andra and I had been apart long enough that we were coming back together, slowly, the way retired football enemies eventually find themselves barbequing together in a backyard, letting team rivalries dissipate as their one thing in common—the game—became stronger.

This is how we came to be sitting together at a front table in Gilmartin's, a corner diner smack in the middle of downtown. Sandra had initiated the reconciliation, and I was gravitating to her with all the wariness of a housecat easing around a sleeping bulldog. But the one thing that meant the world to me, once, was nestled in the center of her gravitational pull: our kids. Though they were no longer a piece of me, I couldn't help allowing myself to ultimately be drawn in.

I felt like a terrorist talked out of a hostage situation, conceding because I'd been promised a getaway plane. Now, as I sat across from her, I felt like that same terrorist as he's waiting for the FBI to swarm in upon him, promises brutally yanked from beneath him.

"You're looking well," she said, and it hit me that in every movie about divorce or child custody that I'd ever seen—Kramer vs. Kramer; Bye, Bye Love—that was just about the first phrase to be uttered by the one who had the guts to speak up first.

You're looking well.

Sandra was looking absolutely phenomenal, as though she had spent every breathing moment since the divorce came through trotting away on a treadmill, and had just now taken a breather, four years later, to patch things up with me.

I nodded at that, and glanced nervously around for the waitress, tapping my fingertips restlessly on the Formica tabletop.

Her hands palmed mine, and she said, softly, "Relax, David."

My heart stopped and started beating overtime at once. She wasn't wearing the same perfume she'd worn all those years ago—she'd have killed for a kiss of Opium—but beneath the new scent I could detect the soft, soapy smell of her skin, and it brought me back to the night I'd woken to find her gone; how I'd searched the house for her and found that Dyan and Elliot were gone, too; how I'd doubled over in bed and clutched Sandra's cold pillow to my face, breathing deep her smell, and cried myself to sleep.

I swallowed, very aware that I hadn't said anything yet.

But Sandra seemed okay with this. It was clear who had moved on and who had lingered; she was looking alive, very fresh in a light halter top, very casual with her hair-which had been highlighted recently, I noticed. Me: I felt a safe detonate inside my chest each time she touched my hand, or said my name, or even looked at me.

I was the one who was still dragging our former marriage around—clinging to the leg of her escaping helicopter with all of my emotions tied to my ankle like a battered Pontiac.

"Thank you," I said finally. "About me looking...well."

The awkwardness, for Sandra, abruptly vanished, and she smiled brightly. "You're welcome," she said.

We sat, not talking, for a while, until the waitress had taken our orders and returned with a lopsided tray. A salad for Sandra; soup for me. As if neither of us wanted to commit to a full meal, in case something went bad and we had to jettison away from this table, crying "Escape, escape!"

"David," Sandra said as I dipped my spoon into the soup.

I glanced up. She was looking pointedly at my spoon as it approached my mouth, eyes pert. I raised my eyebrows to say What?

"Aren't you going to pray," she said.

 

o that was it, I thought. She hadn't been exercising for four years. She hadn't been focusing all of her concentration, like a death ray, on becoming absolutely irresistible so that I would fall before her when we met again.

She'd gotten religion.

I said, after thinking a moment, "I don't pray."

And as though we'd not been married for six years—as though we hadn't both consciously avoided all things churchy with a silent passion—Sandra flinched and said, "Oh," in a disappointed tone.

"You go ahead, though," I said. "I'll wait."

Sandra hesitated, then nodded. She dipped her head like a scuba diver flushing the water out of her mask, and her lips fluttered soundlessly as I watched. After a moment she was finished, and her composure had returned. "Thank you," she said.

I nodded, realizing that I wasn't completely nervous anymore.

As I sucked in a mouthful of soup—chicken noodle, not so bad—Sandra pulled the trigger, dropped the bomb.

"I don't want the kids anymore," she said.

My lips went slack, and soup dribbled out. I looked at her, stunned, and she went, "Tsk tsk," and leaned across the table and dabbed at my mouth with a napkin, the way she used to do for the children.

I swallowed and said, "What?"

She folded her napkin again, smoothing the edges precisely-I could still detect the smudge of my wet lips on the fabric-and placed it in her lap, then collapsed her hands and said, "I'm going to reverse the custody order and give the kids back to you."

The back of my chair must have been a thousand miles away, because I fell hard against it. "I don't understand," I said weakly, thinking of my life; thinking of the pittance I earned rolling out pizza dough in the bakery; thinking of my studio apartment and the excavated darkness of my neighborhood; contemplating my lack of any transportation other than a bicycle; thinking about the metal detectors on the sidewalk at the school around the corner.

Sandra's cheeks were pink and her eyes, bluer than ever, danced. I could see that she had just released a vast weight from her shoulders. "I really can't be supporting them anymore," she said, as though we were discussing a relative's children and not our own. "I have other things I'd like to do."

"You can't just..." I started, but I wasn't sure what I was going to say to her.

The waitress stepped up and, in a quick blur, was gone again. I looked down to see that my cup of coffee had vanished.

"I have other things I'd like to do," she repeated quietly.

