After the affair, but before the second blow up, they had sometimes referred to Hugh as “their husband,” a joke showing that they could get through things, a way to push the pain neatly out of reach. How’s our husband, then? Marg had started it a year or two in and it had stuck. Hugh was English and his family had that habit, charming to Marg and Sylvia, of referring to “our Hugh.” Now Sylvia wished she could say it, could begin this conversation with something light and intimate and bonding.
She diluted the syrupy sugar in the bottom of her cup with more tea. It was another detail she liked about this place: the old-fashioned teapot, its knitted cozy in rag-rug colors. When the café had first opened she had walked in, smelled the coffee and the used books, and felt a pang: she had missed her calling. She had been meant, really, to open a place just like this. She could have been happy then, she felt sure. She had let that vision fill her and then, just as quickly, it faded.
The other day Sylvia had seen a large coffee-table book of Audubon’s birds there. It was wrapped in a plastic jacket as if it had once belonged to a library. Leafing through, she’d admired the birds, the details of the paintings, the fine colors. But today when she’d come in the book was gone. Birdwatching had been another of Sylvia’s phases: waking up early when the children and Hugh were still asleep and pulling on her loose jeans, muddy at the cuffs, and her sweatshirt in the dim light of their bedroom. Shutting the bedroom door softly behind her. Filling her thermos with coffee. Lacing her heavy boots that could navigate uneven terrain. Walking into the brisk morning with her binoculars, feeling the chill of the steering wheel on her hands and imagining, always, driving away, past the designated meeting place, past the towns she knew and did not know, to arrive at nightfall in a new place, setting herself up there as if she were in a witness protection program, without the protection part. A new life. The image dissolved as soon as the car’s engine ignited but it was potent in those seconds just before.