Chapter 189: The Night Before the Last Night
The night before the last night, Owen and I walked the dock after dinner, the way we did when something was ending.
The lake was black and flat, holding the far shore's lights like entries in a ledger.
We did not talk at first. The dock boards counted our steps for us.
Owen said it at the end of the dock, where we always stopped.
Are you ready to say goodbye to it?
I thought about lying. It is a short walk back, and a lie would have filled it nicely.
I said goodbye to that room long ago, I said. Tomorrow is just saying it again over oysters.
He nodded, the way he takes testimony.
You do not have to go, he said. Nobody would grade you for skipping it.
I know, I said. That is why I can go.
We stood there a while, and I did what I do. I took inventory.
Years ago a man chose a corner table to end a marriage, because he thought the room made him look generous.
He had not counted on the wife checking the terms instead of crying into them.
That wife had a trust she never mentioned, a father who had armored her in documents, and a habit of finishing what other people skipped.
The rest was consequence. Audits. Hearings. A cousin with lawyers he could not afford. A fund that learned what the trust deed cost to challenge.
And people. God, the people.
A mother-in-law with a ledger. A sister with a foghorn for a heart. A girl with a steno pad.
A woman rebuilding herself out of night classes. A lawyer who read me like his favorite case.
I said some of it aloud. Owen listened with his hands in his coat pockets.
Do you regret any of it? he asked.
The question he never asked. He had saved it for the right dock.
I regret the years I spent being smaller so a man could feel correctly sized, I said.
I do not regret one page since.
Not the mercy?
Especially the mercy, I said. It was the most expensive thing I ever gave away, and the only thing I never wanted back.
The lake lay flat. Somewhere a fish made one small silver sound.
Henri called this afternoon, Owen said. To confirm.
How did he sound?
Like someone closing a thirty-two-year tab, Owen said. He asked if we wanted the usual table, then laughed. There is no usual. There is only the one.
The corner table, I said.
The corner table, he agreed.
We walked back slowly, our two shadows running ahead of us under the lamps.
At the porch steps he stopped me with a careful hand on my arm.
Last thing, he said. Whatever walks in that door tomorrow, it walks into our life, not your old one.
You are not going as anyone's ending. You are going as my wife, in a restaurant I intend to enjoy.
I know, I said.
Say it anyway.
I am going as your wife, I said, in a restaurant we are both going to enjoy.
Good, he said. I have been dreaming about the oysters for a month, and if you make it weird, I will never forgive you.
I laughed, and the laugh surprised me. That was how I knew the goodbye had already happened.
Tomorrow was not a funeral. It was dessert.
We went in, and I slept eight full hours, because endings, like everything else worth doing, are better done rested.
Henri told me weeks later, over coffee in the closed restaurant, what had happened across town at that same hour.
The man was confirming a reservation.
One table. One chair. The last Saturday of the month.
And when the reservationist asked for the name, he gave it like something heavy you have carried a long way.
Wexler, he said. Table for one.