The Princes had talked about divorce for so long that the subject seemed almost to have a benign, even beneficial effect on their marriage. The ritual of their quarrels—escalation to the brink, then de-escalation right back to a shamefaced and indulgent détente—provided, like marriage itself, a comforting texture and rhythm. At the moment when all seemed lost, the smallest apologetic gesture or tenderness would suddenly reveal them to each other as they were: their one, their soulmate, even though they did not believe in soulmates.
But the fact was they were not happy, and so they booked a flight to Spain the day after his teaching semester ended. Madrid: where they’d honeymooned, ten days burnished by fond recollection to an impossible shine. They must have known, booking the return visit, that they were courting disaster. But maybe that was the unconscious point: to either find their former happiness, or find it irrefutably gone—for their marriage to end where it had begun would, at least, have a symmetry to it. Their motivations, at this point, were as nebulous as the early morning fog blanketing the interstate on the Uber ride to the airport.
“Where are you headed?” asked the Uber driver, a young middle eastern man that Julia had insisted on chatting up when they got in. Richard was always obscurely irritated by her need to ask how the driver’s day had been so far. On the one hand, she was just being polite. On the other, how did she think it had been going? Pretty boringly, he imagined, driving around people like them and being asked how their day was going. It seemed somehow condescending, too, in a way he’d sensed before without consciously thinking about. He supposed it was something like: the nice, professional lady deigning to ask after the day of the sharing-economy prole, not considering that perhaps they’d like to just be left alone to do their job. But then, this was insane—she was just being nice. Here was what marriage could do, he thought, send you into a rotten grouse over your wife’s civility to a stranger, and he turned away to the window, only to reencounter it all in the reflected tableau: to the left, Julia gesturing as she spoke; in the middle, a dark expanse of seat and the rear quarter-angle of the driver’s sleek head; to the right, the half-image of his own beakish nose and glasses. You couldn’t escape.
“Madrid,” his wife said.
“Oh, Madrid!”
“Have you been?”
“No.” An awkward pause ensued. “I would like to!”
“Yes! It is beautiful.”
“You go for vacation?”
“My husband’s teaching schedule is over, so we decided to go there before it gets too hot.”
“Yes, it gets very hot!”
Et cetera. Richard had thought the driver hadn’t been before, how did he know it got hot there? The inanity of these conversations was almost physically painful. His wife, attentively watching the driver’s eyes in the rear view, smiled and frowned and nodded through the conversation. The amount of emotion and effort she expended on other human beings, including him—especially him—was truly remarkable. It wasn’t really a choice. She was the middle of three children, sandwiched between a first-born favorite son, and an erratic, exhausting baby sister. The thought softened his mood toward her, and he held her hand. As his middle finger grazed her wedding ring, he lapsed into a mock-poetic reverie that echoed the Late-Elizabethan verse he’d been teaching this semester.
Ah, kind hand!
Worthy hand, how long I have loved thee!
This fond flash was attended by a stab of dread, a feeling he’d been trying to conceal from himself, namely that this might be their last vacation together. This was something he’d known, of course—things had been bad, very bad, and the trip was an attempt to make things better—but he hadn’t felt it, a little shivering premonition of loss. He closed his eyes against it, letting himself return to the sleep he’d just exited. A dance of light and dark images like shadows from one of those antique rotating lamps playing on the wall, the sense of someone else in the car sitting between them, and he startled to realize he’d fallen asleep. They were at the terminal.
“It was lovely meeting you, Sidney. Thanks so much,” said his wife, taking the handle of her rolling bag, courteously extended for her by the driver. Sidney—apparently—smiled, showing an even set of white teeth, and Richard realized he was handsome. What had they discussed while he was sleeping?
“You as well, Julia. Take care!” Julia and Sidney: old friends. The driver got back into the car and stuck out his head as he pulled away. “Bon voyage!”
IDs and boarding passes produced, bags and bodies x-rayed, shoes removed and put back on for no good reason, they found themselves standing before a departures board that told them their flight had been delayed.
“Of course,” said Richard. “What I don’t understand is why they don’t just always tell you it’s going to be three hours later than it is. Fuck.” He leaned with pleasure into the word—its initial fricative lippiness, followed by the dumb exhale of air running into the glottal stop of the throat. Sometimes it almost felt worth having a thing go wrong to justify a really good fuck.
