Anniversary

Luke Diamond
Jul 20, 2017 · 7 min read

Instead of shouldering through the potholes, Henry lifted his foot off the accelerator and eased into and out of them. One hairy wrist was on top of the truck’s steering wheel, the other on the seat between him and Rebecca. His hands were broad and sun-dried, having absorbed the rougher qualities of the welder’s gloves they often filled. Her hands were soft and creamy because she worked with children and she rubbed lotion into them every evening. She looked out of her window, but there wasn’t much to see. It was dark enough that even at ten miles an hour, the pine trees blurred into a black curtain. If she tilted her neck sideways, she could have glimpsed the waning moon.

She was wearing a pale blue dress, knee-length and sleeveless. The truck was warm, but she kept rubbing her shoulders. “Ten years,” she said, and placed one of her hands on the seat next to his. “Where does the time go?” She said this to the windshield, and it was unclear whether the question was meant for him at all.

He slid his hand on top of hers and gave it a light squeeze. It was an unusually affectionate gesture for Henry. But he was not like himself tonight, having already committed two atypical acts, and both in service of an even rarer third. The first was that he had shaved. Henry was a man of verbs, not adjectives. He considered “handsome” and “manly,” if he considered them at all, empty badges pined after by boys. His defining words were to work and to provide, neither of which required shaving as far as he was concerned. His scruff often roamed down his jaw unchecked, eventually bridging his cheek and collar bones, at which point Rebecca felt compelled to say something. But tonight, he had shaved unprompted. The second was that he wore a shirt with buttons. Henry owned exactly two shirts with buttons. One was black. He wore it to funerals. The other was blue, and he wore it to everything else at which a plain-dealing T-shirt would be so intolerable as to cause offense. He was wearing his blue one tonight. But it was the motivation for these actions that was queerest of all.

“Are we almost there?” she asked. He smirked in response, and she didn’t know what to think.

Henry was executing a surprise.

He was notoriously averse to them. At work, every screw had a hole, every latch had a hook, every huge metal plate had prescribed neighbors. At home, he saw no reason for life to operate any less smoothly. So he awoke every day at five and ate a bowl of Cheerios, punched in at the yard at six, worked until six, then drove home and ate dinner at seven. His schedule was built tightly with no corners or nooks for surprises to pop out of. At work, surprises bred injuries. At home, they bred problems that knocked his schedule out of kilter. And Henry became his verbs best when everything was assuredly in kilter. So his helming of a surprise tonight was surprising enough in itself for Rebecca to feel happily and thoroughly boggled.

He was not always so tightly wound. In their early days, he had made love to her under a sugar maple in a public park. She was terrified and meant to tell him absolutely not except for that she couldn’t stop laughing. So they did and it was wonderful. No one saw. Someone might have seen. The point was that a major risk had been taken, and they frolicked in it together. But the tonnage of ten years’ ticking with no remarkable inclines in fortune but more than one in debt bent Henry into a dependency on dependability itself. Schedules. Fixed interest rates. Bi-weekly paychecks. His life was a shrine to the reliable, and almost all its untrustworthy elements had been removed.

Not far ahead, she could see where the pine trees ended and the white gravel glowed in the glare of moonbeams. He braked ever so slightly so the trees rolled backwards like curtains. Beyond the gravel path, which arced to the left, a navy green lawn sprawled many yards forward and wide toward the long bank of lake where it disappeared beneath the surface. It had not been cut recently, and its rioting blades were bejeweled with dew drops that captured the moon’s light and glowed like a legion of micro-moons that paid radiant thanks to their source. The sky was an astronomical wilderness. Free of competing light, it bared its deepest, blackest layers of stars which twinned themselves on the lake’s surface. Perched on a hill overlooking the scene was a small wooden cottage. Henry proceeded down the path towards it.

He lifted her bag from the truck bed and opened her door for her. She descended onto the dewy grass. He crooked his arm to escort her. She smiled, but it was not a pleasantry or a general expression. It was the exact manifestation of the hope she felt bubble inside her for their future together, and she resolved to do whatever needed to be done to nurse it into greater health. She settled her left arm inside his right and hung her hand over his wrist like a lazy dove. The misty night air tickled her shoulders and wrapped her in chilled aromas of minty pine, wet earth, and still, clean water. A cloud passed over the man in the moon’s face as they stepped onto the porch and into the house.

