The Coworker Who Knew My Wife

Four seconds

I was looking at Curtis when it happened, so I saw the whole thing from the start.

I saw him glance toward the patio the way you glance at any movement, without really looking. I saw his eyes land on Nora. And I saw the color go out of his face.

I have never seen anything like it, before or since. It was faster and more total than a blush in reverse, like watching water drain out of a sink. One second he was a sunburned man at a summer party and the next he was gray, gray as ash, and his mouth came open and no sound came out of it.

The cup fell out of his hand. It hit the flagstone and the pop foamed up around his boots, and the sound of it, that little plastic crack and splash, cut straight through every conversation in the yard. People turned. The horseshoes stopped clanging. The sprinkler kids kept running but the grown-ups all went still, because you can feel a thing like that even before you understand it.

Curtis did not notice any of them. He only saw Nora.

And Nora had stopped dead in the middle of the patio with that tray of burgers in her two hands, staring back at him. She just stood there, and her face did the same thing his had done, went pale and then paler, and her mouth moved but nothing came out either.

For a few long seconds the two of them just looked at each other across my backyard while forty of my neighbors held their breath.

Then Curtis took a step back, and another, like a man backing away from a snake, and he raised one shaking hand and pointed it right at my wife, and he screamed.

“I thought you were dead. I thought you were DEAD.”

The tray hit the flagstone. Burgers everywhere. Nora’s hands came up to her own mouth. And out of her, in a voice I had never once heard come out of my wife in thirteen years, small and cracked and about nineteen years old, came a single word.

“Danny?”