“It was Out of Africa. It was Robert Redford.”
Margo went into the living room slowly. “It might have been Meryl Streep I went for.”
“Sit down, Margo.”
She sat on the couch. He watched her put her hands in her lap, move them to the armrest, put them back in her lap. Margo Turner, who ran a restaurant for fifty years and raised three generations and had never once not known what to do with her hands, didn’t know what to do with her hands.
He lowered himself into the recliner and pressed play. Black and white. A man in a hat. A woman on a train. The music filled the room.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Just watch.”
Halfway through he got up and went to the kitchen. He reached into the cabinet above the stove and then into the freezer. He found the jar in the back, behind the ice cube trays, where he’d kept it since December.
He came back with two bowls and the jar.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Ice cream.” He handed her a bowl. “And this—” He held up the jar. Dark brown label, gold lettering. “Sanders hot fudge. My old roommate at Michigan sends it every Christmas. You can’t get it out here.”
“You’ve been hiding hot fudge?”
“I’ve been saving hot fudge. There’s a difference.” He poured it over the ice cream—carefully, evenly—and handed her a spoon. “Try it.”
She tried it.
“Well?” he asked.
“It’s acceptable.”
He leaned forward. “Acceptable?”
“It’s very good, Bernard. Don’t fish.”
He settled back into the recliner with his own bowl, and they watched the rest of the movie. The woman on the screen was sharp and funny, and the man was steady and patient, andBernie thought that some stories were just one story told over and over with different hats.
The credits rolled. The room was quiet and the bowls were empty on the side table between them.
She stood and reached for her coat. “Same time Wednesday?”
“Margo, wait.”
She turned. He was still in the recliner, the blue light of the credits on his face. She was standing in his living room with her coat in her hands and the lamplight on her and he thought about all the things he’d been thinking about since noon, since last Wednesday, since the storm in 1979 when he’d stacked sandbags in the rain and she hadn’t known he was there.
“This is the best evening I’ve had in a long time,” he said. “And it’s not the chicken.”
She looked at him. Her hands tightened on the coat.
“Goodnight, Bernard,” she said.
“Goodnight, Margo.”
He heard her car start and pull away and the street go quiet.
He’d said it. Not all of it—not the part he’d been carrying for longer than he was going to calculate tonight—but enough. Enough for her to take home. Enough for her to hear if she wanted to hear it.
He sat in the recliner for a while. The television had gone to a menu screen. The Sanders jar was on the coffee table with the lid off. He usually saved it for college basketball, eating it in front of the television by himself. This year he'd shared it instead.
