Page 66 - WTP XII #3

Anita’s first spring without Dee came in dredging waves that tossed her to a vantage where she could still make out her coupled and comfortable life, then pulled her out further and further into a lone- liness she felt incapable of surviving. She still had trouble grasping it. A great big absence. To her left
in bed, to her right in front of the TV. Surrounded by it now in the light of an early morning kitchen. Their days always started together.
You hear the stories, the examples, the exceptions to unwritten rules, and they’re always at the same distance as that of a novel. Words being put into the world with no attachment to anything tangible. They were in such great shape, is something said. You re- ally never know, is another. My great grandmother smoked and drank until she was 89, died in bed. He didn’t really change his lifestyle. They never smoked. She ran every day.
She ran Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Until Anita got a call foreshadowed only by Dee’s run running longer than usual. Always the same route: down to the end of their street, left at 4th, two miles to Strager Park, the loop there, down to McClelland, left on 6th, two miles back to just past their block and double back around to home. Always at the same pace. She liked to set a timer, hurrying the last stretch if she’d taken too much off the top. It was a Tuesday run, so she’d been in her bright orange leggings and her purple ombre fleece quarter zip. Her profusion of tight curls on top of her head, bouncing, cheap pink earbuds popping against her maple skin—she never ran in the expensive ones because they might fall out, even though they never did. So when the normal time for her to push back through the door evaporated
almost unnoticed, it wasn’t until it stretched out to noticeable that Anita began to wonder and it wasn’t until her phone rang that...
Anita grips her mug with a tension strong enough to break it, her fingers threaded inside the handle, the web of her thumb stretched and stressed around its middle. Another dredging wave gives her a glimpse
of Dee, pulling the cheap pink earbud from her ear, stepping on the heel of one shoe with the other. The jazzed-up smile she got from every run glimmering, no matter the circumstances of the day previous or the day to come. It’s a vision made gauzy by Anita not knowing the time before was the last time. Not paying enough attention to every time. So now the gestures and sounds of Dee’s homecoming are blurring into some memory mass, indecipherable from itself. Anita stares at the black of her coffee, feeling helpless about Dee turning into a story that’s placing itself at a dis- tance she isn’t sure she can’t handle.
Anita stones her face, presses the lip of the mug against her own and sips at her coffee, now cold from distracted inattention. She sets it back down on the red oak table she always thought was too big, and smooths her robe down the length of her thigh, as though she needed to be presentable on another day alone in their home. Her eyes linger out the window, on their backyard, on the buds of their maple—Dee’s maple—popping out all over the branches. Not one
of the reasons Anita wanted the house, but one Dee would only admit to after the papers had been signed. It came up when Anita had floated the possibility of taking it down, building a deck or something. Dee
had made a wide, out-at-first, arch with her arms and said, woah, woah, woah. The discussion had been brief and Anita tucked it away for a later date when she could come up with a stronger debate platform than ‘a deck or something.’ Now she’d pay someone to take a chainsaw to the house before she’d think
of doing anything to that maple. A Freeman maple. Dee confessed to looking it up, to being minorly obsessed. Telling Anita she’d fallen in love with it their first fall—thirteen years ago—when its reddish, orange leaves couldn’t be described with anything but the cliche of blazing. Anita, the pragmatic of the two, couldn’t deny its beauty, nor could she deny its proximity to the house—a case she gathered evidence for in secret and left there. Now witnessing the begin- nings of its glory again for the first time, she feels a twinge of guilt for even researching.
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Quiet Questions
P.M. BaiRd