Robert Lennon - Familiar

She is panting and feels faintly nauseous. They’re silent together for a moment. The head tech’s face is taut, his eyes bright.

“Well, we don’t have mice here,” he says.

She can only muster an “Oh.”

“Also, I don’t…” He screws up his face, tilts his head, gazes at her with one eye half closed. “I’m not sure… my mother doesn’t live around here.”

“That was just a… an example.”

“Is this some kind of joke?” the man asks. “Did Dean put you up to this? I don’t understand the bit about my mother.”

She keeps very still. Her sweater itches her and she clutches her bag to her lap.

“Something like that.”

“You seem to have worked at a lab. And we do some of those things. Environmental testing, work for the city. Not the police. You’ve done this kind of thing, you say.”

“Yes.”

“But… this is a practical joke?”

“No, no,” she says. “I just meant… I didn’t mean…”

He is leaning forward now, palms flat on the desk. “I find this whole encounter very odd,” he says.

“I’m sorry.”

“You are the woman from the biology department, aren’t you? Laura?”

“I was only — I’m only looking for another job.”

He stares at her for a long time, and as he does, his face grows longer and harder, like something that has melted and then cooled.

He says, “I’m thinking it probably isn’t going to be this one.”

He says, “Do you want to explain yourself? Should I call the biology department?”

There’s nothing she can say that will explain anything. She is afraid that he will get up and block the door. She doesn’t think he would, but what does she know? About this man, or about anyone? People are who you think they are until they do the thing that proves you wrong. Her head has begun to pound.

She says, slowly, “It’s not a joke, it’s just… I thought it might impress you.”

Silence. This is inadequate. But she doesn’t have anything else.

“How about,” she continues, “if I just get up and leave now, and never come back. This was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

His expression does not change. She gets up. She leaves and doesn’t go back.

It’s winter before she hears from Derek again. Or not quite, really: the week after Thanksgiving, snow falling and blowing in wild circles in the street, several inches already on the ground. It’s a Saturday and she is watching this spectacle out the window and thinking what everybody else in Reevesport is thinking, which is that their hope for a prolonged autumn without scarves and gloves is now shattered. Of course there’s a part of her that likes this weather very much, likes the feeling of forced indoorsness, the excuse to drink more hot coffee. She is glad to be alone. Thanksgiving she spent, for the first time in years, in Chicago, with her parents, and though she expected to be depressed by their advancing age and eccentricity, she found them almost charming. They didn’t comment on her separation from Derek. They seemed genuinely glad to see her. They appeared very firmly in love with each other and in the idea of isolation from the rest of the world.

The first thing Derek says when he calls her is, “Crazy weather, huh?” and before she can stop herself it makes her laugh.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get good at that,” she says. “Small talk.”

“I suppose not.”

There is a moment of awkward silence. It’s strange to experience: they have shared so many hours of companionable silence in a quarter century — more — that the awkwardness seems to belong to someone else.

Derek says, “What are you doing right now? Can we meet?”

“Drinking coffee. Come on over.”

She says this without thinking — he’s never been here of course. To this apartment. His silence is answer enough; she corrects herself. “How about the Edge?” This is a café not far from here, though of course he’ll have to drive. Though this only matters to her — he likes driving.

Fine, he says, he’ll see her in an hour.

Like everyone on the street, she hasn’t gotten the winter clothes out of storage yet, so she puts on a hooded sweatshirt and a canvas jacket on top of that, then walks to the café with her head down and her bare hands curled deep into her pockets. There are the sounds of wind and traffic, but no voices; people passing say nothing to each other, nor to their phones. Some crows somewhere are freaking out. It feels like the end of the world.

The café is warm and moist, the windows fogged and dripping, and the staff are playing loud music, as though to compete with the wind. She imagines that Derek will be annoyed by the music and she’s right; though he says nothing, he can’t resist training a sour expression in the direction of the counter. They both order black coffees — her inquiring look at Derek, a lifetime milk-and-sugar man, in both worlds as far as she can tell, goes unacknowledged — and take a table far from the window. On the bulletin board behind Derek is a pristine pull-tabbed ad for bass guitar lessons and a lost cat notice. She thinks, We are still married.

“I’ll get right to the point,” he says. “I’ve stopped going to Amos.”

“Why?”

He levels an annoyed gaze at her. “We went to him to stay together. We’re not together.”

Her instinct tells her to apologize now, but her instincts are bad, so she says nothing. After a pause, during which his body jerks the chair, loudly, into a new position, he goes on.

“I don’t know if you think this is permanent.”

Is it a question? She says, “I have no idea what this is.”

“Well, I think this is a trial separation.”

“Okay.”

He scowls, sighs. “Don’t do that. Capitulate.”

“I’m not capitulating. I’m just encouraging you to get to the point.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

She savors the sorry as he gathers himself to speak.

“Now that we’ve been apart for a while, it all seems so…”

She waits.

“It’s not that I regret this. But it’s hard to remember why I was so upset that you went to see the boys. It made me… it felt like the ultimate transgression. Given our arrangement. But now it seems more sensible.” So far he has been staring into his untouched coffee mug, but now he looks at her face. “Maybe the arrangement wasn’t sustainable. Maybe it was time to change. I still have no idea what happened to you at that conference, and if we get back together—”

They’re both surprised to hear him say this and he appears, for a moment, to be choking back tears. He sips his coffee with a wince before he resumes speaking, now with his head down.

“All I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter what happened. What the situation is now is all that matters. And I’m thinking we should apologize to the boys. And try to start over.”

“With each other?” she asks him.

“With the boys.”

Neither of them speaks for a minute. The girls behind the counter are laughing at something. They have turned the music down — Elisa realizes now that she and Derek are the only customers.

“It just isn’t right,” he says, and there is no danger now that he will choke up. His face is hard; his head looks heavy, like a boulder. He’s showing his age: the cheeks a bit sunken, the lines deeper. He carries it well. He has always looked best under the weight of some burden.

He says, “It isn’t right that we’re all scattered like this. I don’t know how it happened.”

Elisa pats his hand where it is loosely clenched on the tabletop, then crosses her arms over her chest.

They decide to write a letter, a paper letter, and mail it. To Derek, this makes things more official. Neither of them suggests doing it together, in person; instead each of them writes a draft and they compare them via e-mail.