Waiting On You

The train from London took forever, or it felt like it did. Three hours and change, and I spent most of it staring at a scratched window and thinking about how long it had been since I'd touched my own husband.

Five months, if you're counting. I was counting.

Tommy does voice-over work, and they flew him out to a studio in Manchester for a big run of commercials, and then it stretched, and then it stretched again. We talked on the phone most nights. It's not the same. Any woman who tells you a phone call is the same is lying to you.

So there I was, fifty-two years old, dragging my suitcase through a lobby in Birmingham that smelled like carpet cleaner and somebody's bad decisions at the bar, and I saw him before he saw me.

He was standing by the lifts in that gray jacket I bought him, checking his phone, and my whole chest went tight in the good way. Twenty-eight years I've known that man. He met me at the salon where I used to work, sat in my chair, and flirted so badly I almost felt sorry for him.

"Tommy."

His head came up and his whole face changed. "Joy. Oh, thank God!"

I dropped the suitcase handle right there on the floor and he crossed the lobby in about four steps and wrapped me up. He's a head taller than me, so I put my face right in his jacket and just breathed for a second.

"You're real," I said into his chest.

"Last I checked." He pulled back and held me at arm's length, looking me over. "You look tired, love."

"Charming. Five months away and that's your opener."

"You look tired and beautiful," he amended, grinning. "Train all right?"

"Long. There was a delay at Reading and a man ate a pasty two seats from me for an hour." I picked the suitcase back up. "Take me upstairs before I fall down."

He grabbed the case out of my hand, which I let him do, because I'm generous like that.

The room was your standard business hotel room. Beige everything, a picture of a swan or maybe a duck, a kettle with one sad little tea bag beside it. I sat down on the end of the bed and kicked my shoes off and sighed like an old woman, which I suppose I have a right to do.

"Right," Tommy said. He sat next to me and took my hand. "Before anything else, I have to tell you something, and you're going to make a face."

"I'm already making a face."

"Joanne and Kevin are here."

I blinked at him. "Here where?"

"Here. Birmingham. Same hotel, actually." He was watching me sideways, the way he does when he's pleased with himself. "They're at the conference."

"The seed catalog conference," I said slowly. "The one you're doing the voice work for. The one you've described to me on the phone, and I quote, as the single most boring event in the Western world."

"That's the one. It's in the basement of the city hall, Joy. There's a man here who has written a ballad about parsnips. He performed it last night."

I laughed before I could help it. "Stop. Joanne and Kevin? What on earth are they doing here?"

"Kevin's firm did the landscaping for the conference center grounds, and he got asked to come talk about it. And Joanne wouldn't let him come alone, because Kevin on his own in a hotel is a man who eats dinner at half four and is asleep by nine." He squeezed my hand. "So when I found out they'd be here the same weekend as you, I may have had a thought."

"What kind of thought?" I asked, and I'll admit my voice came out a bit careful, because with Tommy a thought is never just a thought.

"I'll tell you later. Over dinner, maybe. It's nothing mad. Or it's slightly mad." He kissed my knuckles. "First I want an hour of just you. Is that all right?"

"That's more than all right."

So we did that. We sat on that lumpy hotel bed and talked the way you can only talk when the phone isn't involved. I told him about the salon, the woman who comes in every Tuesday and complains about the same three things, my sister's endless kitchen renovation. He told me about the studio, the director who kept asking him to do the read again but warmer, which is apparently a real note grown men with microphones say to each other.

And we touched. That's the part I'd missed most, I think. Not anything dramatic, just his hand on my knee while he talked, my head on his shoulder, him tucking a bit of hair behind my ear without even noticing he was doing it. Small things. Five months of small things owed to both of us.

At some point he reached over to his jacket on the chair and came back with a glossy booklet and handed it to me with great ceremony.

"What's this?"

"The crown jewel of the conference. Kevin gave it to me as a joke, and then I read the whole thing in my hotel room like a lunatic."

I opened it. "Winter Flowering Pansies and You," I read out loud. "Tommy, there's a photograph of a man hugging a compost heap."

"There is, and I've thought about it every day since. He looks so happy, Joy. That man has found peace with his compost." He leaned over my shoulder, and I could feel him smiling against my ear. "Page thirty has a radicchio that I swear is making eyes at you."

"You're a strange man and I love you." I flipped a page. "Oh, look, heirloom carrots. Kevin would actually like this, wouldn't he?"

"He loved it. He bought three copies. Joanne had to talk him out of a fourth for the car."

I laughed and leaned back into him, and he wrapped his arms around my middle, and for a minute we just sat there like that, two tired people in a beige room with a seed catalog, happier than the photograph of the compost man by a wide margin.

"So," I said, after a while. "This thought of yours. The slightly mad one."

"Patience." He kissed the top of my head. "Dinner first. I booked us a table at the hotel restaurant for seven, and I told Joanne and Kevin we'd all eat together."

"All four of us. So this thought involves them."

"Everything involves them, love. They've been our people for twenty years." He stood up and offered me his hands. "Come on. Have a shower, put on the green dress, and let me take my wife to dinner."

"The green dress. You remember the green dress?"

"Joy, I remember the green dress from a wedding in two thousand and nine. I have a very particular memory for the important things. I can't tell you what the director's name was this week, but I can tell you that dress."

I stood up on my toes and kissed him, a proper kiss, the first real one in five months, and I felt him go still and then melt into it, one hand coming up to my jaw. When we broke apart he was a little breathless, which I confess I enjoyed very much.

"That," he said, "is why we're having dinner first. Because if we don't leave this room in the next twenty minutes, we will not be leaving this room, and Joanne will come knocking."

"Would that be so terrible?"

"Ask me again after dinner." He swatted me gently toward the bathroom. "Go on. Shower. Green dress. I'll be here."

* * *

There's a knock at the door just as I'm pinning the last bit of hair, and Tommy answers it wearing that face he wears when he knows something.

"Joy Partridge, look at you," Joanne says, coming in with her arms already open. She's fifty, a librarian, and she hugs like she means it. Kevin stands behind her holding a bottle of wine and three copies of the pansies booklet, because of course he does.

"You brought the booklet to dinner," I say.

"Two were gifts. One's for reading." He hands Tommy the bottle. "You look wonderful, Joy. Birmingham agrees with you."

"It's the dress. Tommy requested it specifically, which I found suspicious the moment he did it."

Joanne looks at Tommy, then at me, and something passes over her face. "Did he now!"

"He did," Tommy says, cheerful as anything, pouring wine into the glasses from the little bar fridge. "Sit down, all of you. I have an announcement to make over dinner, but since we've got ten minutes, I'll make it here and we can enjoy the pudding portion of the evening without me droning."

Kevin takes the couch. "Tommy, you're being weird."

"I'm being honest, which people often mistake for weird."

So he tells us. Standing there in his gray jacket, wine bottle in hand, Tommy says that he and I have been married twenty-five years, that Joanne and Kevin have been our people for twenty, and that the four of us trust each other more than we trust most of our own opinions. And then he says, plainly, no big speech, that if everyone wanted it, he'd like tonight to be about all four of us, together, in this room, after dinner. That Joy deserves to be adored by more people than just him after five months of him being an absence on a phone line.

Nobody talks for a second. My ears go hot.