Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

And now his blankness is a comic’s deadpan. It’s all okay, she thinks, as she laughs. “And you?” she says.

“Florida, then and now. We neither of us fell far from the tree.”

“Were you barefoot and chewing grass in a town with two blinking lights?”

“Pretty close,” he says.

“It shows,” she says, keeping her own face straight.

He doesn’t laugh. Kelly — a little to her surprise — does not worry about his being offended. She isn’t picking up any of that. She senses him thinking about his small-town Florida, but simply serious thoughts, perhaps nostalgic ones.

She’s wrong. He says, “You mentioned something about your sister.”

She feels that little leaping again. She realizes instantly that he has come back to a consideration of the end of their time together. “She’s long gone,” Kelly says.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Please,” she says, in two, long, are-you-kidding-me syllables.

Michael smiles at this and then sets his face again. “I can drop you,” he says.

This takes Kelly by surprise. “Really?”

“I’ve got shoes and cycling traffic lights in my present Florida town. Pensacola. You’re right on the way.”

“So it’s not over?” Kelly says. “Not abruptly at least?”

Michael rises, stands over her, offers his hand. “Coffee first,” he says. “With chicory.”

And they sit nursing the New Orleans chicory-root coffee under the open-air pavilion of the Café du Monde. And Kelly lifts a beignet, extending her ring and little fingers, trying to be ‘Bamagirl-dainty, but though its square, doughnutty texture is manageable, when she brings the beignet to her mouth, the coating of powdered sugar suddenly, profusely pollinates her face from her mistimed downward breath.

Michael sharply leans to her and speaks with urgency. “Don’t breathe back in. It’ll coat your lungs.”

This makes her laugh and the laugh jostles her beignet, which releases another cloud of sugar.

“Don’t laugh,” Michael says. “It can be fatal.”

She puts the beignet down on her plate. “We’ll just look at them,” she says.

And she begins to do just that, laying her hands on the tabletop and lowering her face and staring at the three beignets sitting in a snow drift of sugar on the plate. She does this for several moments, playing out the joke, but she can dimly see in the upper periphery of her downward sight that Michael does not move, he remains fixed on her.

Kelly lifts her face to him. And she and Michael begin wordlessly to look each other in the eyes for a long, long while, though as Kelly sits in the flower-print chair in Room 303 on the day she has failed to finish her divorce, she does not remember that the silence was extended. This was the unexamined incident that gave Michael his deep and abiding early impression of what life would be with Kelly. For Michael, the influential part was the silence, even as the incidence of that silence has now faded from his conscious memory. Of how he ended the silence, he has no memory whatsoever, conscious or unconscious, though it is this final gesture that makes Kelly squeeze hard with both hands at the arms of her chair beside the French windows.

Michael’s eyes shift ever so slightly upward, and Kelly realizes he is looking at the cross of ashes still on her forehead. And now he looks down at the beignets before him, and he puts the tip of his forefinger into the powdered sugar at the margin of his plate, and he lifts his finger, coated white, and he reaches out, across the table, and he touches Kelly’s forehead, touches the dark cross of ashes, and he traces a white cross of sugar there.

And he says, “In remembrance of life. And to a thing not ended.”

∼

Kelly’s hands on the arms of the chair eventually loosen their grip. They rub there for a while, even as her mind shuts down. She rubs there and rubs there and then her hands finally stop. How long has she been sitting here utterly empty? The sun is still on the bed. Perhaps not so very long. How unbearably sweetly it all began, yes? Very sweetly. The cross of sugar. Sugar Wednesday. No, Kelly thinks. “Remember you are dust and unto dust you will return.” Did she say that aloud just now? Perhaps. She and Michael are walking along the Gulf shore, the barrier island just south of Pensacola. The sand is fine and white and the dunes behind them block off the shore and there is only the wide, jade Gulf before them and the buffeting of wind and the cry of seabirds, and she and Michael have been together for months now, months, and they are in swim suits and they’ve been at the beach all afternoon and they’ve been drinking wine — quite a lot of wine perhaps — and they are standing side by side, their bare legs touching, just their legs, ever so lightly, and out before them on the water, far out, is a fishing boat, a private thirty-footer, and Michael has been watching it for a while, and he says, “My dad liked to fish the rivers and the lakes, but not the Gulf.”

Kelly looks at him. He has not turned his face to her to speak; he is still watching the boat. And he did not even begin with the declaration of his father being a fisherman; he has spoken as if that has already been established, as if he has been speaking of these issues already, though he has not.

“It’s a different thing,” Michael says. “It made him uneasy.”

He falls silent. She watches him watching the boat. And she says, “After all these months, that’s the first thing I’ve heard you voluntarily say about your dad.”

He looks at her. “I don’t talk about him much. I don’t know why I did now. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Kelly says. “I’m honored.”

Michael looks away.

“Really I am,” she says. And as Michael watches the Gulf, clearly thinking of his father, Kelly finds herself ready to speak of another thing. She’s been ready for a while, but till now she sensed it was too soon. Too soon for him. Not her. For herself, she no longer even needs to re-examine her feelings, no longer needs to play the little litany inside her of all the signs. She invokes none of them now. She is aware only of a trembling that’s beginning in the place in her chest where she must focus to consciously breathe in and breathe out. Courage she whispers in her mind. Courage now .

And for the very first time, she says, “Michael, I love you.”

He does not look at her. He does not answer. Not for one beat. Not for another. The trembling in Kelly ceases abruptly. But before some new feeling can assert itself in her, born of the very fears that kept her from this declaration for weeks now, Michael speaks.

“He did go out there once to fish,” he says, keeping his eyes on the Gulf. “A friend of his took us out in a boat. I didn’t know how to interpret what I sensed about my dad. We went far enough so that the shore had vanished. There was only deep water all around, and my dad was actually afraid. It took me years to realize this. He’d be rip-shit furious if he thought I knew.”

Kelly isn’t sure he’s heard her. Perhaps his absorption with the memory of his father blocked out her words. The place in her where the trembling abruptly ceased expands now, warmly, he has suddenly exposed himself to her, has let her see his vulnerability, this complex thing between him and his dad — she knows complex things between a child and a father all too well — and she has to do something for Michael, something, she wants to take him in her arms, but not yet, not in this moment. In this moment it seems to her the most natural thing would be to say it once more, to reassure him that way, to let him know it and share it and give it back and then they can hold each other and it will be all right for both of them. “I love you, Michael,” she says.