Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

“Oh, darlin’.” He sighed. “That was supposed to be a rekindling-the-marriage trip.”

“How did it go?”

“I think it would have worked better if I could have stopped thinking about you for more than five minutes at a time.”

She smiled a little.

“Ever since I told her about us, Linda’s been trying her damndest to reach out to me. First it was shopping bags full of sexy lingerie and silk sheets and massage oils.”

Clare winced.

“Then it was the trip to Montreal, then the marriage counselor. Even kicking me out of the house. I don’t think she’s as interested in exploring the non-marital side of herself, which is what the therapist recommended, as she is in making me see what I’ll be missing.”

Clare was silent for a moment. “And will you be missing her?”

“Yes.” He knew she was half-hoping for a different answer, but he couldn’t be anything less than honest with her. “We’ve got twenty-five years together. Half my life. That’s too much to just walk away from. I stood up in front of my family and friends and promised to stay with her until death. She’s kept her promises. Why should she suffer because I couldn’t?”

“And you love her.”

“And I love her. It’s different than the way I love you, but yes.”

Clare looked away from the fire. She was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “I think what you have with her is love. What you have with me is novelty. I’m new and different, and we’ve been catching bits and pieces of each other over the past two years.” He had never known her to sound so bitter. “I expect that if we ever spent any real time together, the infatuation would wear off pretty damn quick.”

“Clare.” He pushed out of his chair and knelt on the rag rug before her, pinning her in place. “Don’t say that.” Pain and frustration roughened his voice. “Say what’s true. You know things about me that no one else ever will, not in twenty-five years, not in fifty. You know me. Goddammit, if I was just looking for a quick thrill, don’t you think I would have ended it by now? Do you think I like making my wife cry? Do you think I like lying awake at night, caught between destroying her and destroying myself? ’Cause that’s what it feels like when I think about never being with you again. Like I might as well walk up into the mountains and lie down and let the snow take me.”

She was shaking beneath his hands, and he realized she was crying. He pulled her against him, tumbling her out of her chair, and they rocked together in front of the hissing fire. “Christ, Clare,” he said. “Christ. Tell me what to do. I can’t leave her and I can’t leave you. For God’s sake, tell me what to do.”

She was standing by one of the windows, looking out. It was snowing, softly, fat flakes that looked like the paper-and-scissors ones his nieces taped to their windows all winter long. He had gone out to the shed and brought in more wood, triggering the sensor light over the deck, and the snow pinwheeled through the brightness and vanished into the dark.

“We have to end it,” she said.

“No.” He was sitting on the polished wooden floor, his back to the wall. It seemed appropriate.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m not willing to buy my happiness with your marriage. And neither are you.”

“I love you,” he said. His voice sounded bewildered in his own ears. “Am I just supposed to stop loving you?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I wish it did. Then I wouldn’t feel as if someone put a stake through my sternum. No. We just… go on.”

“That sounds like that idiotic Céline Dion song.”

“Yeah.” She stared at the falling snow. “You know it’s a bad sign when the theme song from Titanic describes your relationship.”

She had taken his seat on the floor, back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her. He was sitting on the second-from-bottom tread of the stairs leading to the loft. “No lunches at the Kreemy Kakes Diner anymore,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“I won’t drive by the rectory to check things out anymore.”

“No.”

“But it’s a small town. We’ll wind up seeing each other. We won’t be able to help it!” He suddenly felt wildly, irrationally angry with her. It was his town, dammit. He was here first. She should go. He was happy before she came.

Happy like the dead in their well-loved graves. Unknowing, unseeing, unfeeling.

“How often do you run into Dr. McFeely, the Presbyterian minister?”

“Uh… I don’t know. Once in a while I bump into him at the post office or the IGA. I’ve seen him at the hospital a couple times.”

“It’ll be the same with me, then. Less. I’ll start shopping over in Glens Falls.”

“You don’t want to make that drive in bad weather,” he said automatically.

“I don’t care!” Her voice cracked. “If it means I won’t be coming face-to-face with you buying groceries or mailing letters, I’ll do it!” She took several short, jerky breaths, then a deep one. “With luck, we won’t see one another more than once a month or so. I signed another one-year contract with my parish in December. Next year, I’ll tender my resignation and ask the bishop to reassign me. Or maybe I’ll just go home to Virginia.” She knocked the back of her head against the wall. “I’m such a screwup as a priest. I should never have left the army.”

He wanted to tell her no, she was a wonderful priest, and if he could ever believe in a God, it was when he saw Him shining out of her, but the words were stopped in his throat by the realization that she would be going away. In a year or less. And he would never see her again.

He would get back into his coffin. He would pull the lid down himself. He supposed, after a few years, he might even grow to like it again.

There was an old hi-fi near the sofa and chairs, the kind with a stacking bar so you could put on four or five records in a row. They had turned on the lights in the kitchen and one of the lamps, so she could make coffee while he riffled through the albums. Some of them were probably old enough to qualify as antiques. Lots of mellow fifties jazz and classic American pop. He put on Louis Armstrong.

“Here you go.” She handed him a mug. “Hot and sweet, just the way you like it.”

“Except I’m usually not drinking it at eleven o’clock at night.” He put the mug on the coffee table. “Dance with me.”

She smiled a little. Put her own coffee down. Went into his arms. Her head fit neatly beneath his chin.

“Give me a kiss to build a dream on,” Louis sang as they swayed back and forth, “and my imagination will thrive upon that kiss.”

They were sitting on the sofa staring at the fire across the room. The fifth album was playing quietly. Mel Tormé.

“Your turn,” he said.

“Okay. Um… sometimes I floss my teeth while watching TV.”

“Everybody does that.”

“Really? Huh. Well, it still counts as something you didn’t know about me. Your turn.”

“Okay. I once had jungle rot on my feet.”

“Eugh! Gross! I don’t want to know that about you. When?”

“In Nam. I went for five weeks without a change of socks in the rainy season. To this day I still compulsively sprinkle Gold Bond powder before I put anything on my feet.”

“You were right. This is true love.”

“Hmm? Why?”

“Because even with that disgusting image in my head, I still find you irresistible.”

They were spooned on the sofa, her back on his chest, his arm around her. The lights were off again. The music had ended. He could hear the hiss of the fire in the woodstove and the silence of falling snow all around them.