Zig smiled, pretending the compliment didn’t matter. But everything with an ex matters. He looked over his handiwork with a fresh eye, imagining how the pieces looked to her. Each project had taken months. He’d built the dining room table from barn wood, reupholstered the arts-and-crafts-style sofa, and personally sandblasted the porcelain on the antique barbershop chair that he’d pulled from a junkyard and made the centerpiece of his living room. He’d even sculpted the three soapstone hummingbirds anchored to the wall above the sofa. Zig was always moving, filling his home with project after homemade project. But at this moment, with Charmaine at the center of it, his house felt emptier than ever.
“Restroom this way?” she asked, heading toward the kitchen without hesitation, like she owned the place.
“What’s the bad news?” Zig called out.
“Just relax,” she replied, doing that thing where she twisted her wrists, jangling her yoga bracelets, which were made of shells, beads, and pale aquamarine crystals. Heading down the hallway, she forced a smile before disappearing into the bathroom.
It fooled most people. But it didn’t fool Zig. And he didn’t fool her.
She definitely got married, Zig thought, racing toward the kitchen, practically smashing his shins into the pinewood bench as he grabbed his laptop from the farm table. With a few clicks, he navigated to Facebook, the browser populating with the only profile he ever visited.
Charmaine Clarke.
Status: In a relationship.
Like most things on Facebook, it was a half-truth. Charmaine had gotten engaged months ago. No wedding date set, at least based on the few replies he’d seen on the subject.
He double-checked her feed. Her most recent post was a photo that a friend took after a recent car crash, airbag deployed, all the windows shattered, with a message from Charmaine: “Be thankful for what you have.”
“SO TRUE!” someone replied.
“Love your posts!!!” wrote another, outdoing the caps with triple exclamation points.
For years after Maggie’s death, Zig would check Facebook every day, eyeing Charmaine’s relationship status. He swore it off years ago, on that night that he decided to leave Dover and his old life behind. New house, new town, new start.
Yet in two minutes, Zig already felt that familiar pit in his stomach, that cocktail of thrill and shame that only comes from being around an old flame.
“Sorry to ambush you. It’s just—hoo boy,” Charmaine called out behind him, her voice hoarse, like she’d been yelling. Or crying.
Zig slapped shut his laptop and spun around, getting a better view of her in the light of the kitchen. She still looked great, but she also looked tired. Her crow’s-feet were deeper than he remembered, same with her elevens, which was what she called the two vertical wrinkles between her eyebrows—but her brown hair was long again, the way she used to wear it. She’s beautiful, Zig thought, the emotional kaleidoscope spinning faster, anxiety colliding with excitement. She looks better than last time. She hates me. And of course, that steadfast nugget that always arrived as old memories mixed with old smells mixed with an entire lifetime that they’d shared and then discarded: She still loves me. Yet as Zig motioned for her to sit across from him, it was clear that when it came to old love, nothing got discarded, at least not completely.
“You and Warren okay?”
A small smile lit Charmaine’s face—a real one. Back when they were married, Charmaine had taught linguistics at Drexel University, where she’d greet students with her favorite joke: The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense. After Maggie’s death, though, working with kids . . . Charmaine couldn’t do it. Like most parents who bury a child, she couldn’t do much of anything. What saved her was, of all things, yoga. Eventually, she opened Blue Yogamaya, a small wellness center, determined to be on the giving side of helping others, rather than the receiving. The universe heard her loud and clear. A week after the opening, she met Warren. “He’s great. Warren’s great,” she said, a true calm settling her voice, her elevens disappearing.