“Can you not?”
“Can I not what?”
“Curse in front of people.”
There was no one around them that he could see, just a businessman monologuing into a
Bluetooth earpiece. “What people?”
“There’s a child.”
The only child he could see was at least thirty feet away from them, engrossed in some bright plastic device. “Where?”
“Just take a deep breath, okay? Don’t bring additional suffering into this.”
This was all standard. Something bad happened, he reacted, and she would react to his reaction, usually with some nugget of Eastern wisdom, gleaned from years of yogic mindfulness, that tended to further aggravate him. This, despite the fact that she was, in fact, just as disappointed or frustrated or angry as he was. But her anger had to first percolate up through a protective scrim of new age philosophy before it could manifest, usually as a delayed and mysterious bad mood.
A frazzled-looking agent at the departure gate looked up from her computer at their approach. Richard assumed jauntiness was the intended effect of the woman’s neckerchief, but it missed the mark. Combined with the bags under her eyes and the nimbus of her dry, reddish hair, it seemed almost surgical, like a bandage preventing her head from falling off. She told them the delay was due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland or thereabouts, somewhere in the eccentric path
Flight 2407 would take to Iberia.
“A volcano?” said Richard.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Do you know when—” he paused, looking for the phraseology.
“The volcano will finish erupting? No.”
They moved away and stood in front of an electronic billboard cycling every ten or so seconds between ads for the Washington Post, a local dry-cleaning chain, the ballet, and a TSA admonishment to not leave your bags unattended, as though there was a single person in America who would still do that at this point.
“A fucking volcano,” he said.
“It’s not as though we have control over it,” she said. “There’s no sense in getting angry about it.”
“You say that like I think we have control over it, or that I think getting angry about it is sensible. Or that the only things worth getting angry about are things we have control over.”
“Okay, Richard.”
He felt himself on a roll and leaned into it. “I’m just expressing momentary unhappiness over something I wish wasn’t taking place. Can you give me a minute to not be happy about it?
I’m not proposing ritual suicide.”
“Jesus, I’m just saying let’s make the best of things.”
A nearby Chili’s was already filling with other delayed travelers at nine in the morning. Suitcases barricaded the bar, and the place already had the feel of a bunker. There was a collective understanding that the delays would build and build, and that the tables in this place would become exponentially more valuable as the day wore on. There was a weird excitement, as everyone within earshot discussed the same thing, occupied more or less the same mental space. When else did this happen? Holidays, sporting events, movies—the foreshortened line of faces at the bar all wore the same look of grim festivity.
Their waitress was overwhelmed, barely able to stammer out her opening spiel. “Just water,” said Julia.
“I’ll have a—” he looked at the laminated rectangle, “—Cadillac Margarita.”
“Richard, really? It’s nine AM.”
“What, I’m making the best of things. Like you said.”
The waitress hurried away, and Julia said, “Such spontaneity. You’ll regret this in about two hours.”
“I already regret it.” He was sorry as soon as he’d said it. How had he been married to this woman—this exquisitely sensitive woman—for ten years and not yet learned to hold his tongue? No better than he’d ever been at resisting a cutting remark. She frowned inwardly, a pained look he’d first encountered when they’d met at an English grad student party in 2007.
She’d been a law student, which technically counted, she’d joked. It had been some grotty dump one of the other English PhD candidates rented, and she’d been standing in the kitchen with a glass of wine, looking pretty and nervous. Uncharacteristically, he’d introduced himself, having had a couple of beers already. Upon learning that she was a law student, he’d pointed out the window and told her Tuckahoe’s was that way—Tuckahoe’s being the shitty, expensive cocktail lounge and meat market that the law and MBA students seemed to favor. Her face had crumpled, and he’d had to immediately backtrack and apologize, a dynamic he hadn’t known, at the time, he’d be engaged in for the next decade.
“Do what you want,” she said now, putting in her earbuds.
“Christ. Can you not?”
“Can I not what?”
“Give me the silent treatment. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Of course, you didn’t. Why would you mean to upset me? Only an idiot or a sociopath would mean to upset someone, and you are neither of those things.”
“What am I then?”
The waitress dropped off their drinks and was summoned to another table before she could take their food order. The enormous drink before him resembled a child’s cowboy hat turned upside down, and he felt clownish, risible. How much had the thing cost, forty dollars?
