A Short Story by Patty Jane Maher

            She applied teak-rose lipstick in the mirror by the front door and thought how the color flattered her even though she hadn’t taken time to apply mascara. She liked looking in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs because it had once hung in her grandmother’s bedroom and the polished cherry frame reminded her that some things endure and even become more beautiful in time. At the top of the mirror, between wooden frame and plaster wall, were dried flowers from her yard, asters she’d picked for the brunch she hosted following her friend’s funeral, hydrangeas she’d picked from the bush she planted in memory of her mother. They reminded her of her sentimentality, something she decided she wanted to hold onto.

            As she returned the lipstick to its cap she heard his horn in the driveway and she wondered, as she left the front door unlocked because she didn’t have her key, what else would she hold onto. Since Thomas had moved out in August, Jane had been in a posture of letting go. And she realized as she stepped off the snow-covered front step that in letting go, she hadn’t lost herself, as she feared she might. It seemed rather that she had removed him like a coat that didn’t fit anymore and uncovered her self, a situation that made her feel more natural and more vulnerable. And that may be why she felt pleased to remember that she still had things she wanted to hold onto.

            Jane put all that out of her mind as she opened the passenger door to his gold Chevy S-10 pickup and focused her attention to the situation at hand.

            “Hello,” she said as she settled into the seat, tearing off a long piece of toilet paper from the roll she’d taken from a bag of groceries on her way out. “Don’t worry. I’ll tear it into little pieces so they won’t know it’s toilet paper.” On the phone the night before Thomas had explained he was planning to wear a suit, concerned they shouldn’t look like white trash.

            “You still have a cold?” he asked as he turned right at the bottom of the hill, carefully checking all his mirrors.

            “It’s not as bad as it was. I think the fever broke last night and the humidifier seemed to help some.”

            “So, you like the humidifier? It works OK?”

            She’d bought the humidifier at the downtown Battle Creek K-Mart on her way home from work the night before. She’d also bought vitamin C, Echinacea, multiple vitamins, Diet 7-up and tissues.

            “I usually park at City Hall,” Thomas said as he scanned the crowded Justice Complex lot, which he had pulled into upon her suggestion.

            “I guess I don’t usually come here in the morning. There are always spots in the afternoon,” Jane said. “We can park in the back and just walk a little more.”

            He was wearing the brown suit he’d bought at Hudson’s after Christmas the previous year with the gift certificate she’d given him. But he had no coat, and she worried he would catch cold and also about what people must think of them if that was the way he walked around all winter, to his church, to business meetings.

            “Don’t you have a jacket?” she asked.

            “Yes. I have two,” he said. “I have that purple jacket and then my other one. But I decided to just wear this, since we would just be walking from the truck to the building.”

            “Oh,” she said, remembering the expensive purple parka his mother had bought him, glad that it was long enough to cover a suit coat so that he could wear it on very cold days.

            It was a very cold January morning and she’d worn a turtleneck and wool cardigan under her down coat. It was the coat’s third winter and, it was missing a button, but Jane thought it had held up well and didn’t look too bad.

            “Someday I’ll get a good coat, cashmere or wool. Maybe this summer, when they’re on sale,” Thomas said as they approached the sidewalk. “That’s a pretty skirt. Is it your new wool skirt?”

            “This is the skirt my sisters bought me for my birthday. It’s a wool blend,” Jane said, looking down at the skirt, which hung almost to her ankles and looked pretty but not sexy, as it had on the model in the catalog. When she turned thirty-four in November Thomas had sent her a card with a photograph of a baby cow that had the same black-and-white markings as their cat, Edward. The card had saddened Jane, so she had burned it in her kitchen sink and watched the smoke curl up past the framed verse her mother had given her on her thirty-second birthday. It read: Most Of All, Let Love Guide Your Life, Col. 3:14. Thomas had turned thirty on June 22, the day of their eighth anniversary, the day following the summer solstice.

            “Do you think we’ll be late?” she asked, picking up pace on the first set of steps at the Justice Complex.

            “I don’t think so,” he said, as he climbed faster.

            “Do you want to take the stairs or the elevator?” he asked in the hallway.

            “Stairs,” she said, pushing the door to the stairwell and hurrying down.

            She quickly noticed the sign directing them to the hearing room, and she remembered that this was one of the qualities he’d always liked about her; within seconds she could size up a building and figure out which way to go.

