The Dinner That Finally Named My Husband

The Lake Was Already Turning Gold

I walked out through the dining room, past the bar, past the hostess stand where Voss himself was standing with a stack of dessert menus, and out the front doors into the parking lot, where the lake had gone from bronze to almost purple, the kind of light that makes everything look like it is happening in a memory instead of in real time.

I did not run. I did not cry, not yet. I walked to my car, got in, and sat there with the windows down, listening to the crickets start up along the tree line, and I let myself feel, for the first time all night, exactly how tired I was.

My phone had been going off in my purse since I hit the parking lot. I let it. Dominic called twice. Then Bette. Then a cousin of Dominic’s I have shared maybe a dozen sentences with in fourteen years, asking, with real alarm in her voice, if there had been some kind of mix up about the boat, because the marina had just called the dock line to confirm the cancellation and everyone down there had already changed into their jackets for the ride.

I sat in that parking lot for eleven minutes by the clock on my dashboard, not answering anything, watching the door of the supper club through my windshield, waiting to see who would come through it first.

It was Dominic.