“No.”
She doesn’t push.
I’m going to be a mess when I go there, and I don’t need witnesses for that. As close as we are, I am still a private person, and she knows that.
I drive down I-65, the late morning light flat and white through the windshield, Nashville spreading out on either side of the highway—pockets of old and new side by side. The new construction cranes are visible from everywhere now, and the skyline appears revised every time you look at it.
I don’t have much to take fromhisplace. I moved my body in, and my clothes, and my kitchen things—the cast-iron pan, the good knives—and I planted things in the garden, and I put books on shelves and blankets and throws around the house because I get cold and like cozy, but I never—I see this now, with the vision that only comes after you’ve left—I never settled my weight into that house.
Never quite trusted the floor, did you, Lucy?
Well, at least that was smart of you, even if it didn’t register as a red flag.
I take the exit toward Germantown, and the city shifts like you’ve crossed an invisible line and becomes visibly more expensive. I have driven this route hundreds of times. I know the gas station on the corner, the dry cleaner Fox uses, and the coffee place that opened two years ago.
I pass Butchertown Hall, our favorite spot for Saturday brunch—on the mornings we aren’t at the farmers market.
I smile at a memory as I stop at a red light.
This was a couple of months after the baby.
Fox was already up when I came into the kitchen, which was unusual—Fox slept late on Saturdays, with the commitment of a man reclaiming something the workweek took. But that Saturday, he was in the kitchen in a T-shirt and old jeans, drinking coffee.
“You’re up,” I remarked.
“That’s accurate.”
He poured me coffee and handed me a cup. “Come somewhere with me.”
I frowned. “Where?”
“Farmers market. On Eighth.”
I looked at him quizzically.
Fox did not do farmers markets.
Fox did not, as a rule, do anything that required standing in a field with other people on a Saturday morning, waiting for heirloom tomatoes.
“Who are you”—I arched an eyebrow—“and what did you do with my husband?”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “I want to see what you do there.”
“What I do there?” I ask, baffled.
“You always seem so excited when you get back,” he explained with an affectionate smile. “Talking for an hour about whatever you found, and I want to be part of it.”
How was I not supposed to fall in love with him?
So we went, and it was one of those mornings that don’t announce themselves as significant while they’re happening. We moved through the stalls slowly, no agenda, no timeline, and Fox—who approached most things with the efficient purposefulness of a man who had somewhere better to be—did not once check his phone. He carried the bags without being asked. He tasted everything I handed him, even the things he was skeptical about, which were most things. He listened to me talk about dry-farming techniques for an uninterrupted twenty minutes with every appearance of genuine interest. At some point, somewhere between the herb stalls and a woman selling raw honey out of the back of a truck, he took my hand.
I bought persimmons and a bunch of herbs so fragrant the whole car smelled like a garden on the drive home.
I thought then, “This is what love looks like in a marriage.”
I thought it so completely and so surely that I put it away safely in my heart, like a fact I didn’t need to examine because it wasn’t going anywhere.
The light changes.