She was looking at him, arms crossed, and he said, “No, I know. An asshole.”
Had he always felt like an asshole before he met her? It was hard to remember now.
He’d always been known for—and prided himself on—his sharp wit and a certain prickliness in his demeanor. But he’d also always had many friends, and never considered the possibility that he was actually an unkind person until he met her. Their dynamic, from the outset, had been one of victimizer and victim. Even when she was unquestionably, egregiously in the wrong about something, the ensuing argument would immediately refocus on the way he’d talked to her, how he’d made her feel. There was no winning, and wanting to win, as more than one relationship
counselor had told them—as well he knew at this point—was the problem.
She put her earbuds in, and he could very vaguely hear the tinny voice of her spiritual lodestar du jour. Breathe. Find the center. Let it go. Sipping his drink while his eyeballs idly registered ESPN tennis highlights on the bar TV, he realized that he’d always felt obscurely attacked by her meditative practice, as though she’d started doing it to put up with him. But the
thing was, maybe, probably—almost certainly, now that he really thought about it—she had.
One hour, seventy dollars, and a surprisingly edible fajita later, they were informed by the gate agent—whose nametag Richard now registered: Deborah—that the flight had been delayed until five PM.
“Is there a point,” he asked, carefully modulating his voice to betray no annoyance, merely a serene desire for information, “at which it makes more sense to cancel the flight?”
“Yes, but since this is affecting all international travel, everything is basically on pause at the same time.”
“On pause.”
“So, when the volcano stops erupting,” Julia said, helpfully, “it’s like the airlines press play and everything resumes the way it was supposed to.”
“That’s right.”
“So,” Richard said, “we just wait.”
“We all just wait.”
The “all” was impossible to miss. Turning away from the flight desk, he saw them all, all of them, people more or less just like Julia and him. Stalled vacationers, tourists, business travelers, all scrolling through their phones, presumably doing the same thing: checking updates about Mt. Eyjafjallajökull, as it was apparently called. Noon light filtered in through the windows. An unseeable cloud must have passed in front of the sun, because for a few moments, everything was cast in the mellow, holy glow of an off-hours cathedral. In those same moments Richard felt a deep affection, close to love, for all of these people, strangers for whom he would normally, at best, feel a mild reflexive distaste. The effort it took to be here—the planning, the booking, the expense, the taking of vacation days, the packing of bags, the driving and trundling and walking and waiting—struck him as virtuous in its hopeful desire. They all wanted to go somewhere and see the world. They all felt the world was worth seeing.
Of course, he was also a little buzzed from that Cadillac margarita. Julia had said something he hadn’t taken in. “What?”
“Let’s go to the bookstore. We can each buy a book to read while we wait.”
They walked down the concourse to a Waldenbooks. He hadn’t realized Waldenbooks still existed. It was the same floor plan he remembered from his youth, racks of glossy magazines to the right and register to the left, and beyond, an array of shelves and endcaps that mostly offered mass-market thrillers and cookbooks. They meandered around until they located the literature shelf, designated as such with a thin plastic strip that read: Literature.
He held up a copy of Nostromo. “Can you imagine?”
Julia was looking at the back jacket copy of a recent New York Times bestseller—he recognized the silver medallion, though not the book itself. “Can I imagine what?”
“Any human being buying Conrad at the airport? It must be a joke.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What do you think old Joey would have thought of his books being sold at an airport
Waldenbooks?”
“I think he would have wondered what an airport and a Waldenbooks were.”
“I’m going to buy something more in the spirit of things.”
“Okey doke.”
From the bestseller shelf, he grabbed a mass market novel that appeared to have been dipped in blood. They paid and walked until they found seats at an empty gate scheduled, in three hours, to debark passengers theoretically arriving from Mumbai. Julia settled back into the chair, cracking her respectable-looking volume, something called The Shortcomings. His, mysteriously titled Three in the Hand, he opened with a covertness reminiscent of when, during one of his frequent insomniac episodes, he would creep downstairs and try lulling himself to sleep with pornography.
It might have been the lingering effects of the tequila, but he had a hard time following the book, despite it having been written at, approximately, a fifth-grade level. A maniacal diplomat named Hans was killing people, but it wasn’t clear to what end. Or maybe better put, it wasn’t clear if finding out why the diplomat was killing people was supposed to be the point, or if it was simply a fact of the book, and the point was yet to come. The chapters were all two pages long, but the reading project felt Don Quixote-esque.
