at the bottom of the stairs, as I do every day, for the
cold of it, and I push the door.
Matt’s there. He's been there since three; I can tell by his color. He sees me and takes his hands out of
his pockets and doesn't do anything with them, and I cross the sidewalk with the bag on my shoulder, and
he says, "So. Wednesday. What would you like," and I say, "Walk," and he says, "Which direction," and I
say, "I don't know yet," and he says, "Okay," and we go.
He takes my hand and I let him. Behind us the bell goes for the buses, and the doors open, and the
kids come out shouting, and the city does whatever it does at three-fifteen on a Wednesday in May, and I
don't listen for it, because I'm not waiting for anything, and I haven't been since January, and he's here.
The End.