Free The Best American Short Stories 2013 by Elizabeth Strout

against the dress; he just handed it over, and she pretended to use it to soak up the wine. With the pedestrians passing by and an overhead neon sign audibly humming, he gave off a blue-eyed air of benevolence, but he also looked on guard, hypervigilant, as if he were an ex-Marine. God knows where he had found the benevolence, or where any man ever found it.
    “Elijah.” She looked at him. In the distance a car honked. The evening sky contained suggestions of rain. His smile persisted: a sturdy street-corner boy turned into a handsome pensive man but very solid-seeming, one thumb inside a belt loop, with a street lamp behind him to give him an incandescent aura. Physically, he had the frame of a gym rat. She had the odd thought that his skin might taste of sugar, his smile was so kind. Kindness had always attracted her. It made her weak in the knees. “Elijah the prophet? Who answers all questions at the end of time? That one? Your parents must have been religious or something.”
    “Yeah,” he said noncommittally, bored by the topic. “‘Or something’ was exactly what they were. They liked to loiter around in the Old Testament. They trusted it. They were farmers, and they believed in catastrophes. But when you have to explain your own name, you . . . well, this isn’t a rewarding conversation, is it?” He had a particularly thoughtful way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them.
    She coughed. “So what do you do, Elijah?”
    “Oh, that comes later,” he said. “Occupations come later. First tell me
your
name.”
    “Susan,” she said. “So much for the introductions.” She leaned forward, showing off her great smile. “This wine. It’s so bad. I’m kind of glad I spilled it. Shall I spill more of it?” She hadn’t had more than a sip, but she felt seriously drunk.
    “Well, you could spill it here.” He reversed his index finger and lifted up his necktie. “Or there.” He pointed at the sidewalk.
    “But it’s white wine. White wine doesn’t really stain.” She threw the wineglass into the gutter, where it shattered.
    Twenty minutes later in a coffee shop down by the Embarcadero she learned that he was a pediatric resident with a particular interest in mitochondrial disorder. Now she understood: out on the street, he had looked at her the way a doctor looks at a child. She herself was a psychiatric social worker, with a job waiting for her at an outpatient clinic in Millbrae. She and Elijah exchanged phone numbers. That night, rattled by their encounter, she couldn’t sleep. Three days later, still rattled, she called him and proposed a date, something her mother had advised her never to do with a man. They went to dinner and a movie, and Elijah fell asleep during the previews and didn’t wake up for another hour—poor guy, he was so worn out from his work. She didn’t bother to explain the plot; he was too tired to care.
    He didn’t warm up to her convincingly—not as she really hoped he would—for a month, until he heard her sing in a local choir, a program that included the Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor. She had a solo in the opening measures of the Benedictus, and when Elijah found her at the reception afterward, his face, as he looked at her, was softened for the first time with actual love, the real thing, that yearning, both hungry and quizzical.
    “Your voice. Wow. I was undone,” he said, taking a sip of the church-basement coffee, his voice thick.
Undone
. He had a collection of unusual adjectives like that. He had a collection of them.
Devoted
was another. And
committed
. He used that adjective all the time. Never before had she ever met a man who was comfortable with that adjective.
     
    A few months after they were married, they took a trip to Prague. The plan was to get pregnant there amid the European bric-a-brac. On the flight over the Atlantic he held her hand when the