I Left to Make Him Follow, and He Let Me Go for Three Years novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Toast

Halina seats Neve beside her and offers a cold welcome; Magda arrives slowly with a scarf and a pill, and after the guests leave Ansel kisses Neve against the cutting table until Halina calls him away to the car.

Halina gave the toast standing, with a glass of water, because she did not drink in public.

"Seventy-four years," she said, and the hall went quiet for her.

"My husband's father came to this city with a cutting wheel and a debt.

"He built the first kiln in that lot with his own hands.

"Tonight we light the window he began, and we will see it finished."

She said "we" and looked at the room.

She did not look at the empty iron in the rose window, or at me.

Ansel sat on her left with his hands folded on the linen.

When she said "finished," his thumb pressed hard against his own knuckle.

I saw it because I was watching his hands.

I had told myself I would not.

They were big and steady and scarred in a dozen small white lines from forty years of glass.

They had once held my face as if I might shatter.

I drank some water and set the glass down harder than I meant to.

"To the glass," said Halina.

"To the glass," said the hall.

The door at the back opened as the glasses came down.

A woman stood in it with her coat still buttoned.

She was small and thin, in a cardigan and a long patterned scarf wound twice around her neck.

She held a cane-handled umbrella, though the rain had stopped at dinner.

She was late, and she knew it, and she did not hurry.

She took the three stone steps one at a time, with her hand on the rail.

At the bottom she stopped and pressed her free hand flat against the left side of her chest, just under the scarf.

The tower bell began to ring eight o'clock.

She kept her hand there until the last stroke, her lips moving silently.

Ansel stood.

He pushed his chair back so fast that it scraped the stone.

He walked the length of the table to the aisle and offered her his arm.

In five years of marriage I had never seen him move like that for anyone.

"Magda," he said.

"I'm sorry," she said. "The bus."

"I should have sent a car."

"You send enough."

She said it quietly, with a small tired smile, and it was not the voice of a woman keeping a lover.

It was a woman who had been thanking a man for years and was weary of the word.

He walked her to the seat beside the Monsignor, the one I had moved her to.

She looked down at the back of the card and read my handwriting.

Then she looked up the table and found me.

I expected jealousy, or fear, or the cool contempt Halina would have given.

She only looked at me with steady hazel eyes, and lifted her water glass an inch.

A waiter set down a small white coffee, and she took two tablets from a plastic case in her bag.

She swallowed them with the first sip, in the plain way of a habit older than manners.

Ansel sat down beside her, not beside me.

He leaned toward her and said something I could not hear.

She shook her head.

Halina's hand lay on the tablecloth between her plate and mine.

"You see," she said, without turning, "he takes care of the people he is responsible for."

"I see that."

"He always has."

"Is that why he didn't come to Scotland?" I asked.

She turned and looked at me for the first time all night.

"He has always known where his duty lay."

I should have thrown the water in her face.

Instead I smiled, and I ate my dinner, which was pierogi and braised cabbage and a lamb I could not taste.

By eleven the guests had gone, and the caterers were carrying out trays.

Magda left on the Monsignor's arm and looked back once through the glass doors.

Halina went to find her coat.

I did not leave.

I stood in the long annex corridor off the chapel hall, where the cutting tables ran in a line under work lights.

I told myself I had come to look at the glass.

That was a lie.

I was waiting.

I heard his shoes on stone, and a long breath.

"I thought you had gone," Ansel said.

"I'm leaving Sunday," I said.

"Then stay until Sunday," he said.

"I stayed for the toast, Ansel. That was the deal I made with myself."

He stopped three feet from me.

"Come home," he said. "Just tonight."

"I came here to leave you."

"I know. I read the envelope on the steps."

I had not thought he would open it at all.

"You read it."

"I have it by heart. Twelve lines. You spelled my middle name wrong."

His mouth moved, the smallest flicker, and my chest went hot.

"You don't get to be funny," I said.

"I am not trying to be."

"Three years. Not one call."

"No," he said. "Not one."

"You sent a transfer every month like I was a pharmacy."

Something crossed his face that I could not read.

I never could.

It was the thing I had loved first about him and hated last.

"You are right," he said.

"That's all you've got?" I asked.

"I have more. I cannot say it tonight."

"Then why did you walk down this hall?" I said.

"For nothing," said Ansel. "I only wanted to be near you."

He took one step, and then another.

I smelled the cedar soap he had always used, and the cold of the corridor on his jacket.

He lifted a hand and stopped it an inch from my cheek.

"I would like to kiss you," he said, "and I do not have the right."

I should have said no.

I had said it a thousand times in a flat in Edinburgh.

What I said was, "You never needed the right before."

He kissed me.

His mouth was hot and exact, and it came down on mine with three years of nothing in it.

I felt the edge of a cutting table behind my thighs, and I did not remember walking back to it.

His hand opened over my jaw, and the other slid inside my open coat and pulled me against him.

I made a sound I had not made in three years.

"Neve."

"Don't talk."

I took his tie in my fist and dragged his head down.

His tongue touched mine, slow and sure, and my knees went.

He lifted me by the hips and set me on the table.

The stone was cold through my skirt, and a pane of glass lay under my palm.

His hand came up under my sweater, flat on my bare ribs, and his thumb found the wire of my bra and stopped there.

He was shaking all over, a big careful man trying to hold still.

"You have not changed," I said against his mouth.

"Neither have you."

"I have."

"Not here," he said, and his hand slid higher.

I bit his lip, and he groaned.

I heard the corridor door open before I felt anything else.

A hard step, then another.

I knew that heel on stone.

"Ansel," said Halina from the end of the hall.

He went rigid against me, and his hand slid out from under my sweater.

"Magdalena is waiting in the car," she said. "She does not like the night air."

I held his tie a moment longer.

He stepped back and straightened it himself.

Then he turned and walked toward his mother, and away from me.

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