Course Correction
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Your wedding band is tucked into the front pocket of your jeans.
Your soon-to-be ex-wife doesn’t ask where you’re going. No comment about the bergamot perfume on your wrists. No note of the straightened hair tucked behind pierced ears.
The front door shuts behind you with a measured thud.
You don’t know when leaving became easy.
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Irene is older than you remember. Or perhaps Irene was always this old, and only now has the realization settled, as remarkable as a paperweight.
Irene keeps her trench coat on when she sits. The diamond on her ring finger catches the light when she brings her iced tea to her lips.
The air pulls taut.
“This suits you.” Irene says. As though the observation belongs to her.
Despite yourself, you ask.
“What suits me?”
“Divorce.”
Irene punctuates the word with another sip.
You look down too quickly. The foam of your flat white caves in on itself—a small destruction.
Irene hasn’t stopped watching you. She won’t.
It would be easier if Irene never emailed you again. Not from her personal address instead of her faculty account. Not beginning with hey stranger or long time, no speak. Not always after office hours, when her husband has retired for the night.
It would be easier if you could remember Irene’s son—thirty-one, your own age—and feel revulsion. But revulsion requires distance, and distance has never arrived easily.
“So, you know.”
“I guessed,” Irene corrects. “You answered me. And I don’t see the ring.”
You have never forgiven Irene for knowing. For filing it away so neatly, for treating it like information she can erase with the click of a button.
It still surfaces, even now, when you least expect it.
Beneath the table, you pinch the ring in your jean pocket.
“I still live with her.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s temporary.”
“So is marriage.”
You have nothing to add, so you don’t. There’s nothing to get out of the conversation, nothing tangible, so you let it fold in on itself.
Irene changes the subject—with finality and without fanfare. The husband’s name pierces the conversation like a credential. Proof of stability. Proof that this, too, is something Irene can maintain.
I tried, you want to say.
Did you? Irene would ask.
The ring stays in your pocket because taking it off was easy.
Explaining why you put it on in the first place never will be.
Heather Emmanuel
Heather Emmanuel is a Black British writer of contemporary lesbian literary fiction and prose poetry. Her work is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Offing, SWWIM, and Gone Lawn. You can find her at heather-emmanuel.com or at @heather.emmanuel8