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.

You might not know how you felt about the song if you were alone in your car, but sung in a local pub? With a drink in your hand? Alongside strangers? Pure magic.

Truth

Did she want to say these things to a near stranger? That wasn’t the point, she said; the point was to try to understand wanting some of that intoxicating energy in their lives again for thirty seconds, what harm, because the truth was that most of them would wake up to a pile of dirty laundry and kids demanding a snack.

Jess wondered how many of his clients were like her and Malcolm, raised to keep all troubling thoughts to themselves, and then, as soon as they possibly could, to bury them.

Jess used to say that he wasn’t himself until he had people around, until he had other moods and personalities to react to, and he resented when she said that, as if he were incapable of self-reflection, but now he sort of knew what she meant. It wasn’t that he disliked being alone, it was more like he felt muted, not completely awake.

“It’s not one or the other. You know? There’s a third choice. You can just be alone for a while.”

She brought a cup of coffee into his car once, when he was a few minutes early picking her up, and after looking at it he said, “Yeah, that’s fine,” as if Jess had asked. I don’t know him, she reminded herself then and now. Not really.

Malcolm never imagined people doing things to him that he wouldn’t do to them. Look at Hugh.

In this dramatic divorce, where Neil’s ex was in the complete wrong according to him, who’d gotten all the mutual friends? It was a detail that only occurred to Jess recently.

Stupid. Women are stupid.

He had money but he was a good guy.

Anyone in their crew could make a billion, but they’d still understand what it meant to worry.

When people were raised without that worry, you could feel it just by standing near them; something about the way they spoke and moved. It couldn’t be learned.

He told her that no one would ever love her like he did. She wanted to say that she agreed, but that it wasn’t relevant. No two people ever loved each other the same way.

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. The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn’t lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.

Life is actually really simple when you boil it down.”

Why? Because he loved her.

Oh