The Sound of Her Stare

*This one came from a long Sunday afternoon with nothing but dust motes in the light. I wanted to write something about married people finding each other again, not broken, just forgotten. Thanks for reading it.*

I was dicing carrots in the church hall kitchen on a Sunday evening, and I was chopping them a lot harder than onions needed to be chopped, because my husband had walked out the door that morning without once looking up from his coffee long enough to tell me I looked nice, or even tell me goodbye properly, or anything at all really beyond "did you move my keys."

Six years of marriage, if you're counting, which I was, since we got married young at twenty-two after meeting in culinary school, and I'd like to say the shine had dulled slowly, like a good patina, but honestly it felt more like somebody had turned the lights off in a room and nobody had bothered to mention it. And the thing that stung the most was that it wasn't even a special occasion I was mad about. It was a Sunday kind of Sunday. Toast, keys, gone.

So there I was at St. Bridget's, where I sometimes help with the potlucks because Catalina the custodian knows I can't say no to feeding people, and I was dicing carrots for a big potluck tray with a violence that would have concerned a therapist. The kitchen off the side of the hall is a decent kitchen for a church, big industrial pots hanging on a rail, a walk-in that groans like an old dog getting up, and a window that looks out into the main room where they hold everything from AA meetings to the evening prayer group.

Which is where my husband was, as it happened, because Mitch works there evenings as the sound technician, running the board for the prayer group and the choir and whoever else rents the room. He was up on the little stage crouched over his soundboard in his work polo, coiling cables the way he does, all neat loops, and I watched him through the window for a minute and felt something in my chest that was half anger and half something warmer I didn't want to name yet.

He glanced up, caught my eye through the window, and gave me a little wave, the way you wave at somebody across a parking lot, casual, like I was a coworker he sort of knew.

I turned back to my cutting board.

I know how that sounds. Petty. It was petty, and I was doing it on purpose, and the weird part is it felt good, like scratching a mosquito bite you know you shouldn't touch. He wanted to wave. Fine. He could wave at the back of my head while I murdered these carrots.

"Jayne, honey, those onions are going to be confetti if you keep that up," Catalina said, coming in with a stack of folding chair legs under one arm. She's forty-seven, been running this hall for ten years, and she has a way of saying things that sounds like a joke until you realize it wasn't.

"I'm fine," I said. "Just getting the aggression out."

"Mm. Married life," she said, and set the chairs down, and didn't ask a single follow-up question, which somehow was exactly the right amount of sympathy.

The prayer group started trickling in around six, mostly older folks who take their coffee weak and their hymns slow, and Mitch's voice came over the speakers doing his sound check, that low patient voice he uses with everybody, hello, can you hear me in the back, give me a thumbs up, and everybody gave him thumbs up like he was the most beloved man in the county. Which, fine. He is very good at his job. He can make a bad room sound warm. I used to tell people that like it was a cute fact about my husband. Now it just sat in me sideways.

Here is where I admit the plan, such as it was, because I did have a plan, a small ugly little plan that I formed somewhere between the second carrot and the third. There was a guy who comes to help with the potluck setup sometimes, a younger fellow, mid-thirties maybe, always told me my food was the best thing that happened to that hall, always a little too warm about it. My idea, roughly, was that I would laugh at his jokes and touch his arm and be charming, and Mitch would watch from his soundboard and feel that little twist in his stomach that I'd been feeling for about a year, and then maybe he'd come home and actually see me.

Immature? Completely. Did it work? Not the way I thought.

Because the plan needed a prop, and the prop was a heavy tray, one of those big aluminum ones loaded with roasted vegetables and a chafing dish, and I staged it beautifully. I stood by the kitchen door with the tray, made a show of adjusting my grip, and said, loud enough to carry, "Could somebody give me a hand with this? It's heavier than it looks."

And that is when Gino beat him to it.

Gino, the evening janitor, fifty-five, retired electrician who took the job for something to do, appears in doorways the way old men do, silently and exactly when inconvenient. He was suddenly just there, taking the tray out of my hands with one easy heave, saying "Careful now, this thing's got heft to it," and walking me into the hall like a gentleman, and I couldn't very well say no thank you, I was saving this chore for my husband.

"Heavier than it looks," Gino repeated, pleased with himself. "You know I wired half this building back in the day? Before they had me mopping up after the scouts. Fall of a lifetime."

"Is that right," I said, laughing, and I did lay my hand on his sleeve for balance, going down the two shallow steps into the main room, and I must confess my eyes were not on Gino at all. They were up on the stage.

Mitch had stopped coiling his cable. He was standing there with the loop half made, watching us, and his face had a frown on it I hadn't seen in I don't know how long, that particular frown where a man is doing arithmetic he doesn't like. His eyes went from my hand on Gino's sleeve, up to my face, back down. The prayer group hummed behind him, somebody's walker squeaking, and over the speakers his check mic was still live so I could hear his breathing change, just slightly, when he saw it.

"Well, here we are," Gino said, setting the tray on the serving table with a clang that made an old woman jump. "Anything else, sweetheart? I got time before the floors."

"That's perfect, Gino, thank you," I said, and smiled at him, a real smile, because he was sweet and because I am a terrible person and it was working.

I looked back up at the stage. Mitch was still watching. He didn't wave this time.

* * *

The potluck went fine, the way church potlucks go, somebody brought a jello salad with shredded carrot in it that should be a crime, and I stood by my tray being pleasant and helpful and, on the inside, keeping a running tally of every time my husband looked at me. He had looked maybe five times over two hours last week. Twice was just professional, checking sight lines. Once was when I laughed at something Catalina said. The other two had a different temperature to them, and I filed that away like a magpie, a shiny thing for later.

Catalina caught me in the kitchen while I was wrapping the leftovers, and she looked at me over her glasses the way she does, and said, "You know, that husband of yours has been staring at you all night. Doesn't say much, that one, but he counts."

"He's staring at the room," I said. "It's his job to stare at the room."

"Mm-hm," Catalina said. "I've worked here ten years. I know the difference between a man staring at a room and a man staring at his wife's laugh. That second one doesn't come in here often enough, in my opinion."

I stood there with a roll of foil in my hands and didn't have anything to say to that, because I'd spent the whole evening trying to make him jealous and it turns out the part that stuck with me wasn't the jealousy at all. It was that frown on the stage. It was the way he stopped coiling the cable. It was the thought, arriving late and unwelcome, that what I actually wanted was not for him to miss me. It was for him to watch me.

"Jayne," Catalina said, taking the foil out of my hands gently, "go home before you burn something that isn't on a stove."

So I did. And Mitch walked me to the car in the warm early-autumn dark, and halfway across the parking lot he said, quiet, not looking at me, "You and Gino seemed friendly."

That stopped me dead, I'll tell you, because Mitch does not do that, does not do jealousy, does not do pointed. He does cable loops and sound checks.

"Friendly," I said carefully. "He carried a tray."

"Mm," he said, and opened my car door for me, which he hasn't done in a year, and I got in and sat there with the key in the ignition thinking, oh. Oh, this might be a door, and I might be about to walk through it, and I might not be the only one.

He shut the door and stood there a second in the yellow lot light, and through the glass I swear he looked at me the way he used to look at me at twenty-one, back in the culinary school days, and then he turned and went back inside to tear down the sound gear, and I sat in my car with my heart doing something unprofessional, and I did not drive away right away, and that is all I will say about that for now.

* * *

The next Sunday I told myself I was going back for the hall, not for the husband. The potluck committee needed somebody to label the storage bins, that was my story, and I was sticking to it, and the fact that I put on the good jeans and the