INTENTIONAL LOVE: SHOW UP

THE ANNIVERSARY MORNING

Point Of View — Maya

I never told anyone about the message. I did not tell Linda about it. I did not tell David's mother about it. I did not tell a person. I read the message twice that afternoon. I was sitting on my bed. The journal was closed beside me. The pen was on the floor. Then I locked mine. Put it face down on the nightstand. I sat still for a long time.

Then I got up. I picked the pen off the floor. Put it in the drawer. I went downstairs. Started dinner. When Ethan came home he ran to my legs. I held him tighter than usual. He. Laughed and said Mama you are squishing me. I said good. Held on anyway.

I have not thought about the message since. That is what I tell myself.. The truth is I have thought about the message every single day. It has been three months since that September afternoon. Now it is this December morning. I have thought about the message the way you think about a sound you heard in the night that you cannot explain. I have thought about it quietly. It is a thought that lives in the back of a room in my mind. It never fully leaves when I stop looking at it directly.

I do not know what the message means yet. So I put it away.. I cook. Our wedding anniversary is today. I have been awake since before the sun came up. I could not sleep. I lay on my side of the bed. I watched the room go from black to grey to the soft pale light of early winter morning. I thought about five years. What they looked like from the outside. What they felt like from the inside. Sometimes those two things are so different they seem to belong to separate lives.

From the outside we look fine. David. His wife. The beautiful house. The healthy son. The successful. The woman who keeps everything running. From the outside it is a life.. In many ways it is. I know that. I hold that. I remember the years when David used to come home for dinner. He would sit at the table. Ask me about my day. He would listen like my answer was the important thing he would hear all week. I remember the night Ethan was born.

David held him for the time. His whole face changed into something that is different. It was not protected and completely open. He looked at me over our son's head with eyes and said thank you.

I remember those things. I carry them.. Memory and the present moment are two different places to live. I get up quietly so I do not wake Ethan. I go downstairs in my socks and my robe. I start the music first. The song from our wedding. The one that played when I walked in and David turned around. I watched his face and everything else in the room disappeared. I connect my phone to the kitchen speaker and I press play. The song fills the kitchen soft. I stand in the middle of the floor for a moment. I let myself feel it.

Then I start cooking. Eggs first. I c***k them carefully into the bowl. I beat them until they are pale and smooth. I slice the mushrooms thin the way David likes them. I lay the bacon in the pan. The smell rises immediately. It fills the kitchen and moves into the hallway. I know if Ethan is close to waking up that aroma will do the job for me. I made the pancakes from the beginning. I sieved the flour myself. David once said fresh orange juice in the morning is one of his favourite things. So I warm the honey in a pot on the stove burner. I squeeze oranges for the juice.

I set the table with the plates. The ones we got as a wedding gift from his aunt. We almost never use them because they feel too special for days. Today is not a day. I get them down from the shelf. I wash them even though they are already clean. I dry them carefully. Set them at both places. I fold the napkins. I put the juice in the glasses. I found a vase on the windowsill and I put the last of the white roses in it. Three branches. The ones that are still holding on. I set it in the center of the table.

I step back. Look at it. It is the most beautiful breakfast table I have ever set in this house. I put on perfume. The honeymoon bottle. I dab it on my wrists and my neck. I look at my reflection in the kitchen window for a moment. Hair loose. Robe swapped for the soft cream dress I laid out at night. Earrings in. I look like a woman who is trying. I look like a woman who still believes.

I sit down to wait. His text came at night at 10 O'clock. He was in the car on the way home from a dinner meeting. He said he would be home by 9 O'clock in the morning at the latest. He said he was looking forward to the day. He used the word us. He said I have been thinking about us. I read it in bed with Ethan sleeping across the hall. I held the phone against my chest afterward. I let myself hope again.

I know what Linda would say about that.. I hoped. By nine fifteen the food is hot and plated. The juice is poured. The candle I lit in the center of the table is burning steadily. The wedding song has cycled through three times on the speaker. By nine forty five I get up. Cover his plate with foil. I do it automatically. Without thinking. My hands just do it. Tear the foil. Fold it over the edges. Press it down. The way they have done it many times has become the natural ending to the act of cooking for David Collins.

I sit back down. I eat my eggs. They are good. Everything is good. I cooked it all right. I ate it alone at the table with the good plates and the fresh juice and the three white roses and the wedding song and the single candle burning between the two places. I ate slowly. I did not cry. I am past the crying. That is what I noticed this morning. It quietly frightens me more than any tears ever did.

His text arrives at ten twelve. "Baby I am really sorry. The board had an emergency meeting. I will be there by noon I promise. Do not move that plate." I read his message. When I saw the foil covered plate that's across from me. The candle has been burning for an hour now. I can see that the candle is melting down than it was when I first lit it. The three roses, in the vase are completely open. They are fully open which is what roses do right before they start to die.

I look at all of this for a moment. Then I get up. Walk over to the drawer where I keep my notebooks and pens and other small things that I use every day. I opened it. At the back behind everything else is a business card I have had for eight months. I took it at a school event.

Brought it home and put it in this drawer and closed it and have not taken it out since. I picked it up. I read the name on it. I turned it over. On the back of my handwriting from eight months ago I wrote one word. A question really. One word with a small question mark at the end that I did not have the answer to then.

I stand at the drawer and I look at that word. And this time , standing in my beautiful kitchen with my anniversary breakfast going cold on the good plates while the wedding song plays to an empty chair, I think I finally know the answer.