The Half Moon

by Mary Beth Keane

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

But it turned out people didn’t want things to be nice, they wanted them to be familiar.

He learned it was possible to appear to the world as an average, ho-hum person but to actually harbor thoughts that human strangers didn’t normally share with one another, until they sat at a bar for too long on a Friday night and encountered a bartender they considered attractive.

But middle age was looming and he could already see the headline that would arrive with it: that a person could be extraordinarily good at something and still fail at it.

He didn’t know how much he depended on her habits to set the pattern for his days until they were gone. He never knew what he was supposed to do with himself when he was alone, and wondered what people did who lived by themselves their whole adult lives.

They’d been moving around each other without seeing one another lately, but that week she’d touched his arm as she passed behind him at the sink. She’d reached for him in her sleep and fitted her body around his. He thought things were getting better, but actually, all that time, she was saying goodbye.

She knew she sounded like the exact kind of wife she swore she’d never be, speaking to him like she was his boss, or his mother. Did she want to speak to her husband like he was a child? Of course not. But when a person dreams of partnering with someone for life, no one ever considers the fact that there’s no dependable way to communicate a thought except to say it.

He was so affable, so easy in so many ways, but if there was one thing he wouldn’t forgive, it was being made to feel stupid.

As they moved around each other, she tried to decide what was different, what he was holding back from her now that he’d never held back before, but there didn’t seem to be anything except maybe a new seriousness, a sense that they’d come very, very close to losing each other, and also, underneath all of that, a sense that they still might, nothing was guaranteed.

But in the end you can only have one life. One at a time, at least. You could turn, you could pause for a while, but you couldn’t go down two streets at once.