Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

she had identified, immediately, something missing when she’d walked in the front door, the life a person brings to a household whether they’re home or not. There is a new pervasive stillness in the house, a kind of staleness, the molecules having rearranged themselves around the absence of Pete.

That mixture of how much you need someone and how much they need you back? It’s never an equal amount. And it fluctuates—ideally it does—because both of those things are exhausting in their own right. You needed me more than I needed you then, maybe, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t need a friend too. That I didn’t benefit from having you in my life. Of course I did.”

Loving someone so much that you’d buy her a friend? It’s the sort of thing I would have done for my boys when they were little if I could have; how you’d do anything for your kids to make sure they never feel alone.”

“Whatever,” Alma says. From her, this may as well be a wrapped present.

It’s easy to grow complacent, to allow yourself to dwell in the dull dramas of the everyday and lose sight of your own unimperviousness.

She sinks into brief contentment, the kind of contentment she’s only ever found with him. They don’t make love—of course they don’t, impeded by decorum and formal wear—but for a number of reasons it may as well be the same thing. They’re two people bonded by something extraordinary: surviving a nuclear explosion or seeing the Beatles live—or just loneliness, loneliness at their respective outsets that colored everything else; or proximity, or passion; or hurting each other, or watching both their children leave the nest, or deciding to keep coming home to each other at the end of the day. Closeness and distance at the same time, antipathy and affinity, love and exhaustion.

The way time moves, glacial and breakneck, the way two people fit together in a bed, in the hours after their son is born and the hours before his wedding. Unbelievable things, really, and so many of them; she’d like to stay here with him, making a list, but there isn’t time; they have to go.

she finds she isn’t jealous anymore on Ben’s behalf because he looks happy, her son, truly happy, about to set off on an adventure of his own,

“Mom,” he says now, and she wonders if he ever remembers the late-night times of his toddlerhood when she would creep in and lift him from his bed and rock him back to sleep in the glider, Mama’s nuts about you, chipmunk. Mama wouldn’t understand the world without you in it.

Try to count on her, try to be there for her. If you’re trying, it means you care.”

You got to spend time on that stuff before all of the mire slipped in. You got to argue the merits of different tracks and ignore the big picture: kids and mortgages and which pieces of your motley ethical and religious upbringing survived the journey through life. You got to sit back and consider—in that liminal space before everything accumulated all of its weight—the substance of the other person.

instead she’ll hug her kids and assure them that everything’s copacetic, look for Mark in the slope of Alma’s nose and in Ben’s astonishing conscientiousness; she will focus on those things instead of the endless stretch of hours that lie before her, hours for which she cannot bring herself to feel gratitude,

Helen Russo, who pitied her just the right amount and who is ultimately responsible for far more good things in Julia’s life than she is for the one big bad thing that she happened to be there for.

She will remember them when she is feeling bad, or when she wants to feel bad, or when she wants to feel good, depending on her mood, depending on the lighting, depending on whether she has had one or two glasses of wine with the dinner she eats alone. And she will remember them sometimes when she is already feeling good, those rare moments of gratitude for being alive.

after a while she’ll begin to doubt that they ever happened at all.

Again Mama again, ha ha ha, and she’d tell him to wait, my sweetheart, you’ll have to wait, because she can’t control the placement of the hills along the road.

On that: thank you to all independent booksellers and librarians for literally everything, for being safe havens and light sources even in the worst of times; for your zeal and your compassion and all you do on behalf of writers and readers and words.