Isaac came out from the bedroom while I was making my study of the refrigerator. I heard his footsteps stop behind me, but chose to ignore him.
“You came back for the chicken,” he said.
I laughed, but not too loudly. I straightened my face, closed the door, and pressed my back against it.
“It’s Saturday,” I said. I felt excited saying this. It was a beautiful morning, warm but not hot, the living room full of sunlight.
I had felt restless and scared since waking up, and now I had a vague idea of how to respond. “I think we should take a trip.”
He folded his arms, leaned against the wall, crossed his legs, and even pursed his lips.
“I thought you had to work.”
“I was wrong. I made a mistake.”
I waited him for him to state what was obvious. I was lying. I had run out on him that morning in a way that had felt final to both of us, but he seemed willing to act as if none of that mattered anymore.
“Chicago. I’ve always wanted to go. It’s the capital of the Midwest.”
“I never got closer than the airport.”
“Now is our chance,” I said.
We disagreed on whether we should leave right away. As Isaac made his argument for later, I made a mental list of everything I wanted to do before leaving. When he finished, I said, “We can stop and rest along the way, but it’s important we go now.”
He didn’t disagree. He asked: “Is that what you really want?”
“It is.”
I told him to pack as much as he could, and not to leave behind anything that was important.
While he packed, I showered. When I finished, I saw his toothbrush on the sink and put it in my mouth. I yelled from the bathroom, “I’m using your toothbrush.”
It felt more intimate than sex — a seemingly minor thing that any normal couple would have shared by now. But when I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see all the reasons why I had never done so staring back at me.
When I came back to the bedroom, Isaac had laid out on the bed the one suit he owned, the one he had been wearing at the airport. On the floor was the same suitcase he had been carrying. I was surprised at how little he still had, and then I understood that the suitcase had been empty when he arrived: all the clothes inside it now, he had bought with me. The only original item was the notebook that sat on top.
He was looking at the suit.
“Do you mind if I wear it? It was the last thing I bought in Nairobi. I don’t want to fold it into such a small suitcase.”
I wrapped my arms around him from behind and held my face against his back. I felt the urge to tell him I loved him; it wasn’t the first time I’d had that thought, but it was the first time I was certain it was true. I pushed him onto the part of the bed that wasn’t covered by his suit, and took off my towel as I undressed him.
He reached for a condom, but I pulled his arm back and placed it around me.
“Is this because of the toothbrush?”
“Yes.”
He tried to pull me off him before he came, but I refused to let go. I looked ahead and had a sense of the doubt and anxiety that would follow, but when I looked beyond that for regret, I found none. I stayed on top of him for as long as possible. I saw him preparing to apologize.
“There is nothing to be sorry about,” I told him.
I made eggs while Isaac showered and put his suit on. When I first met him I had wanted to laugh at the idea that someone would get so dressed up to come to this town, where most men wore suits only to church, and then just for weddings and funerals. I had missed how handsome he looked in gray, how a suit aged him just slightly beyond his twenty-odd years to a point better matched to the sometimes grave, formal aura that surrounded him.
“I thought you didn’t touch eggs,” he said.
“I learned while you were away.”
I sat on the kitchen counter while he ate his breakfast at the table. I couldn’t help thinking of the hundreds of times I had watched my mother sit next to my father as he did the same. His daily breakfast consisted of two eggs, fried or scrambled, with bacon and toast on the side. She nervously watched him eat from her side of the table, as if she knew that it was merely a matter of time before there would be a final breakfast; it would never be acknowledged as such, and so she rehearsed the end daily for years in order to soften the blow.
Here was another difference between us: I knew the end was near. I was making it, and trying to devour every moment left.
Before we left, I asked Isaac if he was certain he had packed everything he needed for a long trip. “Just in case I kidnap you and you never come back.”
He held up his suitcase. “I’ve never had much to leave behind,” he said.
I didn’t say where we were going next, and Isaac didn’t ask. We skirted the center of town, drove past the new shopping malls to the eastern edge of Laurel, where my mother and I lived. I had never taken Isaac to that part of town, and I could tell from the way he stared out the window at the houses, which were larger than most homes in Laurel and were graced with wide, circular porches and acres of grass to look out upon, that this was new to him.
We pulled into the fourth house we passed.
“This is yours?” Isaac asked me.
I thought of it as my home, but never as mine. I don’t think any of us who lived there had any strong feeling toward it. My parents were the second people to own it, and I never gave much thought to what I would I do when I inherited it.
“I live here,” I said, “but it’s my mother’s house. My father didn’t want anything to do with it after the divorce.”
I asked him if he wanted to come in with me while I packed. He peered through the windshield as if trying to gauge the reception that would be waiting for him on the other side of the door. I knew better now than to guess what it would be.
“Is it okay if I just wait in the car?”
It was and it wasn’t, but I said yes, because I owed him that.
The front door was already half open. I knew from experience that my mother would have parted the curtains in the living room or in her bedroom as soon as she heard a car pull into the driveway. Still, I was taken aback at seeing her standing on the other side of the door, in an ankle-length blue floral dress that she used to say made her look matronly, as if she were hiding children and possibly some pies underneath the hem. She didn’t know what to do with her arms and hands. She unfolded and refolded them in the time it took me to enter and close the door.
“I heard your car from the kitchen,” she said.
“I was going to call and tell you I was coming.”
“This is still your home, Helen. Why would you ever do that?”
For all the love and affection that existed between us, we rarely hugged. Our gestures of affection had become increasingly girlish — we squeezed hands; occasionally, my mother held my forearm; I often caught her staring at me, waiting for me to notice she was watching me closely. I thought of that when I held my hand out to her. She took it, and I led her to the windows that looked out onto the driveway. The curtain was halfway parted.
“That’s the man I’ve been seeing,” I told her. “His name is Isaac.”