middle of a paragraph in a chapter I’d read a couple of nights earlier.
Before I even studied the passage, I knew it was going to be significant because there was a word in it that I hadn’t known when I read it the first time, and I’d lightly circled it in pencil so I could look it up. Once I did, I was so taken with the word that I added it to the list I was saving to show October.
The passage went like this:
Each morning I go out with my tea and I check on the fig tree and I think, Do what you want, my dear, but only if it means going back to the house, only if it keeps the fear of saudade close and even closer than that, do you hear me?
There was no equivalent to the word “saudade” in the English language, but the translation I found defined it as “a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.” It went on to explain that saudade was sometimes described as “a nostalgia for something that never was.”
I don’t remember walking out the door, down the steps, or across the yard. I only remember that when I got to October’s house I walked in without knocking and found her in the kitchen making a grilled cheese sandwich. She’d showered; I could tell because her hair looked like a wet rope hanging over her shoulder. And she’d changed into a pair of sweatpants and a loose, silky tank top. Her back was to me, and I could see the tops of the letters I’d written there, a little faded but still legible.
CHOICE.
The sound of the door startled her. She spun around and her hand went to her heart. “Jesus, Joe. You scared me.”
Diego moseyed over from the living room floor and nuzzled up beside me, wagging his baseball-bat tail.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” I blurted.
She tilted her head to the side, her face a rictus of expressions I couldn’t discern.
“I’ve tried and I can’t. It’s like you turned on some faucet in me and I have no way to turn it off.”
I thought for once that I might surprise her, but she didn’t look surprised. She looked cautious. She shut off the burner, moved the skillet to the adjacent burner, and leaned back, her hands behind her on the counter like she was going to hop up onto it.
Fear began to rise in me, starting at my feet and filling up my body, as if I’d stepped into a pool of it.
“Say something,” I mumbled.
“I’m trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with this information. Because I’m assuming that’s all it is. Information.”
I took a step forward and noticed her face was pale and shiny, her eyes red from scrubbing off all the makeup.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “I’m open and available now, but come tomorrow I’m going to turn back into the cold, asshole Joe that makes up a bunch of excuses or changes his mind, but I’m not. This is different. I can feel it. Tell me you can feel it.”
She said nothing, and her silence lingered like a stranger hiding behind a door—I didn’t know if it was benevolent or menacing. She turned back to the stove and used a spatula to lift the sandwich out of the skillet. She sliced the sandwich in half on the diagonal, put it on a plate, and handed it to me.
“You don’t want it?”
“I’ll make another one.” She nodded toward the table. “Sit.”
I went and sat down, and the silence resumed while Diego and I watched her make another sandwich. She was slow and careful buttering the bread and slicing two different kinds of cheese, and it took forever. When she finished, she cut her sandwich in half and put it on a plate too. Then she poured us both glasses from a half-empty bottle of Chianti.
She placed the wine bottle in the middle of the table, along with a couple of napkins, and sat across from me. The little yellow flower arrangement from Cal was on the table too, directly between us like a blooming “Yield” sign. I moved it out of the way.
I watched her and she watched me. She had a funny way of eating her sandwich. Instead of biting it like normal, she tore pieces off and put them in her mouth the way a person would eat a