I punched him in the arm.
“What the hell?”
I hit him again.
I was still laughing, but I slugged him as hard as I could. Even though I was striking flesh, I felt the impact in my knuckles, my nails digging into my palms.
Tom recoiled, rubbing at his shoulder, getting out of harm’s way.
“Lily, it’s not—”
“Is everything okay here, folks?”
It was a beat cop. The buttons on his jacket sparkled under the street lamp.
“It’s fine . . . We had a little too much to drink,” Tom said. “My wife was teasing me.”
The cop spoke directly to me. His eyes were almost black, from what I could see of them under the peak of his cap, but they seemed kind.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
I caught my breath and forced myself to speak. “I’m fine. It’s our anniversary. Twenty-two years! Since our first date, anyway. Only twenty married. Twenty.”
The police officer looked from me to Tom. Tom was rubbing the spot where I’d hit him. I could feel the half-moon crescents I’d made in my palm.
“Violence isn’t the answer, ma’am.”
“We were only horsing around. Look,” I said, retrieving the certificate from the ground where I’d dropped it. “My husband named a star after me.”
The officer took the paper. “I see.”
“Do you?”
We locked eyes, and for a second, I felt like he got it. As if with everything he must see day in and day out, all the worst of humanity but sometimes the best, too, he could figure out what was going on. Not the details, maybe, though how hard were those to guess? Infidelity is pervasive. It’s commonplace.
“Will you be okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Yes,” Tom said. “We’ll be fine.”
The police officer handed me back the paper. “You’ll want to keep this safe.” He turned to Tom. “And you should head home.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you for your concern.”
The officer tipped his cap to me and resumed his beat. We watched him go, the night full of all the things we were going to have to talk about now that it was out in the open.
Tom reached out his hand. I took it reflexively, like I’d done everything that night. Impulses. History.
After everything, my instinct was still to trust my husband, to take his hand, and to face the night together.
• • •
I was back to being late, which wasn’t the best way to start a new job.
I’d been planning to go back to work for a while. Having spent my entire adulthood at the yoke of a restaurant, when Knife & Fork closed and our deal to buy it ourselves fell through, I found myself floating, aloft like a bud of pollen in the spring. I’d never had any other profession in mind, but it still felt too new, too raw, to start somewhere else, to learn a different menu and kitchen and staff and regulars.
The story Tom and I told each other was that I was taking a moment to figure out the next chapter. But really, I was sleeping, literally and figuratively, restoring the bank of energy I’d expended over the previous fifteen years. I’d tumble to bed minutes after the kids went up, only to be woken by the annoying Top 40 hits my clock radio blared nine hours later. In the afternoon, I’d often sneak away for a nap, though I was never sure what, or who, I was sneaking away from. The paintings on the walls? The judgmental flowers I clipped from the garden?
As our financial situation tightened, Tom encouraged me to put out some feelers. See what was out there, get back in the game, every cliché you can think of. I did, but my heart wasn’t in it. I’d show up for an interview and blow it. Sometimes I didn’t even go. Time and again I came away without the gig I should’ve had in an instant.
Then the texts happened. Then New York. The fallout from that robbed any energy I’d restored.
Then the world exploded.
But after a year of funerals and fund-raisers, I need a change, more, something of my own. When I saw the ad for a day manager at a newer restaurant on Noyes, I e-mailed my CV without taking too much time to think about it. I put on my game face for the interview, and if the owners knew who I was, they didn’t let on. I got the job, and we set up a day for me to start.
Today.
“Cecily, hi,” Kim says as I walk into the back office of Prato, which means “plate” in Portuguese. “So glad you could make it.”
“I’m glad to be here. Sorry I’m a bit late. It won’t happen again.”
Kim leans back in her desk chair and stretches her arms above her head. About my age, Kim opened the restaurant two years ago. Her hands are callused and scarred like all chefs’. She’s got a stack of orders in front of her, the day to day of the restaurant. Most of the restaurant has been given over to customers or the kitchen, but she’s squared off a small space of her own.
“It’s been a weird twenty-four hours,” I add, wondering how much she knows about me or if she cares.
“You could start tomorrow, if you’d like.”
“No. Please. I need the distraction.”
Kim stands. She’s tall and angular, her hair cut almost boy short.
“Great. So why don’t we meet with the chef and go over the menu for the day?”
“That sounds perfect.”
• • •
I work through lunch and the early dinner sittings without a break other than to answer my mother’s anxious texts wanting to know how my first day is going. The deal I made with Kim is that I’ll switch out with the night manager at six. The kids are older now, and they can handle themselves until I