He stood. “I think I’ll walk around.”
“Not into your book?”
“It’s gripping. I need a stroll to calm my tattered nerves.”
Without looking up, she laughed. A genuine laugh. When had she last laughed in a way that wasn’t meant to, at least partly, convey bitterness or disappointment? He said, “Hey.”
“What?”
“We’re on vacation.”
“I know.”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously, I know.” He bent and kissed her cheek, and she smiled inwardly, the obverse of her frown. That little smile: he felt like he could put it in his pocket and take it with him. He walked to the part of the concourse where the moving sidewalks began and got on one, standing on the slow, right hand side, still seeing her face. To stay in that moment, that little moment forever, that would be happiness. Right? Maybe. There was something both very true and very untrue about that thought: on the one hand, it was correct to want to linger in those little moments of pleasure and love; on the other hand, it was wrong to want to cling to any part of it—the whole thing should be experienced in its ongoing totality. This simultaneous truth and untruth struck him as Buddhist, something someone might say on one of the “Dharma Talks,” so called, that Julia was forever trying and failing to get him to listen to.
A young couple standing beside the moving sidewalk, clad head to toe in athleisure wear, leaned into each other in an easy embrace. They were looking at something on her phone, laughing. As he often did, he had the sinking sense that there was just something wrong with him and Julia, with the way they experienced the world and each other. It just couldn’t ever be
simple, easy. It never had been. Their first date, they’d gone bowling, an inexplicable choice, given that it was an activity neither of them enjoyed. This was at the campus lanes, a barely used dungeon in the bowels of the university’s old sports complex. Some work-study kid had poured them a rancid pitcher of Bud Light (shockingly, they sold beer there), and they’d gutter-balled over and over to the strains of REO Speedwagon. Still, it had been fun, weird fun, until she’d told him, over her second cup, that she’d been sexually assaulted the year before.
It had struck him as inappropriate, but also, clearly, a vulnerable oversharing borne of her immediate trust in him, and whether she’d meant for it to or not, it had brought them closer, automatically. And yet, hadn’t some part of him thought: now’s your chance: run? Not in the sense that she was damaged goods, no, but in the complication of it. He’d only gotten out of a long-term relationship the year before, the first one of his life, and here he was, about to commit to whatever this daunting thing was.
Looking back, it seemed as inauspicious as the volcano currently thwarting their vacation. Hard: everything had been hard with them from the start. And yet there had been something about the difficulty and friction that made it also seem worthwhile and serious. Further, perhaps the difficulty was all just in his mind. If he could let go of how things should be, and just exist—that was the thing! He was like a swimmer who, having jumped into a surprisingly frigid lake, refused to accept it and kicked in anger against cold water that should have, by some imaginary dispensation, been warm. He got to the end of the moving sidewalk, the circular terminus of the concourse, and looked out at all the planes not taking off, one of them presumably theirs.
It was funny: one volcano no one had ever heard of letting off a little steam, and suddenly everything was different, and the planes out there were useless hunks of metal baking beneath an indifferent sun. Everything was at once so solid and so frangible, and you never really knew how close things were to the edge. He turned around.
Watching Richard glide away on the moving sidewalk, Julia was reminded of the trip she’d made to Austin, Texas, two months earlier. It had been for a legal conference, and during her downtime between afternoon sessions and dinner, she’d decided to take in some of the town. At a bar, Julia drank a predictable Shiner Bock and watched a woman play moody folk songs in the corner. Afterward, on a whim, she decided to try riding one of the omnipresent scooters. Birds, they were called, people zipped around on them constantly. She downloaded the app and was soon gliding down the street—helmetless and heedless and full of reckless joy. At Barton Springs, in the middle of town, she stripped down to her underwear, as many other women were doing, and waded in. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt like this: so free. She used to be a fun person. This was what she’d told Richard upon her return, offending him, of course, but it was true, and part of her had despaired a little that week as she’d reentered her complicated marriage.
The problem was, she didn’t really want to leave him. She wanted things to be better between them. At times, they were uniquely good for each other, and in those times, the idea of living without each other was unthinkable, ridiculous. But how quickly those times graded into the other times, into one of Richard’s dark existential funks, into the little jibes that felt like paper cuts somewhere deep inside her, into her being hurt and him mystified and affronted, as usual, by her sensitivity.
