“I thought all your days are nice here.”
“You must be a visitor.”
“Just a tourist, staying with my daughter for a week.”
They began to talk quietly – about Carlton’s wife, and Jen’s daughter – the way absolute strangers sometimes can, ships passing in the night, unlikely ever to meet again.
“My husband was a good, decent man, who put up with my quirks,” she said after a while. Dave’s gone now, eight months.”
“A neighbor stays with my wife.”
“We met in a bar one night, thirty years ago. Not love at first sight. But we got married a year later. He was an enlisted man then, before he became an officer.”
“Sheila doesn’t recognize me any more most days, although she seems to knowwho Oscar is.”
“She drove right though a red light, texting,” Jen said, “right into the driver’s side of my husband’s sedan, his bags of groceries in the next seat. Her two kids were strapped into their seats in back, thank God. Nobody else suffered a scratch. Jail for that young mother wouldn’t have brought me any ‘closure,’ as the newspapers like to say.”
“I live mostly with memories of happier days. Paris, Naples, other places. Sheila was a painter. Won’t touch a brush now.”
On the bench next to theirs, two parents watched their son, a small wiry boy, maybe seven or eight, begin to perform, for their benefit, repeated somersaults on the pavement. The mother and father responded with proud, gleeful shouts of “good job.”
“I hope I’m not being too forward, “ she said brightly, asking Carlton if he’d like to go over to one of the cafes for coffee, or wine. “To mark my early morning departure back East, where the forecast is overcast and drizzly.”
“A most pleasant thought,” he said. That restaurant allows dogs inside. But, alas, Oscar gets too nervous.” So they sat and chatted for quite a while on less weighty matters, until they both fell, for a few moments, into a peaceful silence. At last, Carlton said in a low sad voice, “all stories, Jennifer, even for nice people like us, don’t always have happy endings. Sorry for the truism. Now, Oscar and I have to walk home. It’s just a few blocks. Time for his dinner. And for Sheila and me too.”
The two grieving people, who’d shared surprisingly candid intimacies for a few hours, exchanged contact information. Jen took a cab back to her daughter’s apartment, to drink a glass of pinot grigio with her, before she started packing.