The Hat Check

Nora adjusted her fedora in the bathroom mirror, the brim casting a shadow over eyes that had seen too many corporate mergers and not enough joy. At forty-seven, she'd stopped coloring the gray at her temples. Let them see her unraveling.

She swallowed her vitamin D supplements with a gulp of lukewarm water — the doctor said her levels were critically low, but she knew it was just the artificial lighting in her office, the way she hadn't seen real sunlight since the last recession. Everything inside her was deficient.

"You look like hell," Marcus said, leaning against her doorframe with that infuriating smirk. Twenty-six, with the kind of confidence that came from never having been broken by anything worse than a delayed flight. He held out an orange — a blood orange, nearly scarlet — like some kind of peace offering. Or an accusation.

"Rough night," she said, not taking it.

They'd been sleeping together for three months. In the supply closet. Once in the parking garage after the holiday party. She hated how much she looked forward to it, how his hands on her made her feel like she was swimming upward toward something that might have been air, or might have been just more water.

"Your husband called," Marcus said, peeling the orange. The scent hit her — citrus and memory. "Asked if you were still at the office."

She remembered her husband's hands, how they used to feel before they became careful, before everything between them became negotiations about mortgages and whose turn it was to pretend they weren't lonely.

"What did you tell him?"

"That you were swimming." Marcus's voice dropped. "That you were finally learning how not to drown."

She looked at the orange segments in his palm, bright as wounds. She thought about vitamins, about how her body had stopped manufacturing its own joy somewhere around her fortieth birthday, about the way her husband had looked at her across the dinner table last night like she was a stranger he was being forced to entertain.

Nora took the orange from Marcus's hand. She didn't eat it. She just held it, feeling the weight of something alive in the middle of all this artificial light, all these borrowed hours.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Tomorrow I'll learn to swim."