Free Elena Undone by Nicole Conn Page B

mind.
    Suddenly she realized she wasn’t alone in this section of the park. She could barely make out the russet color of the sweater, but someone was sitting at her other favorite bench.
     
    *
     
    Did she hear something? What was it? Elena didn’t know why, but felt compelled to turn. It almost frightened her at first, but then she realized it was a person sitting on her other favorite bench. A woman in a dark coat was sitting there. She wondered what had brought her here to this park, this very moment. If it was another lone person come here to escape her life.
    Peyton could barely make out the features of the woman. Ethnic, somehow. Middle Eastern? Indian? Whatever nationality, Peyton could read pain, frustration, a perturbation with the world. Where had she seen her…something familiar. Could the woman see that Peyton was looking at her? Peyton realized she had been studying her for some time.
    As if answering, the woman’s head moved slightly in acknowledgment.
    Elena looked into the woman’s eyes as much as she was able to in the quickly growing dusk.
    Their gaze held for an awkwardly long moment. Elena felt somehow as if time had stopped. Peyton herself felt as if she were on a different level of consciousness. Shook her head and thought she really needed to get more rh ao get mest.
    Did she even know she was looking at her, Elena wondered.
    Peyton wasn’t sure the woman was looking at her or beyond her, but she suddenly felt very uncomfortable. She got up and prepared to leave. She began to walk the opposite direction, but for some reason she had to look back at that woman again. Something about her.
    Peyton turned. The last of the sun flared into her eyes.
    Elena stood up and watched the woman turn her direction, but she put her hand up to her eyes and Elena could not make out anything else in her face.
    Peyton shielded her eyes. Apparently the woman had already gone.
    Peyton turned and walked away.
    Elena watched the woman’s retreating figure until she could no longer see her.

     “We spent our entire lives working in the same company.”
     Edith, a spry eighty-five-year-old, sits next to her husband, Milton, eighty-nine. “Passing one another every day for thirty-seven years. Never said a word to each other. He’d just nod and smile. Always so pleasant...”
     “Then I had a heart attack.” Milton’s hand shakes as he takes Edith’s in his. “Thought, I don’t have much more time to let things pass me by. I’m not going to waste another minute.”
     “When he came back to work he walks right up to me and says ‘I’m not willing to waste another minute. I’m no Fred Astaire, but I’d like to take you dancing.’”
     “Well, I’m not,” Milton concurred, shaking his head. “But you came anyway.”
     Edith smiles tenderly. “It was the best date of my life. We married exactly three weeks later in City Hall. And right after, back we went to dance some more.”
     Milton’s upper lip quivers as he announces, “And we haven’t spent a moment apart since.”
     Edith puts her hand over his.
     “The heart knows what the heart knows.”
     

A year later
     
    Peyton sat tapping her pen, feeling inordinately bored as the Adoption Orientation Instructor droned on and on about all the state’s rules and regulations. The instructor was tall, angular and spoke in a clipped cadence, making the information even more difficult to digest in the community service room annexed to the Women’s Foster Services Building. Following her words, it seemed to Peyton, who sat in the stifling heat in jeans and a gray sweater, that the system made adoption as difficult as humanly possible—and it was that kind of meaningless counterintuitive behavior that drove Peyton to distraction as she sat amongst twenty some odd strangers all sharing the general concept that adopting a child was the most important thing they could do in their