Sunday Clothes

They drove back from the airport in the kind of silence that has nothing wrong with it.

Kadian had cried at the barrier, and Yvonne had not, because one of them had to be the one who did not, and she had been that one for nineteen years. Neville had carried the big suitcase and had argued with the man about the weight and had lost, and had paid, and had said nothing about it in the car.

At Bog Walk, Yvonne said, “She’ll be cold.”

“She have the coat.”

“That coat is nothing. Toronto in February is not a coat, Neville. It’s a whole winter.”

“Then she will buy a better one,” he said. “With the money from the job that she is going to get. That is the whole point of the exercise.”

Yvonne looked out at the river. After a while she said, “I know,” and he reached over and put his hand on her knee and left it there until he needed it for the gear.

· · ·

The house was the problem.

Not the emptiness of it. She had been ready for the emptiness. What she had not been ready for was how the house had been arranged, for nineteen years, around other people, and how obvious that became the moment the other people were gone.

The good chair faced the television because Kadian watched the television. Dinner was at seven because that was when the homework was done. The radio in the kitchen stayed low. The bedroom door stayed closed and the conversation behind it stayed at a certain volume, and both of them had grown so used to that volume that it had become the volume at which they spoke to each other about everything.

That first week they were unfailingly polite. He asked her how her day was. She asked him if he wanted more rice. They watched a program neither of them was following, in a room built for somebody who had left, and at half past nine she said she was going to bed, and he said he would come just now, and she lay listening to the television through the wall.

On Thursday she caught herself cooking for four.

· · ·

On Saturday evening Neville came into the kitchen while she was washing up and stood there with his hands in his pockets like a boy at a gate.

“Wear the dress tomorrow,” he said.

“Which dress?”

“The green one.”

She turned around with the dishcloth in her hand. “That’s my church dress.”

“I know which dress it is,” he said. “Wear it tomorrow evening. Not for church. I am taking you out.”

“Out where?”

“Yvonne.” He was not quite smiling. “Just wear the dress.”

She stood in front of the wardrobe for a long time the next evening. The green dress had been bought for a wedding in 2011 and had been to church perhaps two hundred times since, and it was a good dress, and she had long ago stopped thinking about it as a thing that had a shape, or that she had a shape inside of. She put it on. She stood in front of the mirror on the back of the door and did the small pull at the waist that every woman does, and then she stopped doing it and just looked.

Her mother’s earrings. Perfume that was two Christmases old and still good.

When she came out, Neville was in the front room in a pressed shirt with his shoes done, and he looked up, and whatever he had been about to say he did not say. He stood up instead.

“What,” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. Come.”

· · ·

He took her to a place on the coast road with tables on a deck over the water and a man playing keyboard badly and everybody forgiving him for it.

They had not been out, the two of them, in a way that required a dress, since before Kadian sat her exams. At first they talked about Kadian, because that was the language they had, and then they ran out of Kadian, and there was a silence, and Yvonne felt it coming and braced for it.

Neville said, “What happen to the shop?”

“What shop?”

“The shop. You were going to open a shop. Fabric and notions. You had it all written down in the blue book.”

She laughed at him. “Neville, that was before Marlon was born.”

“So?”

“So that was twenty-four years ago.”

“And the blue book is still in the cabinet,” he said, “because I saw it Tuesday when I was looking for the light bill.”

She did not know what to do with her face, so she drank her drink. The keyboard man attempted something and did not reach it. Out past the deck the sea was doing what it does at night, which is to be heard and not seen.

“You would have to teach me the stock,” Neville said. “I don’t know one thread from another.”

“Who asked you?”

“Nobody asked me. I am volunteering.” He turned his glass around on the table. “I am saying that there is time now. That is all I am saying. There is a whole heap of time now and I don’t want it to pass the same way the last five years pass, with the two of us being polite.”

“We are not polite.”

“Yvonne. Last night you asked me if I wanted more rice, and I said no thank you, and then neither of us said one word until the news.”

She wanted to argue. She could not.

“All right,” she said.

“All right what?”

“All right, we are polite,” she said, and she put her hand out across the table, and he took it, and the man at the keyboard started something slow and better than the rest.

· · ·

They danced on the deck, badly, with four other couples who were all of an age where nobody was performing for anybody.

She had forgotten the fact of him. Twenty-two years of a man in your bed and you can forget the fact of him, the width of the back under your hand, the particular way he breathes out when you fit against him. He put his mouth near her ear and said something about the keyboard player that was not kind, and she laughed against his shoulder, and his hand moved on her back, and it was not the hand of a husband navigating a kitchen. It was the other hand. It had been a long time.

“Neville.”

“Mm.”

“Take me home.”

· · ·

The house was dark and there was no one in it.

He did not turn on the lamp in the hall. She got the door closed behind them and then she did not get any further than the wall beside it, because his mouth was already at the place below her ear, the place he had found the first year and had never once misplaced, and her hand was in his shirt, and the green dress, which had been to church two hundred times, came off her shoulder in the dark at nine o’clock on a Sunday evening.

“The bed,” she said, some while later, against his jaw.

“What about it.”

“It’s right there, Neville.”

“It is,” he agreed, and did not move, and she laughed, and stopped laughing.

They got there eventually.

And when she cried out, she did not put her hand over her mouth, and did not turn her face into the pillow, and did not listen, in the half second afterward, for a sound from the other end of the hall.

For the first time in nineteen years, there was no one to be quiet for.

❧