Leftover Thank You Cards Make Excellent Coasters

The waiter clicked his pen’s plunge and excused himself to his tasks.

Louis’ hand went right to the creamer, and his eyes met Jeannie’s while he fixed his coffee. The cardiologist specifically warned against needless foods like butter and jam, that small adjustments should be made, that they would add up to a better diet without creating an unpleasant, abstemious world. Her mouth went flat, and she leveled a cold gaze at him. She was watching the serious models with their buoyant physiques parade across the walk while a violent percussion of flashes and clicks accompanied the parched yearning behind dozens of camera lenses. She was listening to the uncreased face inside the heavy shiny caramel blonde mop lament the exhausting tediousness of creating interesting content. He smiled at the sugar in the teaspoon, and curled the youthfully tight dimple his left cheek would make. He was using the club that made no sense, or tacking with an unruly wind his crew could not decipher.

He ended his stir with a ting against the lip of the cup, and his sip’s slurping seemed loud to Jeannie. This was the impulsive child without a concern for dignity wolfing his food at breakfast come to visit again, despite reprimands. This was the proclamation of independence that had plagued their conversations, with remarks about forgetting to carve time to take their daughter to a practice or a recital when his career became demanding, with remarks about Jeannie’s mother warning her against forgetting she was the Lord's child before she was a wife or a mother. Not to be outdone, Jeannie went to her bag, which had its own chair at the small table, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes which should not have existed. It held half of its magazine, and Louis could not think of what battles occurred where these had been spent. He watched the lines at the corners of her lips crowd to their old friend the way Jeannie’s cadre of sirens glommed onto each other to judge the quality of new injections. The bitterness ran across his face rich as the coffee’s velvety vitality coated him when his mind strayed to his original eviction of this habit. Armand? Was that his name? He certainly seemed to have the habits of an athlete, with his ridiculous diet of powders and concoctions splashing about in his steel tumbler, and his cloying enthusiasm for making things challenging like showering in cold water or parking somewhere a few streets away. It should have been obvious that he would never smoke. It should have been obvious that her attire for dinner or meeting Louis on the boat, with so many bangles and so much focus on comfort, turning suddenly into hardly more than short skirts and snug, flimsy t-shirts or exercise sets that clung like paint, meant more than she would admit about her tennis lessons. It was obvious when the fire in one of the bungalows at the club was traced to lipstick coated cigarettes left on a cocktail glass by old magazines. While he wrote a check for the damages a few days after, the manager who received it had been the same woman who had tried to contain the commotion of Mrs. Rohan in little more than a towel, and Armand in nothing but his big hands, running around outside the burning curtains, yelling for anyone to call emergency services. While Louis and Jeannie looked into their plates that night, eating a cold roast in the mute air of the dining room, his only words were a permanent ban on smoking. .

That time had passed. Those straws had broken the camel’s back.

The road back had been built on the scars of those moments.

Because every word had already been spoken so many times to the point of breaking any meaning, their life had become a mosaic. The broken words were put back into a shape of a thing to be called love, or marriage, or family.

When she drew her first take from that cigarette, she drank every direction her sorority had spoken to her about sisterhood and allegiance, every man’s proclamation of the moral direction that would best suit the nation, every comment about the new vice-president of marketing’s attitude towards self-starters that produce game plans, and exhaled every snide description of someone else’s disciplinary choices for their daughter, every discomfort waiting beside hers in the coven of patients at the gynecologist, every stare fondling the back of her when she walked down her way or distracted by some administrative assistant while she was asserting her analysis to her colleagues. The warm caress of calmative creeping over her was more pleasant than singing some rebellious country lyric to herself, which she also enjoyed. But Louis drank the foul odor of the cigarette as confirmation. He had asked her to arrange the meeting with Nicole’s teacher, and the cigarette’s smoke had bloomed like a promise. He had asked her to speak to the contractor about how much electrical work the new kitchen would entail, and the cigarette’s smoke substantiated her resentment of his irritating parsimony.

Her phone made a noise inside of her bag, which she could never understand how to correct to silence, and when she reached for it, she noticed Marie in a couple being led to a table. Louis’ next sip of coffee became polite, soundless, his deliberate focus on his cup obvious. Marie seemed to buy nothing but athletic wear, often the shiny type, despite never exerting herself to lift things like checks or her own trash. Her glossy, toned figure would glow from the distant end of a group Louis would regale with stories about racing the boat, or a trip to the desert to race buggees. The husbands would all feign interest, while they secretly conspired to conscript elements of the audience for their own raunchy pursuits. Marie would simply pout in her listening spot to inspire pity for her suffering the burden of privilege, like all of the other stark faces of women attending charity balls with their husbands, or galas for causes they alone had the courage to champion using other people’s money. Jeannie despised Marie’s elegant jewelry, as all the other wives did, but mostly because of its flawless beauty and imperial cost. Louis, with his collegiate habit of presenting himself with unruly hair, and his penchant for interrupting even his own discourse with another errant self-satisfied conjecture, suddenly put on his sunglasses to transform into an unobtrusive, focused man, judging the entries in the wine menu that might pair with a lunch he had already ordered.

Jeannie flicked at the sprites on the small screen with the care of a pastoral maiden discarding the petals of her freshly plucked forget-me-not. Her clever fingers forged the maneuver for a specific entry, which she catalogued mentally for later attention. Louis’ pantomime of distraction never broke in the early years of their marriage, but Nicole’s impatience, her obstinate and myopic disobedience, had exhausted him, had worn away his ability over the years to sustain any emotion he tried to affect, like the sternness in the disciplinarian, or the calmness in the listener, or the magnanimity in the instructor. Jeannie knew that a mere few seconds of the amateur sommelier would be all that was required before she could connect his eyes to some part of Marie.

It happened so quickly.

The Labor Day Regatta invitations had already been printed and sent. The order to vacate separation had just been carried. The exam after the bypass had gone well, and Jeannie had hurried to tell everyone in the family and all of their friends the good news. She had stopped writing Remy beside her name on checks and documents. Even Nicole decided to dress like royalty instead of a morose vagabond to welcome father back, but it all seemed a set-up to Louis. His insolence evaporated immediately. This first lunch after returning home was a stupid idea. He was left wearing a deep, existential disarray in the grimace reflecting at him from his coffee. Jeannie’s brows lifted in surprise, and she tossed her glance fully to Marie’s table.

There was Armand, seated as Marie’s companion. And Jeannie’s look darted back to the bouquet of her own fingers, casually cradling an enchanting ruby at the end of a cigarette, and then to her defeated husband, incredulous to how easily she held the crime aloft to the world.