Free The Birthdays by Heidi Pitlor Page B

for supper. Joe had been somewhere all evening—playing cards with Bill, was it?
    “I don’t know.”
    “Come on. It’s always one or the other, isn’t it?” he asked, worrying a blade of grass in his hand.
    “We chose each other, I suppose. We simply went ahead and got married. There wasn’t much decision making involved,” she said. When she first met Joe, she’d just had her appendix out and her parents were driving her home from Mass General. She remembered this afternoon a little differently each time, and parts of it had vanished altogether from her mind, something that bothered her now. But that June evening with MacNeil, what she recalled vividly was her stomach still sore from the operation as she lay in the back seat of her parents’ car. They’d stopped at a deli in Newton to buy corned beef sandwiches, and left her alone when they went inside. A face appeared in the window, startling at first, but it was a handsome face with round brown eyes and a cleft chin. She felt her pulse ticking. When she rolled down the window, he asked if she was all right. (And what exactly had he said? What were his words, his tone? How could she not remember this?) She explained her situation, all the while thinking only of her pasty skin and unwashed hair, and when her parents returned, he nodded at them and stepped away. Ellen turned in time to see Joe wave, his black wingtips shiny in the sunlight.Fortuitously, her father ended up buying a new car from Joe two months later, and soon after he took Ellen out for martinis in Boston. Very quickly it seemed she’d known him her whole life, and six months later they were married. They were the last of their friends to have a wedding.
    “I’ve been thinking I chose Vera,” MacNeil said, holding his gaze on the metal table in front of them.
    Ellen brought her wineglass to her lips. “In what sense?”
    “I pulled her away from her friends and family and seduced her,” he said. The words hissed from his lips.
    The garden was quiet except for the rhythmic clicking of a sprinkler turning on and off. Ellen couldn’t sit in her own back yard without hearing the Wenderses argue or the traffic on Main Street. She shuffled her feet beneath her. “I guess Joe chose me,” she said quietly, though she wasn’t so sure. “Wasn’t that usually the way? It was up to the man to do the hard work?”
    “Not always,” he said, and half smiled at her. “Vera would have liked this, supper outside on a June evening.”
    “You’re right, she would’ve,” she said. “You’re missing her right now. I am too.”
    He looked at his lap. “We were together fifty-three years. Forever.”
    “I know.” She tried to see whether he was crying, but he’d closed his eyes. She reached for his hand and held it in the air between them a moment.
    “It’s like hell some days.”
    “What is?” she asked tentatively.
    “Continuing on.”
    “It won’t always feel this bad,” she said. “It can’t. I promise you.”
    “Can I hold you to that?”
    “You may.”
    “Say it again, would you?”
    She sat up straighter. “It won’t always feel this bad. It will sometimes, but then it won’t.”
    He nodded and attempted a smile. “I definitely chose her, and it was a great choice. The best I ever made.”
    “Good,” she mumbled, and didn’t know what more to say. She rose and explained that she had to be going, that Joe would be home and hungry for his dinner soon, and MacNeil nodded as if he understood something fundamental about her. She took her time driving back that evening. She opted for the long route through MacNeil’s town, past the cornfields on the periphery, and saw a group of cows lying down on a parched field. They knew rain was coming. She drove through other, more crowded towns and then back inside the line of her own town, where smaller houses with peeling paint sat closer together, and grass sprouted from patches of dirt on the sidewalks. Tomorrow, she thought, she