1

It was only a week after her husband had left her that Catherine Sergeant went to a wedding.

It was a cold and bright spring day, a blue sky, frost on the deep grain of the church door. She purposely arrived late, to avoid the conversations; but she couldn’t avoid them afterward, when the congregation emerged.

The photographer took the bridal couple close to the trees, to be photographed in the sunlight under a thin veil of blackthorn blossom.

“Catherine,” a voice said.

She turned. It was Amanda and Mark Pearson.

“Why didn’t you tell us that you were invited?” they demanded. “Why didn’t you mention it? We could have come together.”

“I didn’t decide until the last minute,” she said.

Amanda had looked around her. “Where is Robert?” she asked.

“He’s gone away.”

“Working?”

There was a moment. “Yes,” she said.

She moved from person to person, friends of friends. Fortunately, this was not a family wedding; Catherine was a peripheral guest.

There were some people whom she didn’t know, and who asked her nothing.

She moved to the very edge of the crowd and leaned for a moment on the wall. She was wearing red, and she thought suddenly how very inappropriate it was, this celebratory color, this color of triumph. She felt anything but triumphant. She felt disoriented. It seemed incredible to her now that she had come at all; got dressed this morning—got in the car. Driven here, in a new red suit, wearing new shoes. Incredible that she had even gone out this week and bought the shoes. Sat in a shop, wrote a check. Incredible that she had gone through the motions.

The routine things. Working, driving, buying, eating, sleeping.

Had she slept? Four hours, perhaps. Never more each night in the last seven days.

Looking out over the valley, this country valley folded in with pasture, dissected only by one road, and that road passing through what seemed now to be a gray cloud of leafless beech on the hill, she felt excruciatingly tired.

She looked down at the wall.

The corrugated color, pale green and acid yellow and gray, of the lichen on the limestone; that was animation of sorts. She focused on the colors. Beyond the wall, the graves. The angle of the April light against the graves.

ALEXANDER SEELEY, BORN 18 NOVEMBER 1804, HIS WIFE CLAUDIA ANNE.

The snowdrops forming a white square. The blackbird eyeing her from the neighboring plot, perched on a stone angel with great folded wings, feather upon feather.

A couple nearby had brought a hamper. They were coming through the crowd laughing, holding up the wicker basket. Setting it down again on the path. Unbuckling the straps, they brought out champagne and glasses.

Beyond them, Amanda was beckoning her, holding up a glass.

It’s not difficult at all, Catherine told herself.

Your husband is away, working. It’s a very simple explanation. Simple. Plausible. You’ve come on your own out of necessity. But tomorrow, or the next day, he’ll come home.

This is just a piece of time with a wrinkle in it, like a sheet wrinkled from sleep. Time had wrinkled away from habit, from predictability, and had become—only for a while—unfathomable, like the experience of a dream, where days and weeks become mixed. Living through this was just a matter of coming to terms with the change. Hours that buck and race or slow to a crawl.

Tomorrow or the next day, he’ll come home.

Repeat it, repeat it.

Saying it makes it so.