Georgia
She did not sleep that night either, and this time there was no husband four feet away to cry quietly around. She lay alone in the dark, in the house she’d built for a future that had just been radically, permanently downsized, and did the only thing she knew how to do with grief this large: she tried to count it.
She had spent a year running the numbers backward. Twenty years, married. How many of those years had been real, and how many had been performance. How many Tuesdays had a second, hidden version she’d never been shown.
So she tried, lying in the dark with her hand flat against her stomach, where the thing that was killing her had been growing longer than anyone could say, to run the numbers the other direction. Eighty was the number most of the women in her family reached without effort. That was another thirty-five years, which she had been treating, this past year, as a debt owed to her.
She tried to subtract: thirty-five years, minus six months. She could not hold the size of the gap. The math failed like a calculator dividing by zero, not an answer, just an error.
She thought of Marsha at lunch, saying you’re so lucky, honestly, forty-five and free, and hated her. She thought of the young mother in the hotel bar, adjusting the blanket without looking, months and months of that motion still ahead of her, and hated her too, briefly, completely, until the hatred collapsed into something else. It was not the mother’s fault.
And underneath the hatred, underneath the failed arithmetic, something else began, slowly, to surface.
She thought about the hours she’d spent rewriting the same furious email to Benjamin’s lawyer, spite that had felt like the only thing keeping her upright. She thought about the month after the divorce spent mostly in a hotel room with the television on, waiting to feel different, as though it were weather that would pass over her if she held still long enough.
It was not that the twenty years stopped mattering. Both things were true: she had been wronged, and she had also spent a full year afterward behaving as though she had an unlimited supply of years left to get around to living — an assumption just as false as anything Benjamin had ever told her.
She thought, with sudden specificity, about how badly she wanted to be seventy. Not extraordinary at seventy: not traveling the world, not doing anything a magazine would ever want to photograph. She wanted, with an intensity that frightened her, to be seventy and bored on an ordinary Wednesday. She wanted to be annoyed about her knees. She wanted to complain about grandchildren she didn’t have, about a lawn that needed mowing, about absolutely nothing of any consequence at all. More Wednesdays, stacked up until there were enough of them to call a life.
She got up before dawn, went downstairs, and did not pour a cup of coffee down the sink this time. She drank it, sitting at her kitchen table, watching the sky go from black to gray to the pale color of early morning, and when her phone buzzed with a text from Axel, you up? thinking about you, she did something she would not have done the week before.
She answered it immediately, instead of letting it sit for an hour while she decided how much of herself she was willing to let show.
I’m up, she wrote. Thinking about you too.
At ten to noon a car turned into the driveway too fast. Marnie came up the walk with no bag and no pie and did not say a single word, which for Marnie was an act of great restraint. Georgia opened the door before she could knock.