The Last Layover

I sat there in Terminal 1 with my laptop bag and my little roller case and listened to the fluorescent lights hum, and I thought, well, Mei, this is what you get for booking the last flight out in November.

You learn things about yourself in airports. I learned that I used to fill waiting time with Quentin. Not on purpose, it just happened. Twenty-two years of marriage and every delayed flight, every long layover, I would catch myself doing the little games we made up. Guessing gate numbers. Counting bald heads. His hand on my knee under one of those bolted-down chairs, going a little higher every time the gate agent made an announcement, me pretending to read a magazine. God, we were terrible. We got asked to leave a lounge in Denver once and to this day I have never told anyone why, and now I'm telling you, so congratulations.

Anyway. The kids are both out now, which is a whole other thing. My son went to college two years ago and my daughter followed the next fall, and the house went so quiet that I started booking extra work trips just to hear a boarding announcement. That is a true thing and I am not proud of it. That is also roughly when I took off my wedding ring, but we will get to that.

I was staring at the departures board when somebody sat down one seat away from me. Not right next to me, one seat away, which is a very Quentin distance. I looked over and there he was, sixty-five years old, gray going white, same dry face, holding a carry-on and a boarding pass like a man presenting evidence.

"You're on this flight," I said.

"The cancelled one, yes!" He turned the pass so I could see it. "I take it you weren't flying to Sapporo for the pleasure of my company."

"What are you doing here, Quentin?"

"Consulting job. Retired men make excellent consultants, it turns out, because we charge half as much and complain twice as much. You?"

"Site visit. There's a museum retrofit." I gestured at the board like it was my fault. "So we both got stranded."

"It would appear so." He looked at the empty gate, the rows of chairs, the one sad kiosk still lit up down the concourse. "Do they still sell sake in airports here?"

"At that kiosk, and I believe they also sell individually wrapped earplugs."

"Then the evening has a structure to it."

That was Quentin all over. He never got excited, he just found the structure. I followed him down to the kiosk because what else was I going to do, sleep across three plastic chairs with my coat for a blanket? He bought two little bottles of warm sake and these cracker things, and we carried them back to the gate like teenagers smuggling beer, and sat down, and it was actually kind of nice, you know? The airport at night has this hush to it. Everything far away and soft.

He asked about the kids. I asked about his knee. We traded the small facts of our lives, the retirement, the condo, the daughter who calls more than the son, and we were careful with each other, the way you are with a floor you suspect might give way. Neither of us mentioned the divorce, which was ten years ago now, or the reasons for it, which were also ten years ago now. Some things you just don't renovate.

Then, somewhere in his second bottle, he looked at my left hand.

"You're not wearing your ring."

I put the bottle down. "No."

"When did that happen?"

"The day my daughter left for college. Both kids out, so." I shrugged. "It felt like the right paperwork to file."

He nodded slowly, the way he used to nod at a schematic. "That's an interesting choice."

"It's not a choice, Quentin, it's a ring."

"It's a signal. Everything's a signal." And he looked at me, and there it was, the old look, the one I used to feel across a dinner table. "I have a proposal."

"You have a proposal. We've been divorced a decade and you have a proposal."

"A wager, then. If you like that word better."

"I like neither word, but go on."

He set his sake down and squared his shoulders, and I swear he looked like a man about to present at a conference. "One hour. The hotel here in the terminal. We check in, we sit on the bed, and we keep it to hands only. Nothing below the belt except hands. Mine and yours. The question on the table is simple. Which of us has forgotten the other's body."

I laughed. I actually laughed, out loud, in an empty gate at Haneda, and a cleaning guy across the concourse looked up. "You want to prove you still know my body better than I do."

"I want to know if I still know your body. Whether it's better than you know mine is the wager part."

"That is the most engineer thing anyone has ever said to me."

"Thank you."

"It's not a compliment, Quentin."

"It is from you." He was smiling now, just barely, at the edge of his mouth. "One hour. If either of us wants to stop, we stop. There's a clock right there, we can see it from the bed, probably."

"Probably," I said, and I looked at that clock, and I will tell you the truth, which is that some part of me, some dumb warm part I thought I'd packed away with the Christmas ornaments, had already started doing math. It had been a long time since anyone touched me with any plan. There'd been a man from my office, a disaster, a couple of years back, and it was all enthusiasm and no blueprint. Quentin, whatever else he was, had a blueprint. He'd drawn it over twenty-two years.

"Hands only," I said. "And one more term."

"Name it."

"No kissing."

He actually blinked at that one. "No kissing!"

"None. Because kissing was always our undoing, Quentin, and you know it. We'd go in for one small thing and come out two hours later having wrecked the schedule. Kissing is the gateway drug in this family."

"That was generally my favorite part."

"I know it was. That's why it's banned." I picked up my bottle and finished it, because I needed my hands to be doing something. "One hour, hands only, no kissing. And the clock stays where we can see it."

"And if I win? If I prove I haven't forgotten?"

"Then you get to be smug in the shuttle tomorrow and I'll never hear the end of it. And if I win?"

"What do you want if you win?"

I thought about it honestly, which surprised me. What did I want? The house was empty. The flight was cancelled. I was sixty-three years old, sitting in a pool of fluorescent light with my ex-husband and two empty sake bottles, and the honest