            As she sat down in one of the chairs along the wall she was surprised by the smallness of the room. She had expected something more dramatic, an old-man judge with a gavel at a dais high above a courtroom with wooden pews and a tile floor. Funny she’d expected that, she thought, because she’d been in the building before and knew it was modern. Yet the architecture and decor seemed a let down. How could decisions so monumental be decided in a small basement room with gray carpeting and mauve chairs?

            She looked at him and he looked at her as they waited for a mediator with a bushy permanent and synthetic fingernails to pass judgement on the cases ahead of theirs. They weren’t fighting over property and had no children, so they hadn’t retained attorneys, and weren’t required to see a judge.

            Immediately before them went a young woman who giggled and wore blue jeans tucked into dirty-white snow boots with fake-fur lining. Her pretty-blonde hair was clipped into a pink-plastic claw and she left her schoolbooks, Introduction to Biology and Post-Romantic Art, on the desk as she approached the mediator. She was totally unprepared and hadn't submitted the necessary paperwork and Jane knew she was just what Thomas was afraid of resembling.

“This is one of the problems you encounter when you don’t hire an attorney,” the mediator said to the young woman. “You’ll have to reschedule and get me the papers I need.”

            When it was their turn the mediator told Jane and Thomas she would need a copy of the judgement, which was in his truck. They could proceed if they submitted it, with two copies, by noon.

So they walked back out to the truck to drive to the copy store and Jane said she’d be happy to pay for the copies but she didn’t have any change. Thomas said he would pay.

“Do you mind that I’m meeting Bob this afternoon?” he asked.

“No. I think it’s nice that you have a friend and you’re doing what you want to do, instead of always running around trying to make your family and friends happy,” Jane said. “I gathered from your E-mail that you’d asked Bob to spend some time with you and I think it’s nice that you were able to do that. Bob seems like a nice guy.”

“He is. He’s taking the afternoon off work just to be with me and you know he makes a lot of money every day, so he could be making money. He told he he’d pay for everything, too, not to worry. He’s a nice guy.”

Bob worked as an investment broker for the company Thomas had joined ten months earlier and Bob had a large client base because he’d lived in Battle Creek his whole life and his father was in the business. Thomas had stumbled upon the career after becoming frustrated with several other professions he’d taken up since marrying Jane during their last year of college. He had studied geology and she had studied journalism.

“Will you have a hamburger?” Jane asked, thinking he wouldn’t because he’d become so rigid about vegetarianism. But she wondered because Thomas had forwarded Bob’s E-mail, which had suggested he and Bob go out for burgers at the Stagecoach. Thomas seemed always on the lookout for someone to show him the way, so considering his new bond with Bob, she wondered if he might just have a burger.

“No,” Thomas said. “I won’t have a burger.”

“You can have a grilled cheese,” Jane said, thinking he might wonder about the menu at the bar.

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll have a grilled cheese,” he said. “And some of those onions.”

“Onion rings?” she asked.

“Yes. Onion rings,” he said.

It didn’t take him long to make copies and when he returned to the truck, she said she would pay for breakfast when they were finished. Thomas said he had only spent ninety cents. Still, Jane wanted to pay for breakfast because he had made the copies and done the driving.

She presented the judgement and two copies to the mediator and they took seats at the desks. This is it, she said in her heart as she looked over at his hands, the hands she’d fallen in love with nine years earlier in the springtime as they strummed Bob Dylan tunes by the river in the park where he and she were later married. Now his hands held pages of the marital settlement agreement in the little room.

“Have you prepared a statement?” the mediator asked Jane.

“No. I -- ”

“It’s OK,” the mediator said. “I’ll guide you through it. Is it your understanding that there has been a breakdown in the marriage relationship to the extent that the objects of matrimony have been destroyed and there remains no reasonable likelihood that the marriage can be preserved?”

“Yes,” Jane said quietly, without choking.

“What caused the breakdown?” the mediator asked.

Tears came then, not hysterical tears, but quiet tears, and Jane choked. “Communication,” she whispered. It was all she could say.”

He said he agreed and within minutes it was done.

Outside it was cold still, and she noticed how their footprints merged with hundreds of others, in the thin blanket of snow, on the sidewalk near the Justice Complex. Despite her congestion, Jane could smell Blueberry Morning baking at the Post Plant, and Thomas said he was glad to see they’d added a small parking lot to Memorial Park, so that people would have easy access to the Sojourner Truth monument.

