The Fox in the Mirror

Mara ran her fingers through her hair—still thick, still the same copper shade that had made her grandmother call her little fox. That was before forty, before David, before everything that had hollowed her out. Now she sat at the restaurant bar alone, watching palm fronds silhouette against the Los Angeles sky through floor-to-ceiling glass, nursing a gin and tonic she didn't want.

The woman beside her laughed too loudly. Young. Maybe twenty-five. She had something green in her teeth—spinach, Mara thought, from the appetizer she'd been picking at with nervous fingers. Mara considered telling her, then remembered she was forty-three and invisible now, the kind of woman people stopped seeing as a person and started seeing as furniture or a cautionary tale.

"You're thinking about him," the bartender said, sliding her another drink she hadn't ordered. He had kind eyes. Maybe fifty. His name tag read ELMER.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You've got that look." He gestured to the mirror behind the bar. "Like a fox caught in headlights. Like you just realized something important."

She had. David wasn't coming back. The lawyer's letter sat in her bag like a stone. The house would sell. The life they'd built—thirteen years of dinners and trips and plans—would become something other people lived in. And somewhere in all that losing, she'd forgotten how to be just herself. Not David's wife. Not the woman with the nice house and the respectable job. Just.

"Spinach," she said suddenly.

"What?"

"In her teeth." Mara nodded toward the young woman, now engaged in intense conversation with a man in a suit who kept checking his watch. "She has spinach in her teeth."

"And?"

"And someone should tell her." Mara finished her drink. "But not me. I'm done fixing things for people who don't see me."

She slid off the stool, pressed a twenty into Elmer's hand, and walked out into the LA heat, her copper hair catching the light. For the first time in years, she didn't look back.