look at us now

Her choice of venue says it all. She has not selected the food court for its cornucopia of flavorful choices but for its singular lack of intimacy and plentiful escape routes. It’s easy to see from the way she strides purposefully past Quiznos, clutching her purse and a manila folder, that she intends to make this a short meeting. Even her attire is businesslike, from her modest lavender blouse (the color of sexual frustration), to her gray pencil skirt, right down to her close-toed leather flats. Her expression is benign but determined, thin-lipped and straight, neither hard nor soft in announcing itself—the expression of a woman collecting sperm samples. Though she’s walking straight for me, she does not invite eye contact but rather engages some fixed point behind me. Already, she is a stranger to me, yet achingly familiar.

Smoothing the back of her skirt, she sidles into the fixed metal stool across from me, heaving a sigh as she sets her purse and envelope on the tabletop.

“Tacoma was a mess, sorry,” she says.

Her hair has grown out a shade darker than almond. Two years ago, she all but shaved her head completely. She looked like a Polish POW. Now her hair is lustrous and looks as if it smells good—like peach-scented wax. She parts it in the center, just as she did when I first met her, from which point it cascades evenly down both sides of her face, two inches below the jaw line.

“You look good,” I say.

“I look old,” she says. “I feel old.”

Though I’ve dressed young myself, in jeans and Chucks and a Penguin shirt, I wonder if it doesn’t have the opposite effect.

“I’m the one who’s aged.”

“You look fine,” she says. “You look the same as you looked three years ago.” She’s managed to make it an insult.

She slides the envelope across the plastic table. “I brought you these in case you lost them.”

“I’ve got the papers.”

“Then you brought them?”

“I thought we were having lunch.”

She tenses up and stares out across the food court toward Macy’s, looking spent. She just drove 160-odd miles for this. I want to set my hand atop hers and give it a little squeeze, the squeeze I gave it a thousand times before the disaster—when they found the cyst, when her brother died, when Jodi had a staph infection, when Piper had the chicken pox, when it seemed at every turn that the winds of fate had blown our lives afoul, financially, emotionally, or idealistically. Look at all that we endured. Look at all we managed to light along our path through the long shadow of adversity. Look at the seemingly indestructible affiliation that was once us. And look at us now. She, pretending to be a stranger behind her cakey makeup and impenetrable eyes, and me, pining for access, knowing that if I dare reach out to her, she’ll stand up and leave.

“Ben, please,” she says, and sighs heavily.

Looking away, past the colonnade of potted palms toward Orange Julius, I can’t help but think of Piper’s favorite meal: french toast, shrimp cocktail, and Orange Julius (my version, anyway). I can’t help but remember all the blessed disorder that was the four of us nightly around the dinner table, more often than not eating four completely different meals but eating them together, unquestionably, indivisibly together.

“Please,” I hear her say again. I let it hang there, this desolate plea, realizing that it’s probably the last of its kind, for every remaining shred of her patience seems to have gone into it.

“Do you remember when we went to the ghost town,” I say. “When you were pregnant with Jo—”

“Of course, I remember,” she says.

“Do you remember how, right before it happened, Piper got—”

“Yes,” she says. “I remember.”

“It wasn’t so long ago,” I say.

“It was six years ago, Ben—two lives ago.”

The knot in my stomach tightens. “More like four lives ago.”

“Speak for yourself,” she says, rifling through her purse.

My God but she’s grown hard. Somewhere the old Janet still lives inside of her, I’ve got to believe that. If only to reach her, if only for the briefest moment of contact. She needs me—now more than ever. Who but I could ever understand her devastation? Surely not Jim Sunderland.

“It could still work, you know.”

She looks up from the purse. “I’m tired of feeling like a heartless bitch just because I need to move on.”

“You mean Jim?”

I’ve caught her off guard. She searches my face. “What do you know about Jim?”

“I know all about Jim and his ugly kid.”

“Oh, so now you’re stalking me? What is wrong with you? Why are you doing this to me? Haven’t you done enough already?”

I’m stunned by the cruelty of it. The slackening contours of her face say that she wishes she could take it back. But she will not allow herself to soften. She stiffens up again almost immediately.

“Leave Jim out of this. I want those papers, Ben. Don’t make me get nasty.”

“You mean this isn’t nasty?”

“I gave you six months, I gave you a year. I did what you asked. Now it’s time for you to hold up your end of the bargain.”

“Do I hear wedding bells? Please tell me you’re not marrying that clown. Whatever you do, don’t breed with him—the ugly gene is dominant.”

“You want ugly, Ben. Fine, you’ve got it.” Calmly, she hefts her purse, and picks up the envelope. Rising to her feet, she smoothes out her skirt and stands tall, a portrait of self-possession. “But remember,” she says. “You did this.”

Before I can even think about defending myself—though let’s be honest, I’m guilty as charged, and we both know it—Janet turns and strides away across the food court, past Quiznos, just as purposefully as when she arrived five minutes ago. She halts in front of Busby’s long enough to ram the envelope into the heaping trash bin, brushes a stray hair from her face, and does not bother to look back as she pushes through the glass door and into the gray afternoon.

Do I go after her? Do I attempt to right this ship with one of the two thousand apologies I owe her? My feet say no. My heart says yes. I can only trust one of them. Outside, the low sky has begun to spit rain. I am not proud of who I’ve become.

As I’m rattling out of the parking lot in the Subaru, I spot Janet in her silver sedan. She is too consumed to notice me. She has not moved from her parking space. Her forehead is between her hands resting on the steering wheel, and it’s obvious from the convulsions racking her slumped shoulders that she is crying. There is an opportunity here for some small redemption, if only I were man enough to seize it. With a mere signature, I could offer Janet comfort long enough to reach Jim Sunderland’s arms. I could offer her the chance to take a small step forward and start forgetting our apocalypse, to walk away from the rubble of our lives once and for all and forge some new path for herself. I could care enough to save Janet. Instead, I roll by slowly, fixed on her wrecked figure slumped in the driver’s seat, as though she were the scene of some grisly accident.