I think we both stood at that bar feeling it and pretending we didn't. I won't tell you every detail. I don't remember every detail. I remember how she stood beside me at the bar. I remember her saying something about lavender season, how it had come in early this year, how the whole back greenhouse smelled like summer.
I remember laughing. I don't think I'd laughed like that in years. And I remember the end of the night when the last song ended and the string lights buzzed and the caterers started stacking chairs and the truth settled over us both. Neither of us could drive. We shared a ride home.
The driver kept the radio low. Neither of us said a word the whole way. I remember the street lights sliding over her folded hands one after another, the way they used to slide across the dashboard on night patrols. Janet had planned to get out first. Her house was on the way a few miles before mine.
But when the driver pulled up in front of my bungalow, she didn't move. She sat there with her hands folded in her lap, looking through the windshield at my porch light. And I didn't tell her that she should go. I'm not going to describe what happened after that. I'll only say that we crossed a line that night that both of us knew we couldn't uncross.
Two lonely people, a long night, the quiet inside my house with no reason left to pretend. I woke up the next morning with sunlight on the ceiling and a dull ache behind my eyes. The other side of the bed was empty. I found her absence in the kitchen. On the table sat a small bundle of lavender, the kind she'd taken from the reception tables the night before, laid across the wood as carefully as if it had been placed there by a florist.
Beside it was a coffee cup, clean and empty, turned upright on its saucer. She had set it out for herself, and then she hadn't poured anything. No note, no message, just the flowers and the cup and a silence. I stood there a long time looking at that cup. I ran my thumb along the rim as if it might still be warm.
It wasn't. Then the silence stretched out. One week, two, a month, no phone call, no knock on the door, no Tuesday visit, no brown paper on the porch on Friday. The little bundle she had left on my table, dried out, went pale, and curled at the edges. The last bunch of lavender she had ever left on my porch, the one from the week before the wedding, turned brittle in the corner of the steps.
I didn't throw either one away. I couldn't tell you why. Twice I drove down Augusta Road, slowed in front of Walsh Florals, saw the lights on through the window, and kept going. I didn't call her either. I didn't know what I would say.
I turned it over in my head every night. I had crossed a line with my ex-wife's mother, a woman who had been kind to me when almost no one else had been. She was the last thing left from a marriage I could barely stand to think about. And I believed I had ruined it. Not Chelsea.
I didn't care about Chelsea anymore. I had ruined the one person who had ever asked me if I'd eaten. 3 months went by that way. Then about a month before that Saturday, my phone buzzed on the workbench while I was sanding a cabinet door. I looked at the screen.