Page 7 of Wreckage and Rain

Nothing.

I turn off the burner and move the bread into a bag before it goes tough. I cover the sauce. Then I lean across the table and blow out the candles one by one.

Smoke curls off the wicks and mixes with the garlic and wine, and for a second the whole kitchen smells less like the beginning of something than the end.

I stand there looking at the table.

Two plates. Two glasses. Two of everything.

The woman who set it forty minutes ago, the one who thought tonight might still become something, already feels like someone I used to know.

I don’t cry. There’s nothing solid enough to cry over yet.

There’s only a pot of his favorite food going cold beneath a lid.

I run out to the market to get the coffee.

I see them through the window on my way back.

The market bag is still hanging from my hand.

The Butcher Block is where Colt took me for our first anniversary that felt real. He wanted somewhere nicer than my parents’ diner, and his mother kept saying we really must try it.

He ordered oysters Rockefeller. Got spinach stuck in his teeth. Looked across the table at me with that stupid green smile and said, “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

“You have spinach in your teeth,” I told him.

He shrugs. "Still."

That is The Butcher Block.

Ours.

The restaurant with a story in it.

Now Colt is sitting at a table near the window with a candle burning between him and Cheyenne. Two glasses of red wine, both half-empty.

She’s leaning toward him, elbows on the table, chin resting in her hand, giving him her full attention.

He’s leaning in too.

Same angle. Same distance.

Like she set a mirror across from herself and he hasn’t noticed he’s become the reflection.

And he’s laughing.

Actually laughing. Not the short breath he gives me when he’s looking at his phone and I say something he thinks is probably funny.

The one that breaks across his face, creases the corners of his eyes, and turns him back into the boy who walked into the diner with mud on his knees and rang the bell above the door like he’d invented it.

I stop in the middle of the sidewalk.

People move around me. Someone mutters, “Excuse me.”

I can’t move.

I stand there in the current of King Street at dinnertime and watch my husband be happy.