The front of the cottage was one long room divided into a living room and a kitchen. Between the kitchen counter and the front wall was a breakfast table set for two beneath a window that framed the star-pricked lake. A proper table setting was practically Henry’s signature. Since the age of four, his mother impressed on him the importance of an ordered table, complete with a hand-drawn diagram titled “How to Set a Table” pinned to the bottom door of the refrigerator with a magnet. Rebecca said, “Babe.”

Henry stepped past the table and pulled back her chair. He motioned for her to sit. Was he, against all odds, being performative? “You’ve cooked?” she asked. He replied by tugging one of his handkerchiefs from his back pocket and saying, “I’m going to need you to put this on.” All at once, she lifted her eyebrows and the tips of her lips and opened her mouth a little. It was the face she made when he’d unzipped his jeans beneath the sugar maple. It was the face she made when an impulse to say no and a desire to say yes collided inside of her. The bubble inside her grew. He folded it into a band, lowered it over her eyes, and gently fashioned a loop behind her hair. “How many fingers am I holding up?” She guessed two. He was holding up three.

He clopped across the kitchen in his boots and opened a door that led into the back half of the house. She pricked her ears for sounds of — she didn’t know what, she realized. A Crockpot? But instead, she heard the rattle of a plastic bag. She imagined him undressing one from around an expensive bottle of wine. A more tantalizing image developed in her mind, but she pushed it away. Henry wouldn’t. But he also wouldn’t shave, or dress up, or rent a secluded lakeside cottage, and hadn’t he done those things? Yes, he had, so she let herself imagine that he was bagging a gift box of new lingerie. Something lacy and inappropriate. Something that cost fifty, or even a hundred dollars! Something that felt as light on her skin as the shade of a sugar maple. Oh, yes, the hope had bloomed in her now and there was no putting it back. He had bought her new lingerie that they would use with such fury tonight that the drought of touch that reigned between them would be abolished, and he would fill her and she would melt into him.

He reentered the kitchen and shut the door. The plastic bag rustled and excitement burned in her fingers. He leaned something against the kitchen counter, then stepped towards the breakfast table and placed the plastic bag right on her plate. His mother would not approve! She squeezed and unsqueezed her palms. “Ready?” he said. She didn’t know if she was or not. “Go ahead,” he said.

She pinched the blindfold’s knot and pulled it forward off her head. She was right, it was a bulging plastic bag from their local superstore. Its handles were tied and she unknotted them. Inside were many small slips of paper, receipts, she realized. The one on top was from the coffee shop she stopped at every day on her way to school and it reflected her usual order. She pawed these aside and discovered an empty coffee cup that’s straw was still printed with her chap stick. She held the bag forward and inspected its appearance. Deep inside her, a tiny bomb of fear imploded, and she felt its aftermath rising within her more and more uncomfortably, until it felt like someone was pouring hot buckets of dread over her ribs. Without any effort or conscious thought, an apology fumbled out of her mouth. She looked at him, and his face was as thick and unforgiving as cement. She inhaled and her cheeks fluttered. Her eyes welled and she frowned.

“Empty it,” he said. She asked him not to make her, and he said that wasn’t an option.

She tilted the grocery bag over her dinner plate, her mascara carving black rivers down her face now, and shook it. Receipts fell out, then the plastic cup, along with other shards of debris that might fill any car, but for which Rebecca had engineered a grocery-cum-trash bag that she kept in the compartment between her front seats. Finally, a condom fell out, hit the cup, and stuck. It was inside out and lightly sticky. She covered her face and wept with silent violence.

Henry reached for the other object he’d leaned against the counter out of her sight. She saw it now and it wrenched a scream for her deepest muscles. He motioned her toward the door with its long double-barrel, then marched her out of the cabin and around the lake toward the forest. She chanted her penance until its syllables fell apart in her mouth into unintelligible sobs. When they approached the forest wall, she wretched onto a bed of needles, and they passed behind the black pine curtain. The crickets rubbed music into the air for some minutes, until a single explosion ripped their song in two. A colony of bats exploded from the tree tops and shrouded the moon completely.

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Luke Diamond

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If you don't make your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.