Boots Off

The week in the fire tower had hollowed me out. That's what I kept thinking as I sat on our rooftop in the late July heat, boots off for the first time in seven days, watching the sun go down over the water. Fifty-three years old, and I'd spent the last decade of my marriage feeling like a guest in my own house.

Silvia was down there somewhere. My wife. Fifty-two, brilliant, and about as close to me as the lighthouse on the far point. We had our routines. She made coffee, I drank it. I said goodnight, she said goodnight back. Twenty-seven years married and we'd gotten so good at being polite that we'd forgotten how to be anything else.

The rooftop was the only place I felt like I could breathe. Salt on the wind, asphalt still giving off heat from the day, rusted railings, the town humming below us. I'd kicked my boots off the second I got up here. My feet were wrecked. A week of standing watch and hiking ridgelines in the same pair of socks will do that. They were dusty and aching and callused and I honestly didn't care. Bare feet on warm asphalt. It was the entire luxury of it.

Which is, sorry, that was the luxury of it, until I heard the rooftop door scrape open behind me.

"There you are." Silvia came through with a bottle of wine, two glasses hanging from her fingers, and a beach towel over her arm. She was barefoot too, in that loose sundress she liked, and the hem moved in the breeze like it was showing off. "I had a feeling you'd come up here."

"Where else would I be?" I said. "The couch has forgotten what I look like."

"Well, that's fair. The couch and I have gotten pretty close this week." She sat down next to me, closer than she needed to, our knees almost touching, and poured the wine. "Seven days. You were gone seven days and I didn't know what to do with the quiet."

"I know the feeling."

"Do you?" she asked, and some edge of something I hadn't heard from her in years colored her voice. She looked at my feet. Not my face. My feet. "Oscar. Your boots are off."

"Yeah, well. They tried to eat me on the trail down."

"No, I mean..." She laughed a little, nervous, and took a swallow of wine. "I mean I forgot I even missed them. Your feet, I mean. God, that sounds strange."

I should tell you now, because you'll wonder. My wife has always had a thing for my feet. She told me about it back when we were twenty-three, two years before we married, told me once and then never brought it up again, and I was young and stupid and I think I made her feel weird about it, so it just went into the ground. Thirty years of it sleeping there while we drifted into two people sharing a mortgage.

"Sil," I said. "It doesn't sound strange."

"It does a little." She set her glass down on the concrete. "Can I say something? And please don't laugh at me, because I've been rehearsing this on the stairs for ten minutes."

"I would never laugh at you."

"I miss you." Her voice cracked on the word miss, just barely. "Not the house. Not the coffee. You. I feel like I've been living next to you instead of with you, and I keep thinking, how did we get here? We're fifty-three and fifty-two and we've got this whole life and I can't remember the last time we really touched on purpose."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't make one up. I just reached over and put my hand over hers, and she turned her palm up and laced our fingers together, and we sat there like that while the sky went orange and then bruised purple.

"Here's the other thing," she said. "The embarrassing thing."

"Okay."

"Your feet are filthy and beautiful and I have wanted to touch them since the second I saw you kick those boots off. I have wanted this since before we got married, Oscar, and I stuffed it down because I thought you'd think I was odd, and I am so tired of stuffing things down." She turned to face me fully. "May I? Touch them, I mean. I'm asking. I'm actually asking."

My breath did something complicated. A week alone in a tower gives you a lot of time to think, and half my thoughts up there had been about exactly this distance, this quiet, this wife I couldn't reach. And here she was, reaching.

"You're asking me for my feet," I said.

"I'm asking you for your feet."

"You want to touch my nasty trail feet."

"They are not nasty. They are yours." She was already shifting, turning her body toward mine, waiting. "Please!"

"Well," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to. "Yes. Yes, Silvia. Go ahead!"

The sound she made, oh, you'd have thought I handed her the moon. She scooted down the bench and gathered my right foot into her lap, and her hands were cool from the wine glass, and the first touch of her thumbs along my arch nearly took me apart.

"Oh," I said. Just that. Very dignified, I know.

"Sore?"

"A week of standing watch. There's a ridge behind the tower I walk every evening."

"I know. You told me about that ridge once, three years ago, and I've thought about it since." She pressed her thumb into the arch and worked it in slow circles, and I felt the whole week start to drain out through her hands. She found every callus like she'd memorized a map. The ball of my foot, the heel, the tender spot under my second toe where the boot always rubbed. She worked each one with this slow, deliberate care, like the dust and the ache were things she could lift off me and carry away.

"Silvia," I managed. "Where did you learn to do this?"

"YouTube. Two in the morning. Many nights." She grinned up at me, and I laughed, and it felt so good to laugh with her that my eyes stung. "I watched a lot of videos for a woman who was never going to work up the nerve."

"You could have just asked. Any night in the last twenty years, you could have just asked."

"I know that now!" Her thumbs swept up my arch again. "I was scared, I think. Of the answer. Or of the answer being yes and it changing everything."

"Would that have been so bad? Changing everything?"

"Look at us," she said softly. "Tell me."

I couldn't. So I gave her my other foot, and she took it like it was a gift, and worked it the same way, and the