The words on the page had begun to lose meaning, and she realized she hadn’t had coffee yet that day. She awkwardly pulled both their bags into a nearby Starbucks and got into the long line, knocking into the man in front of her. He turned, a businessman wearing a neck pillow, the kind of guy Richard always, for some reason, felt the need to disparage.
“Sorry,” she said, and found herself confused by the way he patted himself, until he
finished the punchline:
“Nothing broken, I don’t think.”
“Funny.”
“You delayed? I guess everyone is, huh?”
“The volcano.”
“Mount Awfulskull, or whatever it’s called.”
“Right.”
“Where are you headed?”
“We’re going to Madrid.” She reproached herself, very faintly, for that reflexive “we.” It had become so ingrained in her to think of herself as part of a unit, this mind-meld. Though would it have been better to lie and say, “I”? And would that have been a lie?
“How about you?”
“I’m going to Paris.”
“How romantic.”
“Well. To see my daughter, so no. But who knows? Maybe I’ll meet some French woman
in a café.”
The line inched forward. There were six or so people ahead of them, each seemingly ordering a frozen milkshake—the constant buzz of the blenders created a feeling of tension in the room, or at least in her. “What’s your daughter doing there?”
“She’s at the Sorbonne, believe it or not.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe that?”
“I don’t know.” He laughed. “I guess that is a strange thing to say. It’s just taken me a
while to get used to it. What about you?”
“What about me, what?”
“Madrid, you said? Just a vacation?”
“Yeah, we love it there. Me and my husband.”
“Right, I figured.”
He was smiling at her, and she realized she was flirting, and she realized she was enjoying flirting. It was the same feeling as in Austin, and that feeling was freedom, a sense of unboundedness. She hadn’t felt that way, with Richard, in years. Really, since that hectic period post-marriage, when they’d both gotten their current jobs and bought a house—there had been a sense of radical adulthood then, an exciting heaviness. But in the intervening years, they’d settled into routine, one of which being their spectacular fights. It was such a waste of energy, and yet she couldn’t help but feel that it was, on some level, intentional, standing in for something that wasn’t there. The obvious thing was children, but neither of them wanted them; children, however, themselves stood in for something else, and that thing was a sense of purpose, what used to be expressed as religious worship. Most of the mothers that Julia knew treated their children like little gods, objects of worship before whose moods and fierce needs they trembled like pagan villagers at the temple. What did she and Richard have? Good careers about which they could not complain, though, of course, they did. Her widowed mother who would have to soon be moved into assisted living. A cat they tolerated and a dog they both adored, but really, each other. The idea of each other, and the sense of their marriage as a monolithic invisible entity living under their roof, eating at the table beside them, watching from the corner of the bedroom as they engaged in their bi-weekly coupling. Rather than what it was, which was nothing, a piece of paper they’d signed ten years ago. It was fatiguing to invest such constant emotion in something that did not actually exist.
The line had inched forward during her fugue, and the man had said something she missed. She said, “I’m sorry?”
“What are you going to do in Madrid?”
“I don’t know, probably get divorced.”
She couldn’t believe she’d said it, and she couldn’t believe she’d actually put her hand to her mouth, like the words could be shoved back in. He looked at her again, this time not smiling.
“Marriage is hard, I know.”
“Is it for everyone?”
“It was for me. We just couldn’t make it work. The split was like—” he looked behind her, and she looked where he was looking, at an artsy black and white photo of a flowering meadow on the wall “—it was an amputation, I lost a part of me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. Eighteen years, gone. The thing that kills me is even if I find someone else, I know I’ll never be as close to anyone as I was with her.”
“You never know.”
“No, I know.”
The sudden intimacy of the conversation was so bracing and unexpected that, despite the whirr of the espresso grinder and the nearby customers and the white and green logo with the sinister mermaid overlooking everything, she felt transported to a different, secluded place. He was not a good-looking man—fiftyish, balding, and overweight, a bit porcine with his pink ears. But he had an appealing self-possession, a demeanor of complete solidity, and if he had proposed that they leave the airport and taxi to a nearby hotel, she would have said yes, she really thought she would have. He cleared his throat and said, “Looks like you’re up.”
