#contance

She recognized him immediately; she needn’t have worried.

           “Christopher.” He was exactly where he said he would be: sitting on the park bench, a basket at one side on which his arm rested protectively.

           How could someone look exactly the same and entirely different in the same instant? There was Christopher’s face, the blue eyes the slanted jaw, just as she remembered him when he was eighteen, but with fifty years added: mottled skin and a veil of wrinkles.

           He stood. “Constance.” His smile was deep and, she thought, pure.

           She laughed. “How can we be so old?” For she could read the same surprise in his eyes: the last time he had seen her she had been twenty-five. Her hair had been dark and glossy, her waist had been narrow, and she had been wearing a dress that she still had folded deep in a trunk. A dress she had been unable to discard.

           A loud, strangely clad group of men passed between them. Tattooed and smelling of cigarettes, she was furious at them for being so close to Christopher, for existing in the same place. They made him seem fragile, a thin old man standing in front of a park bench. Vulnerable. Absurdly she wanted to vanquish them, but she just waited until they had continued their foul-talking way down the path, then crossed and stepped up to him.

           For a moment they just looked, joy made a bridge between their eyes, and then their hands clasped and cradled, swinging back and forth.

           “Shall we?” Christopher turned toward the row of cherry blossom trees that lined the lake.

           Constance nodded, and he took up the picnic basket and they began to walk, side-by-side.

He had waited exactly a year and one day after he had read Will’s obituary in the newspaper to contact her. “The extra day made it seem less mercenary,” he said, then added quickly, “I wasn’t happy to read of his death. Don’t misunderstand me.”

           The cherry trees made a glowing tunnel above them. She turned her eyes up. Tomorrow the petals would start to fall in earnest, but today they drifted down only occasionally.

           “We had a contented marriage,” she said firmly.

           “Contented?” He paused to shift the basket and she wondered if it was heavy for him.

           “Contented. Happy. Unhappy. Boring. Fun.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It was a marriage that lasted—however it did.”

           “While mine did not,” he said this lightly.

           But she knew this. She had kept track of him, through friends, newspaper articles, and more recently, the Internet. She remembered the strange mix of nausea and euphoria that had overwhelmed her when Valerie said, “Oh, and you know that Christopher finally left that horrid wife of his, what was her name? Priscilla? Patricia?”

           “Pamela,” Constance had said quietly.

           Valerie waved her thin wrist. “In any case, he left her. Or she left him. Not that you care, right Connie? That was all ages and ages ago.”

Monthly reminder that Kogasa is an excellent blacksmith! (She fixed Reimu’s needles)

¿Por que no los dos?