“What is?”
“Our marriage, Keith. Our marriage is over.”
He closed his eyes and then opened them slowly and as he did so it felt as if he was shifting into his own body, as if he had been away and now returned. “Jesus Christ, Barb,” he said. “Jesus Christ, can’t this wait? Can’t this just wait until I’m back home?”
“No, it can’t wait.”
“Really? It has to be right now?”
“Yes, it has to be now.”
“What do you want me to do about it? It’s not like I can just come down.”
“I know and I don’t want you to.”
“You can’t do this,” he said.
“I already have.”
“No, you can’t do this. You’ll be home when I get there and we’ll figure this out.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be like this.”
“Christ, Barb. Don’t do this.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, so am I,” he said.
She had called him days later, also on the laptop, to tell him that she had already removed all her belongings from the house and that he would need to collect his own and then it could be put on the market and sold, told him this as if it was a simple business transaction. At the time, he found himself wishing that he could somehow remain on the space station but then another migraine would send him into a red jagged tunnel of pain and it would take days for him to recover and he knew, even then, that he was failing his first mission, perhaps the only mission he would ever have.
Had she not married him for his ambition, because he was going to achieve something beyond the range of most men? Had she not understood that reaching his own destiny would take time and discipline? And now she felt he had put too much time into his work and not enough time into his family. He was an astronaut and his daughter was dead and then his wife had told him that she was leaving him and would not return. What kind of universe would allow such a thing?
By the late afternoon he gave up painting entirely. He had followed a single wall from the kitchen to the living room and then halfway up the stairs, dripping paint all the while so that the carpet and stair rail were flecked with white spots. It was a mess and he knew he should have simply stopped painting long before but of course he had not done so. When he left the house he was so distracted and frustrated that he did not even clean the brushes, merely dropping them onto the plastic-wrapped kitchen counter and walking out the door.
He ended up at Starbucks again, mostly because he could think of no other place to go, taking a padded chair in the back of the room and listening to the quietly piped-in classic rock while he sipped his coffee from its paper cup. His anger had not subsided and he tried to direct his thoughts back to Jennifer but instead found himself wondering how well she had known Barb. And so there she was again, intruding upon his thoughts and bringing with her the unwarranted feeling of guilt that settled into his chest, as if he was keeping a terrible secret from her. Perhaps he was. He still did not even know the name of the man his wife had been sleeping with, as if knowing his name would change what had happened. He wondered if Quinn had known him, if Barb had brought him into their house, into their bed. My god.
On the adjacent table was a newspaper and he reached for it for no reason other than to divert his mind, staring at headlines on foreclosures, the imploding real estate market, the rising price of oil, the increasing unemployment rate. Servicemen captured in Iraq. Bombs in Afghanistan. It might have been yesterday’s paper or the week before for little seemed to have changed. As if to confirm this fact he found a brief article on the comet on page four, apparently somewhat more important than it had been but still not quite worthy of the cover. The tagline read: “Comet Set to Hit Earth?” Perhaps when scientists removed the question mark from their sentences the paper would move it to the front page. The story noted that it would take nearly two months before it would make impact, if it was indeed on an earth-bound trajectory. It simply might have been too many weeks away for page one.
He had sat there for perhaps thirty minutes in the calm quiet semi-darkness when the door opened and the loud Russian man entered. Fantastic. He was the same man Keith had seen and briefly spoken to the morning after he had first returned to the cul-de-sac and he made a mental note to try a different Starbucks next time, lest he continue to overlap with what was, apparently, this man’s break from work.
The blonde barista — Audrey, he remembered — looked up from the counter as the man came through the door and greeted him and immediately the man looked around as if the source of the greeting was somehow inexplicable. “Who said this to me?” he said. He mocked looking around the room the way a parent might to entertain a very small child. In his hands: a white department store box.
“It’s me, Peter,” she said. She was clearly playing along with a kind of strange, childlike flirtation.
“I hear beautiful voice, but I see nothing,” he said.
“I’m right here,” she said again. She was smiling.
The man, Peter, jumped back, his face appearing startled, eyes wide. “My goodness! Audrey! How you sneak up on me!” Peter glanced toward the back of the shop, to where Keith sat with his paper. “Hello, famous astronaut Keith Corcoran!” he boomed.
“Hello,” Keith responded, trying to suppress both his surprise and his annoyance. Had he told the man his name? If so he did not remember it. Unlikely.
“I would speak to you soon but first my attention is diverting here to counter,” Peter said.
As if on cue, Keith’s phone began to ring. He fished it out of his pocket. Eriksson.
Audrey laughed. “You’re so weird,” she said to Peter.
“Hello?” Keith said into the phone.
“Not weird. You mean charming,” Peter said. “This word I am learning in English class.”
Audrey laughed.
“Chip, Eriksson here.”
“Look here what I have got,” Peter said to Audrey. “Like a present maybe. You open.”
“Hi, Bill.”
“Where are you? At the airport?”
“No, I’m at Starbucks,” Keith said. He glanced up from the paper again. Audrey took the white box slowly, as if handling something dangerous. Chemicals. Something that might explode. She said something but Keith could not hear it.
“Starbucks again? Is that how you’re spending your time off?”
“No,” Keith said.
Eriksson laughed briefly.
Across the room, Peter’s voice continued to boom: “You are so sweet to me. You deserve something nice. Is that not right, famous astronaut Keith Corcoran?”
Keith waved him off, pointing at the phone. Peter bowed to him. “Hey, have you checked with Mullins about those files?” Keith said.
“Well, yeah, that’s what I’m calling about.”
“OK.”
Across the room, Audrey opened the box. Her “Oh” was audible even through Eriksson’s voice but her face revealed no emotion.
“So it doesn’t sound like he’s going to send them,” Eriksson said.
“What?”
“He says it’s against protocol. It’s hard to argue because he’s technically right about that.”
Keith was silent for a moment. Then he said, simply: “Crap.”
“Yeah, probably not what you wanted to hear, but I thought I should let you know what was going on.”
“OK.”
“Sorry about that, pal.”
“Sorry about what?”
“Just sorry he won’t do it. No big deal though, right? You’re supposed to taking a break.”
“Yeah, I’m taking a break.”
“At Starbucks.”
“At Starbucks.” A series of ones and zeroes crossed through his mind, affixed themselves to the surfaces of the visible world before him, and then faded from view. “Is that all?” he said into the phone.