Benjamin
It was Lena who finally pushed him past eventually, fourteen months after the divorce, on a Sunday call that started like all the others and didn’t end like any of them.
“You’re going to be an old man someday,” she said, “sitting in that apartment with thirteen blank walls, telling yourself there’s still time to call her. And one day there won’t be, and you’ll have spent every single Sunday of your life assuming there would be.” She let that sit. “Call her, Benjamin. Or don’t. But stop calling me instead and pretending that’s the same thing.”
He sat with it for three days. On the fourth, a Thursday, he drove past the old house before he’d fully decided to, the way a man’s hands sometimes decide things before he does. There was a different car in the driveway, a child’s bicycle on its side in the yard where he’d once argued with Georgia about the color of the shutters for two straight weekends. He sat at the curb a long moment, engine running, understanding for the first time in any real way that the house had gone on existing without either of them in it, that it had simply become somebody else’s ordinary life.
He drove to the address he still had for her, the one on file with the lawyer, a house on the other side of town he’d never once visited. Her car wasn’t in the driveway. He didn’t know, sitting there, that it hadn’t been her house in months, that a different truck now sometimes parked where his rental car idled, that his own wife — he still thought the word sometimes, out of old habit, before correcting it — was three miles away, at that exact hour, learning to hang a six-panel oak door in somebody else’s garage.
He drafted the letter that night, at the kitchen table, under the lighthouse he still hadn’t taken down. He wrote three pages and tore them up. He wrote one page and got as far as Georgia, before I say anything else and stopped, because everything after it sounded either like an excuse or a performance of not making one, and he couldn’t find the version that was neither.
He called Lena back near midnight.
“I don’t know what to say to her.”
“You don’t have to get it right. You have to say something.”
“What if she doesn’t want to hear from me?”
“Then she tells you that, and you’ve lost nothing you didn’t already not have.” A pause, gentler. “Benjamin. You’ve had fourteen months to get this right in your head. It’s never going to arrive finished. At some point you just have to send the unfinished version.”
He told her he would. He meant it, the way he’d meant it the last three Sundays, and the ones before that.
He did not call. Not that week, not the one after. There was always a version of the conversation he wasn’t ready to have, a better month coming that would make the words easier to find, and he let himself believe, the way he had believed it for fourteen months already, that eventually was still a place he could get to whenever he finally decided to leave for it.
He put the folded, torn pages in the drawer with the things he hadn’t decided what to do with, next to the level he’d never used again and the coast photograph he still hadn’t hung, and told himself: soon. Not tonight. Soon.
He did not know, that Thursday night, that soon had already run out several towns over, in a small backyard wedding he would never hear about until it no longer mattered how he felt about it.