Monday Mourning

Past Ville St-Pierre, congestion eased, and I gunned it back up to a blistering thirty. My fingers drummed the wheel. The dashboard clock said five-thirty. Anne’s flight had probably landed.

A full hour after leaving the lab, I entered the terminal at Dorval Airport. Anne had cleared customs and was standing at the end of a chute of people awaiting arrivals.

I did the windmill thing with my arms. Catching sight of me, Anne grasped the pull-handle of a boxcar-sized suitcase and wheeled it in my direction. A laptop hung from one shoulder, an enormous leather purse from the other.

Sudden flashback. My sister, Harry, surrounded by enough Louis Vuitton for a world tour. She’d come for a week. She’d stayed a month.

Oh boy.

Anne is very tall and very blonde. More eyes than mine followed as she muscled her Pullman through the crowd of greeters. Reaching me, she bent and threw both arms around my neck. The laptop slid forward and gouged my ribs.

“Traffic was a nightmare,” I said, relieving Anne of her shoulder gear.

“You’re a darlin’ to come for me.”

“I’m thrilled you’re here.”

“The pilot claimed it was eighteen below. Can that be true?” Anne’s drawl sounded as out of place in the quebecois hubbub as the Rawhide theme at a PETA benefit.

“That’s Celsius.” I didn’t point out that the reading was only a hair above zero in her worldview.

“I hope there’s a blizzard. Snow would be a kick.”

“Did you bring warm clothing?”

Anne spread both arms in a check-it-out gesture.

My friend wore a cable-knit sweater, suede jacket, green cords, and pink angora muffler with matching hat. I was certain her purse contained fuzzy pink mittens to complete the accessorizing. I knew her thinking. “Winter chic.”

Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn’t care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury.

This was Quebec. Anne was dressed for autumn cool in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Exiting the terminal, I heard Ms. Winter Chic suck in her breath. Smiling, I hurried her toward the car. I really couldn’t fault Anne. Though I commute regularly between Charlotte and Montreal, that first winter blast clotheslines even me.

Anne talked around topics on the drive to Centre-ville. Her cats, Regis and Kathie Lee. The twins, Josh and Lola. Her youngest son, Stuart, who’d become a spokesman for gay rights. Between bursts, she’d stop, and a moody silence would fill the small space around us.

Now and then I’d sneak a sideways glance. Anne’s face flickered in a mosaic of neon and brake lights. I could take nothing from it. She uttered not a word about the reason for her visit.

OK, old friend. Tell the tale when you will.

An hour and a half later Anne began meandering through an explanation. As she talked, I sensed vacillation, as though she were testing ideas as she spoke them.

We’d stopped at home to deposit Anne’s things, and were now in the Trattoria Trestevere on lower Crescent. The waiter had just delivered Caesar salads. I was drinking Perrier. Anne was working on her third chardonnay.

And the chardonnay was working on Anne.

“I’m forty-six years old, Tempe. If I don’t search for some meaning now, there’s going to be nothing out there for me to find later.” She tapped a manicured nail to her breast. “Or in here.”

Again, I thought of my sister. Harry had come to Montreal questing for inner peace. She’d hooked up with apocalyptic crazies who were going to take her on a voyage to permanent peace. As in dead. Fortunately, she’d survived. Anne’s discourse sounded like flotsom straight down the same self-help psychobabble pipeline.

“So the kids are all right?”

“Peachy.”

“Tom didn’t do anything to piss you off?”

The nail pointed at me. “Tom didn’t do anything. Ever. Unless you count defending asshole developers who want to rid the world of trees, and spending the rest of the time seeking the grail of a hole in one. Guess it’s my own fault marrying someone with a name like Turnip.”

Tom-Ted’s surname had also been a source of much amusement over the years.

“The tuber is terminated.”

“You’ve left him?” I couldn’t believe it.

“Yes.”

“After twenty-four years and three kids?”

“This does not concern the kids.”

My fork stopped in midair. Anne and I froze eye to eye.

“You know that’s not what I mean,” she said. “The kids are grown. Josh and Lola have graduated college. Stuart’s off doing whatever it is Stuart does.” She jabbed at a lettuce leaf. “They’re moving on with their lives and I’m left with selling real estate and cultivating fucking azaleas.”

Upon completion of my doctorate at Northwestern, Pete joined a Charlotte law firm, and I accepted an appointment at UNCC. I was thrilled to leave Chicago and return to my beloved North Carolina. But the move had its downside.