"Like what?" I demanded, sitting upright. "Become a nun? Go to Africa?"

My coffee cup was back, full, and the waitress zipped away again, flitting from table to table, then into the kitchen and back to each one.

"Actually," Sandra answered, "yes. Not the Africa part, though."

I blinked.

"I've been accepted into St. Mary's Convent in Brooklyn," she said. "The nuns tell me that it's the best place to get my feet on the ground—there's plenty of work to do in the inner city, and so much to learn. They say the nuns there are the best in the nation, and I—"

"You're going to be a nun?" I said again, my voice brittle.

"Sister Catherine Hannah."

She was changing her name. Four years later, it seemed that the divorce was real for the very first time. Sandra Hanks, former wife of David Hanks, who had kept her last name out of respect for her children (and, I had always thought, out of unwillingness to fight the legal battles to change it back), was really escaping this time. She had come to me; was asking me to pull the ripcord and let her go.

"The children miss you," Sandra said, but I wasn't sure if I believed it or not. Four years, and, except at the beginning, when I was fighting the fight I thought I should be fighting, petitioning the courts for at least joint custody, and losing because of some college drug flings, I hadn't heard a word from Dyan or Elliot. Birthdays—theirs or mine—meant nothing; Christmases and summer vacations were empty voids. The tin cans that had once been our communication lines were shot away, separated.

What were my children to me now?

"A nun," I whispered again.

"Yes, David," Sandra said patiently. "I have a calling."

I thought of her fluttering lips, her silent prayer; she hadn't crossed herself, I realized, but I didn't say anything.

"What about the children?" I asked stupidly.

"I'm entrusting their care to you," she said in a prim voice, as though she were actually trusting me. But it seemed that, beneath her words, she imagined them only another loose end—something that must be neatly packaged up and put away, the same way she might disconnect the power to her home before leaving.

"I don't even know them anymore."

"They know you," she said. "Dyan asks about you every day. At night, when Ell goes to bed, he says his prayers, and always asks God to bless you. David," she said, building an arch of her hands over my forgotten ones, "your children love you."

I stared at her smooth hands and remembered kissing between each knuckle. Slipping the ring on her finger; watching her slip it off so long after.

"I don't want them," I said bitterly.

Sandra removed her hands from mine and looked as shocked as she had when she'd asked if I were going to pray.

"I don't want them," I said again. "They're your children now, Sandra. They're stamped all over with your mark. You think I would ever be able to build something with them now?" I gained speed, rushing toward her like a freight train about to jump the tracks. "You think they'll love me? That they'll know me? You took them with you. You made them yours, not mine. I know about all the nights you told them how bad Daddy was, and why you had to leave—because I know you. You left me, Sandra, and you're not going to leave them now. You can't," I said sharply.

Sandra stared at me, her face almost pale.

"I've got nothing to offer them," I said again, losing steam. "Maybe back when they still recognized me. Did you know I went to their school once?"

Her fingers clutched the tablecloth as I told her about my breach of the restraining order.

"That's right," I said. "I went to the cafeteria where Dyan was eating. I thought she would see me, run to me. You know what she did? Nothing. I looked right at her and smiled, and my own daughter didn't recognize my face.

"So you're not leaving them again, Sandy. You're not forcing them on me, to live with someone they don't know and could never have a good life with. You want to be a nun, you do it, but take them with you."

"I...I can't do that," she said in a broken voice. "Nuns can't have children."

I frowned. "Then you're not a nun, Sandra."

She began to cry silently. The tears smeared the slender lines of mascara around her eyes, and I thought—do nuns wear makeup?

I softened. "You have a different calling, Sandy. It's not the slum kids in Brooklyn. It's your own children. They're the ones who need you most—they don't need me, and"—I said it, and finally believed it—"I don't need you."

It hit me that Sandra had not come here confidently, drawing me back to her by showing me how glorious she had become. She had lured me here like a pedestrian lures medics to the scene of a gory car wreck, hoping that I would pick up the pieces so she could run away.

"So go home, Sandy," I said, standing up, leaving my bowl of soup barely touched. The waitress was a flash of yellow light, here and gone, and my bowl disappeared. "Go home to your kids and tell them how much they mean to you."

Sandra looked down at her lap blindly, and I recognized the slant to her eyes. She knew she was wrong, and if she was anything like the woman I had once known so well, she only needed someone else to tell her so. Her conscience never would have let her abandon those kids the way she abandoned me.

I touched her shoulder, and she looked up. "I loved you," I said gently, "and I love them still. But we're not even similar planets anymore. You and the kids, you're in your own little universe, and I'm a million miles away. I can live with that, finally."

I looked at her questioningly, and behind her streaked skin, I felt her nod. I squeezed her shoulder and said, "Let me pay," and left a twenty-dollar bill—the entire contents of my shambled wallet—on the table; then, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed our collision, I fled the scene, having inflicted only the necessary damage. Like re-breaking a bone so it will set properly.

Sometimes that's what it takes to move on. I walked out into the sunlight, and felt something slip away, and jogged the rest of the way home.

[END]

© Jason Gurley 2001

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