When he woke up he expected not to see her. He had been awake when she came home late, and he listened to her packing a bag in the dark. But instead of leaving, she slid under the covers, close to him but not close enough to touch. Close enough that he could smell him on her, and he wondered why she had even bothered to stay the night here. He didn’t roll over, didn’t try to move closer. He wanted her to go and at the same time didn’t want to give her a reason to.
In his imperfect faith he asked God what he should do, what He could do to make things better. He heard her crying in the dark, and then he slept.
He saw her in the morning. She wasn’t in bed when he woke up, but the packed bag still sat in the corner of the room and he heard movement downstairs. It wasn’t early, it was still late. Later than he usually woke up. He rubbed his eyes. Maybe she wanted to say goodbye.
As he went down the stairs he could smell potatoes cooking, with a hint of rosemary that even more than a decade later never failed to remind him of his first food service job. He saw her in the kitchen, her back turned to him. He stepped into the arch of the doorway. He said nothing, made no attempt to reach out to her. Surely she’d heard him, and if she wanted to see him she would’ve turned around to greet him. He felt like he was intruding.
Seeing her there, profiled by the sunlight that came in through the window over the stove, an image he liked to remember from better times, he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to take her into his arms and hold her tight and forgive her, or turn away and tell her to leave immediately. He didn’t know what he wanted to say any more than he knew what he should say. There were too many possibilities, too many conflicting impulses coming from what he knew from experience, what he’d seen on TV, what his friends had told him of their relationships. He froze.
He wasn’t prepared. She turned around, faced him, showed her face to him so he could see clearly in the morning light the fist-sized black bruise covering her swollen left eye. Her good eye was hard, her gaze like flint. He took a step forward and opened his arms to her.
She turned away and turned over the pan of sizzling potatoes into the sink, then dropped the pan in after with a loud bang. He opened his mouth to speak, but she walked past without a word herself, and a minute later she was walking out the door with her bag in tow. He stood in silence for several more minutes before he walked over to the sink and picked a piece of cooked potato out of it. He brought it to his mouth and savored that bite. It was delicious.
(“Breakfast Potatoes” by Laura Smith, used under CC-by-NC-SA)