She managed to mumble out an order for a cappuccino, paid, and returned to stand beside the man in the pick-up area. Neither of them pulled out their phones. There was a pleasurable expectancy that doing so would have broken, though it was finally broken anyway when the barista put the cappuccino on the counter and called out for Julie.
“Well,” she said. “Enjoy Paris, if you ever get there.”
“Thanks,” he said. With a flash of relief, his aspect, gone grave and intimate over the last few minutes, regained the chummy cast of the moment she’d bumped into him. “Hey, why do French people eat snails?”
“I don’t know.”
“They don’t like fast food!”
He waved, and she clumsily maneuvered her and Richards’ bags and the drink back to the empty gate. In the distance, she could see her husband on the moving sidewalk, so far away, at first, that it was impossible to tell if he was coming or going. Gradually, his form grew larger and his familiar features—the questing nose, the high forehead, the habitual expression of harassment by some obscure detail of the world—clarified, and she fully allowed herself to feel her usual mild dread at his approach.
The funny thing was that she could still so easily remember this demeanor bringing her delighted excitement. He was so smart and sharp, so funny. His students still loved him, as did their friends. But his students and their friends didn’t have to live with him, and what was delicious in small doses, like espresso or gin, became emetic in large ones. She wished it could just, sometimes, be easy with him. But, of course, this was the man she married, the man gliding inexorably toward her, and she well knew the mistake it was to wish someone their age would change. Although, then again, the reason Richard’s bearing was a problem was that she had— changed, from a person enamored with sharpness and jagged intensity, to a person who sat on their back porch an hour a day, meditating and listening to the trees.
The idea of leaving him after Madrid, as it had several times in the weeks leading up to the vacation, flashed through her mind, and she thrilled to it, as she had each time before, like a young child to fireworks. This dangerous, wondrous thing—she was edging toward it. He stepped off the sidewalk and sat down beside her.
“Hi,” he said. “Any word?”
On CNN, as the day wore on and the sun slanted lower and lower through the tall windows, the volcano continued to belch ash into the upper atmosphere. Around nine that night, their flight, and all the flights, were officially canceled. A crew of airline workers stood in a kind of protective phalanx around the gate, relaying the bad news in person to the assembled travelers following the general announcement over the airport PA. Vouchers would be sent to email addresses, tickets would be honored. Little groans issued from the crowd, but there was no real sense of massed outrage, just an exhausted, slumping acceptance. They were sorry. There was nothing they could do. It was a volcano.
And so, almost exactly twelve hours after they’d arrived, they sat together again in an Uber, returning in the dark from whence they’d come in the early morning light. The driver was an older man in a neck brace—it was painful to watch him twist elaborately in his seat, checking his blind spot, as he made the harrowing lane changes needed to exit the airport. Not wanting to distract him, Julia had resisted her usual impulse to ask about his day, and instead, turned toward the window. Behind the signs for the Cell Phone Lot and the Park and Ride and Rental Returns was a dark, rich, choking vegetation, that unknowable world always just past the surface of things.
As they regained the interstate, she found herself reluctant to break the silence, but the driver glanced in the rear-view and said, “Where you folks coming back from?”
“Madrid,” said Richard, preemptively. Julia glanced at him.
“Oh, wonderful,” said the driver.
“Have you been?”
“Always wanted to. My wife went on a church trip years ago, and she said it was just the best.”
Julia turned back to the window. Set against the blackness outside, the dim light of the car was like a warm cocoon enveloping them. In the reflection, Richard pushed his glasses up, and leaned forward on his forearms. “It is, it really is.”
“How long were you there for?”
“Ten days.”
“Hot this time of year?”
“No, not really. It was perfect.”
“What all did you do?”
“Well, we saw The Prado, of course. Went to the Royal Palace. The Botanical Gardens. But mainly we just walked and ate and drank, and sat around in the park sometimes. That’s more or less what you do there.”
She could remember it so well, that vacation early on, how unbelievably lovely the weather had been, how lucky she’d felt to be there with Richard by her side, how completely they’d felt they knew each other when they still had so much to learn.
The driver laughed. “That does sound perfect.”
“It really was. I already want to go back.”
This would have struck her as some new and crueler form of irony—a sustained high facetiousness that would only register in her ears, intended, since the actual trip had been ruined, to ruin the very idea of the trip itself,—but Richard leaned forward, intent on the driver, who had twisted again to change lanes for their exit.
“So,” Richard said. “How has your shift been?”