The Ranch

“I'll be home at four,” he explained, sounding pressed. Leaving his office for several months was complicated, and there were a million details to think of. He was taking one of his assistants with him, and had she been younger and more attractive than she was, Mary Stuart would have come to the obvious conclusion. As it was, she was a heavyset, intelligent, but very unattractive woman in her early sixties.

“Do you want dinner at home, or would you rather go out tonight?” Mary Stuart asked, feeling depressed, but trying to make it sound festive. It was as though there was no pretense between them anymore, not even the illusion of closeness, and it somehow seemed more acute now that he was leaving.

“I'll just grab something out of the fridge,” he said absently, “don't go to any trouble.” They had both come to hate their awkward, silent dinners, and she had been relieved when he preferred staying at the office, and working late. And as a result, they had both gotten thinner.

“I'll get something cold at William Poll or Fraser Morris,” she said, and went out to do some errands. She had to buy a book she knew he wanted for the plane, and pick up all of his dry cleaning. And as she hurried east toward Lexington she was suddenly glad that she was leaving in a few weeks. Despite the chasm between them now, it was going to be incredibly lonely without him.

She picked up some dinner at William Poll, got the book and some magazines, some candy and gum, and she had all of his clean shirts hanging in his dressing room for him when he got home from the office at four-thirty. And he went straight to his packing, without saying a word to her. He was busy taking suitcases out of storage bins high above his closet. And she didn't see him again until seven o'clock when he appeared in the kitchen. He was still wearing his starched white shirt from work, but he had taken his tie off, and his hair was a little ruffled. It made him look young suddenly, and the painful part of it was that he looked so much like Todd now, but she tried valiantly to ignore it.

“All packed? I would have been happy to do it for you,” she said softly, setting out dinner on the table. It had been another hot day, and it was nice having cold meats to put out, and not having to cook dinner.

“I didn't want to give you a lot of trouble,” he said, sitting down on a high stool at the white granite kitchen counter. “I don't give you much happiness anymore, it doesn't seem fair to give you the work and the grief, and not much else. At least I can stay out of your hair and make things easy.” It was the first time he had even acknowledged their situation, and she stared at him in amazement. When she had even tried to say something to him a few days before, she had met a wall, and he had completely ignored her. She wondered now if he had actually heard her.

“I don't expect you to stay out of my hair,” she said, as she sat down across from him, and her eyes looked like pools of dark chocolate. He had always loved looking at her, loved her looks, and her style, and the expressiveness of her eyes, but the pain he had seen there for the last year had been too much to bear, and it was easier to avoid her. “Marriage isn't about keeping your distance. It's about sharing.” And they had. They had shared joy for nearly twenty-one years, and endless grief for the last year. The trouble was that they hadn't really shared it. They had each grieved silently in their separate corners.

“We haven't shared much of anything lately, have we?” he said sadly. “I guess I've been too busy at the office.” But it wasn't that, and they both knew it. She said nothing as she watched him, and he reached out slowly and touched her hand. It was the first gesture of its kind in months, and there were tears in her eyes as she felt his fingers.

“I've missed you,” she said in a whisper, but all he did was nod. He had felt it too, but he couldn't bring himself to say it to her.

“I'm going to miss you while you're away,” she said quietly. It was the first time in their marriage they would be apart for that long. But he had been so adamant about her not going with him. “It's such a long time.”

“It'll go quickly. You'll come over next month with Alyssa, and I hope to be home by the end of August.”

“We'll be together two days in two months,” she said, looking at him in despair, and slowly pulling her hand away from his. “That's not exactly the stuff of which marriages are usually made, at least not good ones. I could stay at the hotel and fend for myself during the day.” They had enough friends in London to keep her busy night and day for months, and he knew that. And it felt awkward suddenly to be begging him to let her be there.

“It will be just too distracting,” he said unhappily, they had been over it before and he had been definite about it with her. He did not want her coming to London, other than for a brief weekend with their daughter.