A fourth selection from my novel

“Who travels on Easter Sunday?”

Hana had been watching for some time as he skimmed over work notes, the weight of her caviling eyes difficult to ignore. They had finished breakfast and were drinking their coffee. A mote-shot nimbus of delicate sunlight flooded through the high windows, the morning air as cool as the tile floor touching their bare feet. The weekend had so far been uneventful. His flight wasn’t until evening.

“Normal people are home on Easter.”

He closed his notebook and looked up to find her staring over her supersized coffee cup gripped in both hands, elbows on the tabletop. He saw exasperated disbelief.

“It wasn’t my choice. I told you.”

“Using a telephone is a choice. Video conferencing? They have that these days.” Her gaze turned piercing. “You couldn’t have done this sooner?”

“It was the only time that worked.”

That was a lie.

He had thought once to try explaining it to her. But the promotion process, like some atavistic initiation rite, was too ridiculously convoluted, opaque, dubious, illogical, too much like a hazing. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. So she didn’t know that he would not appear before the Partner Election Committee. Or that the partner assigned to represent him—Sarah Campbell, whom he had never met before—would be his sole advocate. Or that he had planned all along for the interview to be as close as possible to when the PEC convened so the (hopefully) positive impression he made on Sarah would remain fresh on the day. He would also meet Alastair Creech, the CEO, for the first time—that, he had told her.

He stood and took his plate and cup to the sink.

Despite the uneasy start to the day, they still took Darwin for a walk together, weaving through deserted Parrish Hill streets in a kind of silent, suspended animation, anticipating his departure. They held hands, but only after Hana took his. By the time they were back home, the turbulence from earlier seemed to have subsided. Consecutive showers led to the unvoiced suggestion of lovemaking, but they were both put off by the routine biology of it and dressed in separate rooms. The burden of his approaching departure prompted an early start to the airport.

Driving him to the airport had become protocol, a habit begun when they both dreaded time apart. He could always order a car but never did; how he would get to the airport was never discussed. An addictive alchemy imbued the ritual, a kind of voodoo code that honored their connection, a soothing reaffirmation they consumed in silence.

Calder drove. They passed through sporadic, sunlit showers where fat drops pelted the windshield in the late afternoon light. A plush scent of spring rain infiltrated the car’s interior. The hypnotic monotony of the drive allowed familiar fears to revolve in his mind like an unhealthy mantra, while a faint squeak pulled by the wipers gave tempo to the mantra’s repetition.

The touch beneath his chin dispelled the trance. Hana’s two fingers exerted a gentle pressure, lifting his head from its slumped, slung forward position.

“There.” She withdrew her fingers as if leaving an infant to walk alone.

He turned off the interstate toward Centreville. After the sheltering density of the old hardwood trees of Lawrence Park, the sprawling commercial development of Sully Road—a string of car dealerships and big-box stores, strip malls housing fast-food franchises, and national retail chains—was bleak, soul-destroying.

Hana had known nothing of America when they arrived; this stretch of road always reminded him of that. Her slow and tortuous integration became his. During the fourteen years of his absence, the country had changed. The notion of a kind of American pioneering genome passed down from generation to generation of stanch optimistic humanity, an unbroken procession of tan-faced, persevering civilization-builders, bound by goodwill and shared vision, who crossed New-World soil to fill vast, trackless spaces, had been displaced. The promised grandeur of shared potential and progress became tainted by empty promises that enslaved more than redeemed, a grasping, spiritless slog toward a diminished, almost forgotten ideal. Hana couldn’t understand it, and he had never been able to explain it.

They stopped at a traffic light.

Hana watched for the signal to change with impatient silence, as if she feared yet another comment from him about the landscape. The light remained stubbornly red. She turned, and their eyes met. Her subtle beauty had proved to be only one part of an arcane codex revealed over time: the exotic shape of her pale green eyes, gentle curls at the corners of her mouth, contradicting her often tangled brow. She gave an uncertain smile. “Are you worried about your interview?”

“Not really. No.”

“Just be yourself. Try.”

The light changed.

They lurched forward with more force than he intended.

“No one’s ever themselves in an interview.” Although he believed she could be the exception. Her enthusiastic, quirky self revealed in the interview had doubtless won her the bank job. This was an element of the codex that evaded his understanding. But the unsolicited yet credible advice had irked him. The carping dispassion in her tone had been obvious, as was a weary capitulation to his failure to change, failure to improve, failure to succeed.

“You can be a version of yourself.”

“I’m not sure.” His uncertainty frustrated him. “There’s only one version now. Conveniently. The work version. It’s started showing up at home…”

“I’ve noticed that.”

“It infects everything…”

They passed the first signs for Dulles.

“Just be human. Talk to people like a normal human being.”

“What does that mean?” He had heard this refrain often enough to become deaf to it. “I don’t know what that means.”

She drew a soft breath, exhaled—a single breath, he heard, steeped in frustration. “Why did you never tell anyone at work you had cancer?”

It wasn’t the first time she had asked him; a question repeated enough to oblige him to wonder why.

 “Basically, everything you’ve done, everything you’ve accomplished, you did after the cancer.”

True, but that was not how he wanted to be assessed by others, not how he wanted to be seen by her.

 “Can’t you give yourself some credit?”

He steered toward Departures, lips pressed tight, shaking his head. “I don’t want to take that handicap.”

“Why wouldn’t you do it for yourself, then?”

“Do what?”

His concentration had split between her eleventh-hour advice and finding a place to park.

“Do you really need SM?”

There was merit in the idea, but he felt duty bound to resist. “I’d like to get some acknowledgment first.”

It had been an impulsive response, regrettably plaintive, pitiful, and in tone, final.

He eased the car to the curb and stopped. They climbed out without a word. He took his bags from the backseat, and they met as they circled behind the car. He thought to hold her and started to set his bags at his feet, but she had already kissed him. Rushed, routine, the fleshy warmth of her lips, he felt, lacked a dimension.

“I want to get back to Darwin.” She hurried into the driver’s seat. “Text me when you land.”