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Sunset
It’s a cloudy summer day, and she’s walking down the street hand in hand with Jere when she stops abruptly. Her attention has been captured by a brightly colored flyer taped haphazardly to a lamppost.
She slips her hand out of his and steps closer. It’s for a photography workshop that’s just down the street from their apartment.
She pulls out her phone, thumbs flying over the keys as she enters the number listed. Her contact list is getting a little cluttered. 270 names. Well, 271.
***
Civil Dusk
It’s radish season and Jere is making some sort of watermelon radish concoction to go with the clams.
He’s been cooking more this summer, all cold celery soups with fancy oil, coconut shrimp with cucumbers, seared scallops with citrus. She likes how he seems so in his element here, humming as he blends the watermelon with a sleek oblong device she wasn’t even aware they had.
She remembers the time he made a gorgeous brie and strawberry grilled chicken one night for dinner, crispy golden brown and juicy.
The first bite and she could almost hear the lilt of his voice and the way it curved around his unbidden smile as he defended himself in the face of her relentless teasing. Only almost, Jere’s chicken is seasoned to perfection, and his was always offensively bland.
Every bite after that tasted like bile going down. And it tasted like bile coming back up when she had to step outside and throw up in the bushes. Jeremiah held her hair and rearranged her white floral dress so it wouldn’t stain as she kneeled desperately on the freshly cut grass he had just mown that morning.
She didn’t even care about the dress, she was just grateful he didn’t use peaches instead of strawberries because she might’ve lost an internal organ with how violently her body was trying to escape echoes of the past. When her body had finally exhausted itself, she felt even emptier inside than before.
He never makes grilled chicken again and she never asks for it.
***
Nautical Dusk
Belly has started washing the dishes every night. At first it was just as a thank you to Jere for cooking every day and making sure she ate, but now it’s become something of a ritual. She likes the first rush of warm water against her skin when she goes to wash her hands.
Sometimes she runs the tips of her fingers back and forth along the insides of her palms a few times to clean under her nails, but only sometimes, when memories of the rolled up sleeves of a pale blue shirt and a yellow dishtowel aren’t burning in the back of her mind.
She’s in the middle of rinsing off a plate when something slips off her finger and clatters down the drain. Fuck. She forgot to take it off.
She abandons the plate and sticks her arm as far as it can go down the drain, grasping about wildly and desperately for it. Jere has had a long day and there’s no way in hell she’s dragging him down here to solve a problem she created when she was supposed to be helping him out.
She’s on the verge of tears now, the edges of the drain digging into the soft skin of her forearms as her fingers flail about and come up empty. She will not cry. She will not cry.
It’s a little bit ridiculous but she whispers softly under her breath, “My precious, I’ll get my hands back on you soon,” in her very best Gollum imitation. It always used to make him crack a smile, even on his gloomiest days, and it lifts some of the fog of desperation for her now as she lets out a small chuckle.
She pushes the hair out of her face with the backs of her hands before kneeling down under the sink and unscrewing the pipe. She fishes through the pipe using one of Jeres fancy metal grill sticks that she mentally reminds herself to thoroughly wash later.
“My precious,” she croons, “where are you my precious?” She hears a soft clanking from inside the tube and withdraws the metal instrument of her victory from the pipe triumphantly. She washes it quickly and with the utmost caution, her hands shaking only slightly before slipping it back on her finger.
Now it’s back where it belongs she’s not sure what she was so distraught over only moments before. It’s just a ring.
***
Astronomical Dusk
When the light in their house flickers for the twenty third time, Belly decides it’s time to take matters into her own hands. Literally.
She pulls up YouTube and starts scrolling through tutorials. She’s just about to play one when she notices that the video was published fairly recently, just a couple of weeks ago.
She exits out of the video and resumes her scrolling until she finds one that was published before the summer of her wedding. She wonders if this is the same one that he watched.
When the video finishes, instead of going to grab Jere’s tools, she finds another video, also published before that summer. She watches it all the way though. Then she plays another. And another.
She wonders which of these he watched. She wonders what number view he was. She wonders what the distance is between the number of his view and hers.
Jere walks in when she’s in the middle of watching her who knows what number video, cheerily calling out, “Sweetheart, I’m home!”
“What’re you doing?” he asks, as he leans over the back of the couch to kiss her. She’s just about to answer when the lights above them flicker yet again, their most violent display yet. His attention is immediately pulled from her to the ceiling, and he looks up, brow furrowing in slight annoyance.
“Have they been doing that all day?” he asks, looking back down at her. She gives a small nod of confirmation.
“I better go fix ‘em then,” he says shooting her his megawatt grin. He gives her one more kiss before sauntering away to get his toolbox, snapping his fingers to a beat she can’t hear.
It’s probably for the best that it’s Jere doing it instead of her. She probably would’ve ended up electrocuting herself even worse than he did.
She wonders if the electricity back in Cousins feels the same as it does here in Boston. If it feels the same as in Palo Alto.
Jere makes quick work with the lights. When he’s done, pliers still in hand, he strikes a pose reminiscent of Mario, proudly announcing, “It’s all-a done,” in a truly abhorrent Italian accent.
“Mario’s a plumber, not an electrician” Belly cackles as she throws a pillow at his head.
The lights are fixed and Jere didn’t get electrocuted. She didn’t either. She’s happy about this, of course. She didn’t want to be electrocuted, well, not exactly.
If she hopped on a plane, showed up at his doorstep unannounced and flung herself into his arms for a hug, would it would still feel like being shot through with a million jolts of electricity? Would he hug her back? Wait, no need to answer, she already knows. What she doesn’t know is which answer makes her chest ache more.
***
Night
It’s Halloween, and she watches fondly as Jere stands outside on the porch, patiently and with endless good humor handing out candy to the horde of children currently mobbing their front door. They’re screeching excitedly, grabby hands smeared with melted chocolate, but he remains unbothered, laughing gaily and complimenting each child on their costume before asking them what their favorite candy is.
Jere hands a boy dressed as a cowboy a full sized Twix bar after he makes the lil guy show off his best floss, the dance move she means, not the oral hygiene instrument.
Jere is dressed up as some superhero she can’t quite remember the name of. He’s in a tight suit composed of neon bright colors and a symbol across the chest she can’t decipher.
His costume has some sort of padding in the shoulders so he looks broader, and he’s straightened out his curls and gelled them down, bangs falling across his face and hair a few shades darker than usual.
In the dark of the evening with only the dim glow of the streetlights to illuminate him, he looks like a ghost she could call on the phone right now and who would pick up on the first ring, if only she didn’t have his number blocked.