Bay Air

                                                               

Dinner was done.  All the dishes cleared from the tiny kitchen table.  The open patio windows invited a waft of cold bay air to wend through the house, through the slatted furnace grates in the floorboards.  The cold sat down in the living room on the couch, in front of the muted oversized flat screen television that they’d bought together; unknowingly, at that moment, consigning themselves to defeat before they’d ever committed to this last of last foolish romances.  Some loves linger far past years of usefulness and fire and trying.  This love did not linger.

The day it ended, Shawna woke with a scratchy throat and knew who to blame.  She looked at the rolls that laziness and disinterest had folded into her sleeping lover’s back and imagined herself hunched over a well-lawyered desk, punctilious in signing all necessary-- and some extra--contracts allowing for a silent, pain-free dissolution of her dead dead and done marriage to this woman who used to be able to stop her breath, merely walking through the room and picking up a pencil.  Now they were pals who touched each other only out of habit and politeness.  She couldn’t remember the last time they’d kissed –well, besides the times they both needed to come--it didn’t happen.  The Saturday afternoon shows for the neighbors, with the windows wide open onto the street--Oh sweet Jesus!  Or even counting through Redwood Park, predicting the averages of leaves on the ferns growing beneath the shade of their unknowing, aged caretakers.  The splendid years gone and rolling toward regret, Shawna would have to tell her by noon.  Keep regret at bay.

She asked her future former lover to meet her at home for lunch.  She had a plan.  She’d made roasted chicken sandwiches, home fries with thin sliced garlic and strawberry lemonade, the pulp drawn out and set on a folded napkin.  She sat by the window, gazing out at the huge oak tree at the front of her surly cross-the-street neighbor’s yard.  She imagined how the tree felt knowing it would never leave that spot; it would always be beholden to the soil that held its roots, the sky that greened and sooted its leaves.  The light would change between seasons leaving the tree, at its root feeling a deep down greediness.

But the tree had learned these patterns and braced against what had become predictable let downs, expecting more from longer sweeter daylight and less of short tepid nights.  Winter drove it bare.  It cried for warmth and refuge.  It cried in cycles aligned to the change of light.  Then one day it noticed itself as a sliver of light reached under a cloud and shined upon a pool reflecting the tree back at the tree.

Shawna heard the car engine settle, the car door slammed, and footsteps climbed upward.  She noticed a shift in her breath.