Page 82 of Meet Me in the Garden

We eat in silence. Every so often, Bernard sets his hand on my knee.

After work, I sit down with the children on the living room floor where they’re playing Jacks, and I take their hands in mine. “I have bad news,” I say, “but we’re going to be all right.”

Clément rushes off to his room. Nathalie says, “He’s barely around anyway, so what’s the difference?” She clenches her jaw, brushes tears away roughly.

“He promises that he’ll visit and write, and you can see him during the summers when you go to New Orleans.”

She shakes her head. “He isn’t coming back,” she says. And I think ofBill, how completely he left her, and Felix’s disdain for him, and surely,surely, Felix will do better. Still, I don’t make her any promises. We both know too much for that.

At night I wander the house, seeing him on the sofa with the newspaper. Through the window as he strides down the steps. By the fire, light across his form. I know how to be a woman at home alone with her children. I do it for weeks at a time. And yet I’m suddenly small and young and afraid. My heart pounds fast and hard as I pull the covers over my body and his bed lies empty under the window. Will stay empty now. No more comfort of knowing he’ll be home in a couple weeks. No more sound of his breathing a few feet away in the dark. Or his slippers by the bed. Or his robe hanging on the door.

On Saturday, they come over—Lionel and Al and Bernard, Adele and Claire, with all the children in tow. Claire cooks at my stove, enough meals to last us the week. I’m still in shock, still floating over everything. I don’t know what to do with the sorrow in their faces, the way they hush and move as though someone’s died. It feels wrong to accept it, when we weren’t exactly husband and wife, at least not in the way they understood it.

Whatwerewe?

The question rattles around in my brain, unearthing every joyous memory and every mundane one. The times we were together and the times I was lonely, when I felt that he was happy and when I felt that he was restless, when I was satisfied and when I wasn’t. That night when he brought Ginny here by mistake. His emotion when he hugged me in the quiet house while his lover prepared for bed. We needed more of that. I could have given him more of that. He could have given it to me, too, had I let him.

But I didn’t let him. Too late now. My fault.

I stand at the window, and Adele joins me there. Looks out to see what I see: the men, pacing through the wild garden. Al throws his hands up and says something. Bernard shrugs. Lionel laughs. They don’t knowwhat to do with a yard like this. “We’re trying to help you,” Adele says. “Tell us how.”

I keep watching out the window, waiting for an answer. I will something to appear to me.

“Think about it this way,” she says. “When you aren’t working and you aren’t with the kids, how do you want to spend your time? What would make you happy?”

“Painting,” I say.

“A studio?” she asks. I nod. “You have plenty of room for it. I’ll go tell them.”

“It’s a big job,” I say. “They might not be up for something so big.”

Adele ignores me, walks out the kitchen door. I watch her cross the garden to them. They’ve been squatting, discussing the weeds. They rise when she nears them. She says a few words. Al nods. Bernard lifts his hand to his chin, envisioning. Lionel steps back, points downslope. I crane my head to see. The flat land that leads up to the forest part, framed by an oak and a palm, a halo of sunlight warming it. Al dusts off his knees and strides down.

I can’t wait here anymore, not knowing what’s being discussed. I go out after them.

“You’ll need a sink, yes?” Bernard says. “Would you prefer it inside or maybe mounted to an exterior wall?”

“We’ll need to run the pipes down from the house and add drainage either way,” Al says. “So it’s simply a matter of preference.”

“I helped a friend out with a demo job about a month ago,” Lionel says. “He took home a truckful of old windows. I’ll bet he’d give us some.”

“We’ll make it look real sharp for you, Odette,” Bernard says. “You make us a list of what you want. We’ll make it happen. What do you say, a cinder block foundation, Lionel? Can’t imagine getting a mixer down here.”

“Cinder block’ll be fine. We’ll hide it with a little decking. Odette, how about redwood around the perimeter? We could make one sidewider so there’s room for some chairs and a table. Would you ever paint outside? There’s a word for that, isn’t there?”

“Plein air. And yes, yes I would.”

“No need to cry, Odette,” Adele says, her arm around my waist. “Now, now. No need to cry.”

They wait out the winter rains and then begin. Put the Sunday parties on hold, meet me at the front gate early on the weekends, drive straight to my place from the plant, their work clothes packed in the car. Lionel brings over his little radio and whenever “Earth Angel” comes on I hear all three of them singing from below. With each pound of the hammer and each load they carry down, each step through my front gate and bottle of beer drunk on my patio, I feel their love for me. But I recognize, even more, that there’s something unknowable about me, a part of me that I can’tletthem know. And it eats the love away, feeds at it from the inside of my stomach, and I am a husk as I hug them goodbye.

Summer comes, and Felix still hasn’t written to tell us where he is or how to find him.

“Did he die?” Clément asks on our way to the train station, Adele’s car right ahead of ours. I’m careful to make my voice steady, explain with as much assuredness and gentleness as I can muster. I say it’s most likely we would have heard if he’d died. That sometimes people get a little lost, and they lose track of time, or they come to feel very harshly about themselves and they don’t know how to get past it. Then I’m waving at the Sunset Limited as it leaves the station, heading to the library as soon as it’s gone, scouring the newspapers for lewd vagrancy charges and death notices and train accidents. I phone old acquaintances and ask if they’ve heard from him. I bring lunch to Al and Bernard and Lionel, working out back in the afternoon sun. They’re setting the windows today. We sit on a pile of cinder blocks in the shade, eating sandwiches and drinking iced tea. They assure me they’d have told me if any news had reached them.

I imagine Felix with amnesia and my heart aches. I imagine him happy,drinking in bars and surrounded by beautiful men and thinking nothing of us and I hate him. Halfway through the visit, Clément phones me from the Laurent house.

“Has Daddy called you yet?” he asks.