Laura watched as Jack walked away from the car down the shoulder. He walked deflated. She had not seen this gait in a long time.
At times during their marriage, she would struggle to remember who he was. He had changed so much in the time they were together. But that is how life rolls itself out. Yes, he had changed, but perhaps the grief arose out of the fact that she had too.
In her mind she would remember what seemed like simpler days, days when they felt connected. Her mind would do her the service of forgetting the destitution they went through and painted the memory in watercolor, fooling herself into believing that the past was without hardship. But things did used to be different. The man walking down the road was still redeemable, she thought. She hoped. And so she quietly supported him with the belief that he would return when the stresses of modern life unburdened themselves from his shoulders. He would return someday and take her dreams into consideration.
And besides, the bitterness left her cold, isolated.
Laura would think of her mother and how she would sit at the table waiting for her father to come home, sometimes with the slight scent of bourbon on his breath, and set his plate down before him as if she had just cooked it. She would sit there waiting for him to talk to her, but he rarely did. Her father’s voice in her childhood home had been as rare as his presence. About ten years ago he had got the cancer and told her mother that he loved her dearly. Her mother wept and held his hand in the hospital as he died. After a lifetime of loneliness, that was all she needed.
In her youth she had secretly resented her mother for passively supporting her father. Resented her for being the Xeroxed copy of June Cleaver. A woman without her own dreams.
A woman that she herself had now slowly evolved into.
The duty that her mother had performed all those quiet years now fell on her. Jack provided the means of living but had become detached from enjoying it. Had pushed her to the edges of his attention. She lived her life like she now sat in the car, watching him drift off, hoping on his return that something would spark his soul into seeing her there and smile. Her heart would rise as he would get back into the car, and then slowly rappel down again when his silence filled the empty spaces.