Free The Year That Follows by Scott Lasser Page B

Ahead, he sees a bench. He says he needs to sit on it. His idea is to smoke a cigarette.
    Sitting next to her, catching her in profile, he can almost see how she must have looked as a young woman. Something, he thinks. She must have been something. He is always thinking this, a constant kind of yearning.
    “Aren’t you going to offer me one?” she asks, as he taps out a cigarette.
    He reminds her she doesn’t smoke.
    “What do I have to lose?” she asks.
    “A few years, I suppose.”
    It turns out she smoked once in her life. It made her feel a little naughty, she says, which she was otherwise not. After her first husband left her—this was in the sixties—she found she didn’t need the cigarettes to feel unconventional. “A man got me to quit,” she says. “I guess if I could quit for him, I could start for you.”
    “I didn’t ask you to start,” he says.
    “They say it’s important for couples to find things they can do together.”
    “I want you to meet my daughter,” he tells her.
    “Then I will.”
    Through the trees across the trail he can make out a sliver of shining ocean.
    “Stick with me,” she says.
    I intend to, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He’s having a hard time catching his breath, and, for some reason, he’s embarrassed to speak.
    L ater, afraid to go home, he spends the night with her. Sixty years ago he learned to expect death at any second, and he believed he could face it with calmness and grace. He also remembers lying in the VA hospital and not worrying, just waiting to see what would happen. Now, though, he is afraid. I should have the operation, he thinks. He decides to call the doctor tomorrow and schedule it for September 16 , the Monday after Cat leaves.

X
    O n Wednesday she e-mails Tonya. Cat hasn’t seen her for six weeks. Tonya lives in Farming-ton now, has three girls, a husband, a marketing job, and not enough time to get together. When they were teenagers they had nothing but time. Cat wouldn’t trade anything for what she has now—that is, Connor—but she misses those days, too, the simplicity of them, the hope. The friendship. Things haven’t turned out the way she and Tonya planned. Farmington isn’t Birmingham, or Bloomfield. Cat’s apartment isn’t like the old house. It’s as if everyone in her generation has taken a step back.
    I have a date with Tommy Swenson
, says the e-mail. Tonya calls within ten minutes. Then, on Friday, after Cat has dropped Connor at his father’s—it’s not Michael’s night, but he’s agreed to take his son—she returns to find Tonya waiting for her in the parking lot of her building.
    “I couldn’t let you face this alone,” Tonya says.
    “You’re planning on coming along? A chaperone?”
    “God, no, but I’ll help you get ready.”
    Tonya sits on the toilet lid in Cat’s small bathroom while Cat takes a bath. It is a great luxury to lie in a hot bath without having to worry about a small child in thehouse, to hear the light sloshing of water, to have someone you trust close by.
    Tonya is worried about the wrinkles around her eyes. “You don’t have any,” she tells Cat, “but I’m starting to look like I’m eighty years old.” She wants to have her eyes “done.” When they were girls Cat wouldn’t have known what that meant, and now she counsels against it, tells Tonya that she looks fine, that she doesn’t want to end up like Lisa Knight, whom Cat just saw at Krogers: not a wrinkle on her face, but her actual eyes seemed recessed in her head, as if she were staring out through a mask.
    “You look great to me,” Cat tells her, the truth, which is to say that she looks the same, same round eyes, same slightly upturned nose, same puckered lips and tiny chin. Tonya’s hair is blonder now—as a teenager it had brownish strands, especially in winter—but hair has always been the most mutable part of her appearance.
    “Brian barely looks at me anymore. Familiarity breeds contempt, or