Longing

“Did you want some?”

“It’s bisque.”

“So?”

“It has cream in it. I can’t eat that anymore.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

“Thanks, though.”

He ducked his head in acknowledgment, the gesture resembling a stance of mourning. And she did feel the loss. No cream and all.

“I’m going outside to read. We won’t have many more days like this one—I want to enjoy it.” Holding up a paperback, she said, “I only have a couple of chapters left.”

“Wait,” he said as her fingers touched the door handle. “Still want to go to Vermont next weekend? I can look for a place to stay.”

She replied, “Sure. Okay,” though shrugged her shoulders just slightly. She saw him notice.

Once outside, she ambled down the length of their yard, to sit in the shaded Adirondack chair under the spruce, rather than in the full sun of the patio. The chair faced the garden she’d dug by hand and the stone wall in front of it that she’d cobbled together the year they moved in, from rocks already on their property. One section of the wall seemed to be collapsing.

Turning the pages of the novel she’d brought out, she found her bookmark, a school art project of her son’s, the last he’d written I love you, Mom on. The words “Love’s a gift that’s surely handmade,” from a song by Guy Clark, drifted through her mind and she held this gift, watching the grasses toss their palomino heads in the late-summer breeze. Her book sat open, unread.