“My friends told me I’ve been slow. And I have been. I’ve been coming here three times a week and telling myself it was about the surgery and the cards and I didn’t let myself know what it was really about.”
Her voice had gone soft, but she kept going.
“So I need you to say it. Whatever it is. I need to hear it from you. Not from the Circle. From you.”
Bernie was standing at his side of the table. His hands were at his sides. He hadn’t moved since she started talking.
“Sit down, Margo,” he said.
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Please sit down.”
They sat, the table between them. The flamingo cards on the corner. The light on the floor.
“I wasn’t telling you to stop coming,” he said. “I was telling you that if you came back, I wanted it to be because you wanted to be here. Not because I needed a nurse. Not because Eleanor’s schedule said so. Not because you’d assigned yourself a job.” He looked at her across the table. “I wanted you to come back for me.”
Margo’s hands were on the table. She pressed her fingertips together.
She looked at this man across the kitchen table — the man who had set his coffee cup where she could reach it for decades, who had stacked sandbags in the rain at midnight and never mentioned it, who had made the tea and shared the Sanders hot fudge and said “it’s not the chicken” at the door and let her walk away because she wasn’t ready and then waited while she got ready.
The kitchen was quiet. The rectangle of light on the floor had moved past the table leg. The refrigerator hummed. The flamingo cards sat in their box.
Margo reached across the table and put her hand on his.
It was not a large gesture. It was a hand on a hand. But it was Margo’s hand and it was Bernie’s hand and it was the first time she had touched him since the night his knee buckled on the sidewalk and she’d caught him and held on.
His other hand came up and settled over hers. Warm. Steady. The hand that had held flamingo cards and coffee cups and sandbags in the rain.
They sat like that for a long time.
The light moved from the table leg to the wall behind the stove. The kitchen turned the color of warm bread. Neither of them moved. Neither of them needed to.
After a while Margo said, “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Neither do I.”
“You seem like you know how to do this.”
“Not really. I’ve just had more time to think about it.”
She almost laughed. It came out as something smaller—a sound in her throat, a loosening.
“Same time Wednesday?” she said.
He looked at their hands. Hers underneath, his on top.
“Yes, please,” he said.
She didn’t leave right away. She sat with her hand on his and his hand over hers and the kitchen going gold around them. When she finally stood, she picked up the flamingo cards from the corner of the table and held them up.
“I’m still ahead,” she said.
“At cards, at least,” he said.
She laughed in a way that surprised her, and she set the cards back down and picked up her purse and went to the door.
“Margo?”
