An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim

Author:Thea Lim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

AUGUST 1979

* * *

Frank takes two days off work to help Polly move to Massachusetts. He was the one who found the college program for furniture repair and restoration in Worcester. She devised so many reasons why she couldn’t go: it was six hours away; she’d just got a raise; Donna; Frank. But then she applied without mentioning it, always one to keep doors open, and when she revealed she’d been selected, he had to quickly reconstruct his dismay into pride.

They play with the car stereo, they eat Kit Kats, they listen to the final Agatha Christie on tape, and the reality of just how far six hours is sets in. They unload her boxes into her one-room rental, and she goes to get meatball sandwiches for dinner. He offers to go instead, but she says, “I have to get used to doing things on my own.”

It takes the cook an age to make the sandwiches. The knives are stored at the opposite end of the counter from the bread, the cheese is in the back, he’s run out of foil. All the while, the last night of their way of life drips away. She’s gone forty minutes. But when she returns, Frank’s made a bed out of sofa cushions and pillows and a woolly sweater. He’s combed the unkempt front lawn for wildflowers, and he’s arrayed honeysuckle, foxglove, and Queen Anne’s lace in soda cans, coffee mugs, and a roll of toilet paper. He is sitting on the floor, at a dining table constructed from cardboard boxes.

“You romantic fool,” she says, and kneels to tuck a dandelion behind his ear.

He doesn’t say anything. He catches her hand on its way down and presses his lips into the bowl of her palm. He doesn’t take his eyes off her.

“What?” she says. She feels nervous. She doesn’t know what to do with intensity. “What are you looking at?”

“I couldn’t stare at you before you were mine.”

“Did you want to?” She plays along, but like it’s a joke.

“My heart would start to race at five p.m. if I thought you might be coming by. I wanted to stare into these brown eyes all day. These cherry cheeks. Those other cheeks.”

She giggles, looks away.

“Stay here with me,” he says.

She looks back, and she is caught. By his eyelashes, and his beautiful mouth.

“How lucky we are to be able to look,” she says.

“I’ve never fully exploited this advantage.”

He hooks his fingers in her pockets and he slides her across the floor, into his orbit. Their movements are deliberate, languid, as if they have an embarrassment of time. He unzips her jacket, each pair of teeth parting one at a time. She counts the hairs on his belly, the ones that meet to make a trail, and she follows them down, down. They rock together, as slow as they can bear. The sofa cushions come apart and they lie in the dip.

He asks her what she would like to eat on their wedding day.

Others would shout, Are you asking me to marry you? and squeal and call their mothers, all reasonable replies.

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