What We Bear

The vitamin bottle stood between them on the kitchen counter—a white plastic cylinder with a child-proof cap that neither of them could open anymore without the other's help. Elena smoothed the cranberry-colored wool hat she'd been knitting, her fingers moving through the stitches like she was trying to fix something that couldn't be mended.

"You're leaving again," she said, not a question.

Marcus nodded, unable to meet her eyes. "The Chicago office. Two weeks. Maybe three."

He'd always been a fox—clever, quick, impossible to pin down. She'd loved that about him once, how he could charm his way through any room, how opportunities seemed to materialize around him like he'd willed them into existence. But charm had a shelf life, and opportunity had begun to look like abandonment.

"You'll miss the anniversary,"

"I'll make it up to you."

They both knew he wouldn't.

The truth was, they'd become strangers who shared a bed. But stranger still was what she couldn't tell him—that she'd stopped taking her vitamins three months ago, that she'd found the lump during her routine breast self-exam the same week he'd taken the promotion that required all this travel. That she was carrying something heavier than his absences, something that might kill her while he was busy becoming someone she no longer recognized.

Instead she said, "Your father's old bear coat is still in the closet. The one with the patches on the elbows."

"What?"

"It's moth-eaten. I was going to donate it."

He stared at her. "That coat's been in my family for three generations, Elena. It's not moth-eaten. It's—character. It's history."

"Some things just fall apart, Marcus. You can't save everything."

The fox appeared in the backyard then—a flash of red against the snow, elegant and wild and utterly uninterested in their domestic collapse. For a moment, they both watched it through the kitchen window, united by the spectacle of something that knew exactly what it was doing.

Then Marcus turned back to his suitcase. "I'll call when I land."

Elena placed the unfinished hat on the counter beside the vitamins. Two things she'd started that she might not finish.

"I'll be here," she said. "Bearing everything."