Page 81 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Yes. He acted surprised, overly cheerful, said nothing at all was the matter.”

“What happened next?”

“He went out. Stayed out late.”

“Maybe it’s a lover’s quarrel.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

And then it’s the weekend, and he’s on the train again, and I tell myself that whatever this is will fade over the time he’s gone. The first night he’s back, I cook dinner for the family and we eat on the patio and he’s sweet andhelpful but his mind is somewhere else. After the children are asleep, I find him staring at me when I’m standing at the kitchen sink. I turn off the water.

“Felix,” I say. “What is it?”

He looks pale, unsteady. “I’ve been telling myself that you might know already, perhaps you’ve suspected…”

My heart is racing. “Felix,” I say. “Tell me.”

He closes his eyes, says in the faintest voice, “I have to go.”

“Go where?” I don’t understand. He’s almost always gone.

“Back to New Orleans,” he says. “To stay.”

I stare at him. I can’t move, can’t summon a word to say next. I’m floating above us in the kitchen.Is this you?I want to ask.

“I’m so sorry. You invited me into a beautiful life. I thought I could bend myself into it. You gave me all the freedom I asked for, and so much joy and friendship. But I’m just not built for this. I need to return to myself.”

“But aren’t you yourself here?” I ask. “With us?”

He lowers into a chair. Crosses one leg over the other, rests his hands on his knee. “For a time, yes. I thought it’s what I wanted. Itiswhat I wanted, for a time.”

“Is there something I can do?” Panic sets in, throat constricting, each word a strain. “I haven’t been entirely open with you. There are things that I’ve withheld. Maybe you’re angry with me? Maybe if I could tell you—”

“No. Odette, no. You’ve done nothing wrong. This is entirely my doing. My own shortsightedness. A humiliating lack of insight to myself.”

Cramp under my ribs, tightening, churning. Maybe I’m in love with him. How else could it hurt this much? I careen into his lap. Almost kiss his mouth—impetuous, foolish—he doesn’t love me, not in that way. He holds me and rubs my back. His touch as familiar as a lover’s. Not a lover, though. I close my eyes, rest my head on his shoulder. Beeswax and pine. The quick beat of his pulse. I whisper, “Please tell me what you need. I’ll do anything.”

He’s quiet for a long time. “Darling,” he says, voice low against my ear. “I just can’t keep it up.”

He tells me that with my paycheck and our savings, I shouldn’t have any trouble keeping the house. The car has been mine from the beginning and the adoption is long complete. Nothing will change with Nathalie. “Father Michael’s going to give us an annulment,” he says. “He’ll bring the paperwork to the house.”

“But what about the children?”

“I’ll visit, if you let me. And when they go to New Orleans in the summers, I hope they’ll spare a day or two for me.” He says that leaving me, and leaving them, will be the biggest failure of his life. He wants to slip away. For me to tell them after he’s gone. He says he isn’t feeling brave enough, and maybe it would be better, don’t I think? To not have him there for the news.

I stumble through the next two days, seized by a feeling I can’t place but that unnerves me in its familiarity, until I remember the days between the New Year’s party and marrying Cyril. The sense of something set in motion that I don’t fully understand, something I didn’t ask for, something that’s wrong in a way that grabs me by the throat and won’t let go.

So many chances to say no back then but nothing to be done now. I spend a day crying, my eyes swelling until I can barely see. He holds my hands and he tries to soothe me but he’s resolute. Unmovable. I can’t force him to stay. Father Michael comes and I use a rare sick day so that we have the house to ourselves. I hate it, hearing Felix let him through the gate, watching him walk down the garden steps in his black robes.

He greets me and we sit at the small kitchen table and he tells me that Felix has confessed his sins, and that they are grave, and that I deserve a marriage that’s blessed by God with a husband capable of such a union. I look at Felix. Neat mustache, wide cheekbones, kindness in his eyes. He could have told the Father anything, but he told him the truth.I have a condition.To my surprise, I find myself smiling, and Felix smiles back at me, and it’s reverent, this moment between us, until Father Michael taps on the tabletop to get my attention. He lectures on the sacrament of marriage and the process of the tribunal and how they reached the decision that a nullity of marriage will be granted. He tells me that I’ll be free in the eyes of God to find a husband with whom to enter a true andhonest union, and I want to scream into his face, and then I think,You’re only a man, and it gives me the composure to make it through.

The night before Felix goes back on the train, we have dinner as we always do, and he reads the children a story before bed, and he hugs them and tells them he’ll miss them, and once they’re asleep he packs his clothes and his few belongings into boxes. I realize for the first time how little he’s kept here, how faintly he’s left any mark. I’ve picked out all the art and the photographs on the wall. All the books and most of the records, the glassware and the furniture. Like he always knew he’d be leaving, like it was only a matter of time.

In the morning, we wait together outside the gate, my stomach heavy with dread, so many things I could tell him or ask but I can’t say any of them. And then his taxi’s arrived, and he hugs me on the street before shutting himself in.

I can’t focus in the booth. A record ends and I haven’t even heard it. I start it over. Pull the curtain shut so no one will see me. Just before lunch, I go up to Al’s office and have him call Bernard in. When it’s the three of us with the door closed, I say, “Felix left me. Will you tell my sisters? I just don’t know how many times I’ll be able to say it.” I stare out the window as I tell them so I don’t have to see their faces.

Al picks up his phone. “Ruby, please bring three lunch trays up to my office. Three coffees, one with cream. Whatever looks good today.”