he texts and asks if they can Facebook message. They try but Facebook messaging is new and glitchy so they switch to MSN.
He’s teaching summer school and it’s over at noon. He’s just gotten home and Marie is not due back until five. There is a whole patch of free day. They talk about their relationship, raking over the embers. She says how much she misses him. He says they won’t be able to continue if all she does is talk about getting back together. There’s no possibility. The way he types this feels like a threat. Or anyway, he sounds like a teacher.
They talk until four, when she has to go to work.
Even though it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, she feels that things are different. That there’s a sun again. That he is open to her again, even in some small way.
The next day there is an MSN message.
She found you in my contacts again, your area code. We can never talk again.
Lina
When she texts him, Lina imagines Aidan at home. She imagines his phone vibrating and then pictures him looking down to see that it’s her. All around him is chaos. His wife is washing dishes, for example, and the kids are making a mess. Lina imagines the younger one spilling an entire jar of tomato sauce on the floor. This sauce is from San Francisco where a buddy of Aidan’s started a band and lives by the ocean. Aidan, Lina knows, has never been to California. His wife is screaming at her daughter with her back to the child, so that she’s screaming at the dirty window over the sink, like a crazy person, as if someone is there. On Facebook another buddy of Aidan’s just updated his cover photo to a picture of himself with an attractive Puerto Rican woman on a beach under a palm tree. Aidan has never been to Puerto Rico, or the Bahamas. Lina understands that all he wants is to feel a woman’s arms around him. He wants to be admired for something he values in himself. Lina knows he is tired of living for everybody but himself and that he doesn’t even remember making all the decisions that brought him here. Probably he asked Ally to marry him and that was it. He didn’t know it was going to be a snowball. He didn’t know he was going to be standing inside holes in the earth for more hours a week than he is in a bed or on a couch or in the woods combined. He’s not even envious of people with money. He just knows that this is what his life will always look like. It will only get harder.
But now they have the river again. She hopes it means as much to him as it does to her. Shimmering mist, hungry kisses. Sometimes Lina feels she is as in love with the river as she is with the man she meets there.
She sits on a steel stool in the tasting room of a little winery on the road to the river. She drinks a cup of hot cider ale with mulling spices and looks up at the cathedral ceilings, which have been strung with white lights for the holidays. She wears Aviators and cargo pants and a green shirt and hasn’t removed her gloves.
The text she sends Aidan says, River?
Now she waits, just a few miles away from the place she dreams about, hoping the love of her life will be able to meet her.
A few minutes ago she had a little breakdown in the washroom. She clutched the sides of the sink with her gloved hands and tried to slow the racing of her heart. Just this morning in the courthouse she became legally separated from Ed. The irony is that the very instant they signed the document she wanted to go on a date with him. Out to dinner, with wine. She understands it’s because she fears aloneness more than she fears death.
Her skin is broken out because she bought a few Mary Kay products from a friend. Her friend gave her a home facial with the products and Lina felt indebted so she bought the stuff to be nice and now her face is a mess.
My mother’s something like an Avon lady, Lina says. It’s all a ruse. They make you buy these products they can’t unload fast enough so my mother has like fifty ancient eyeliners with a rubber band around