“Do you think we made the right decision?” Jane asked as they drove toward the restaurant where they had agreed to have breakfast because it was near the interstate and unlikely they’d bump into anyone there.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said as his face wrinkled like a little boy and tears streaked down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I feel like I let you down.”

He continued driving and Jane reached for the hair at the top of his neck and scratched softly as she would a cat, as she always did to soothe him, to tell him it was OK.

“I feel like such a failure,” he said. “I wish I could have loved you the way you wanted me to, the way you deserve. I’m so sorry.”

Jane became anxious for his feelings to pass. “It’s OK,” she said, remembering how after the last time they’d had sex he admitted there was no chemistry; she, too, had wanted something more. “We let each other down. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you.”

She ordered orange juice with her coffee. She was thirsty and still feeling congested, so she wanted the vitamin c and the sweet taste.

Thomas ordered fried apples, hash browns and biscuits, and Jane thought that sounded good but was glad she didn’t order it herself when it arrived because the apples looked like they’d come straight from a can, nothing like she expected. She ordered an English muffin with scrambled eggs and bacon, and wondered if he was upset because she’d abandoned vegetarianism. She thought he might be, since she had been the one who talked him into trying it. Sometimes it seemed to bother him a bit, but that morning he didn’t seem to mind. Still, to justify her selection – and, she reasoned, for her own edification – she pulled out her calorie counter and explained that she could still eat other things that day.

It was hard to make conversation because she could hardly see him. The sunlight bounced off the snow and shone through the window behind him turning him into a dark silhouette. She had to squint to see his eyes.

They talked about mundane things, his plan for paying off debt and the $7,000 he stood to inherit when his grandmother – who was in a nursing home – died. He wasn’t trying to be morose, and she didn’t get the impression that he was looking forward to her death. But this is how the conversation went. She shared with him how things were going at work and the topics she’d written about the previous week: pets in the workplace, penny pinchers, and thrill seekers, those who jump from airplanes and tall buildings for kicks.

He took her to her bank, since they were in the neighborhood, and to the video store, since he had two videos to return, and then he took her home, and they sat in the driveway.

“How do you think things will change between us now?” she asked.

“Incrementally,” he said and very softly they cried.

“I feel like you said you wanted this divorce because you wanted me to wake up and show you that I loved you and I couldn’t follow through. I didn’t do it,” he said. “Now I feel like such a failure.”

“That’s not what I meant to do,” she said, searching her soul for its intentions, wondering why she began to doubt the decision as soon as he began to date. “I just hadn’t let go of the dream.”

The dream was still with Jane and she wondered if it would ever die. In the dream she wore a long braid and a smile and children tugged at her blue jeans as she worked in the garden. Their home was built in a clearing in the woods and powered by a windmill he built himself after reading alternative energy books. In the winter they read books by a fireplace they’d built themselves with fieldstones from their property. He explained to the children how many years ago the glaciers deposited the rocks, granite, schist, and gneiss, and the children were most happy when he played guitar and she painted bright expressionist paintings. The children painted pictures, too, and sang songs. Every summer they rented a cottage on Lake Michigan and built sand castles at the shore.

She stayed with him a while longer, looking at the garage, something he had wanted and begun to build, then put off for months and months and months as work and obligations to family and old friends called him away. After he moved out, a contractor had finished most of it.

Jane watched the sun touch the side of the garage and the row of frozen tomato plants that had yielded pretty well, though they were planted in a spot that was only sunny half the day. The small, urban lot was shady and he had built the garage on the only sunny spot. She protested because she had wanted a garden so very badly, but gave in when he agreed to consider a flat roof so she could plant vegetables and flowers in raised beds. She imagined two Adirondack chairs in the center and sitting up there star gazing on clear nights. Once the cement was poured it was decided that a flat roof was too impractical.

Dusted with snow, the tomato plants looked like skeletons, cold dry bones.

“Next year I’ll plant raspberries, instead,” Jane said.

“Your tomatoes did well,” Thomas said.

“But you can buy them cheaply at the farm stands and you have to replant them every year.”

The conversation had run its course.

Jane looked at Thomas but didn’t feel she could see him anymore. She moved toward him to kiss his cheek; she always loved his skin. He brought his lips to hers and kissed her like an old friend. She worried she would give him her cold and she moved her lips to his cheek, and then her head to his shoulder where she rested for a little while. It felt nice.

Jane looked at Thomas and she asked when would they talk again, and he said he would call her the next day.

And she got out of his truck and didn’t look back to wave as she opened the door to her home.