Sabra Zornes had no intention of attending her ex-husband’s engagement party, but at the last second she slipped a smiley-face emoji into her no-thank-you text. He texted back immediately. Would she agree to meet with him, just once? It didn’t matter where. Call him—they’d set it up. He needed her advice: his oldest friend. “Saw you on the ‘Gram,” he added. “You changed your hair. Sexy.” And there it was: the world, the man, the morass she’d left behind.

Her cautious greeting on the phone—“It’s Sabra, Tom”—elicited shouts of laughter. He couldn’t believe it. He was flabbergasted. Really, this was just too fabulous.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, voice tipping into hushed despair.

“So talk,” she snapped.

The divorce was amicable, as divorces go, but to Sabra it still felt recent. She felt bereft, after the picking through of books and vintage LPs, the divvying up of friends. He’d taken the fruit trees right out of the ground, leaving holes. He’d left her a tank of fish they’d bred by accident and held onto too long, cramped in their twenty-gallon aquarium, too old and stunted to sell or give away.

“Talk,” Tom said. “Talk. Yes. Yes. Well.”

She closed her eyes. He’d be running his hands through his hair as he spoke. He had great hair: long for a man, wavy. He’d be pacing the room, which she hadn’t seen but could imagine. It would be filled with bright colors. Plants spilled from knick-knack-crammed shelves. Outside, through the window, he’d see fruit trees.

“I think I’ve fucked everything up,” Tom said, voice twisted in sudden anguish.

“Everything?” Something throbbed in her voice. It didn’t belong there.

“Hmm? Everything with Erikka. Wait, you thought—”

She hung up. She drank two-thirds of a bottle of red wine, left three messages on her sister’s voicemail, contemplated throwing her glass across the room, hand-washed it instead, dried it, placed it back in the cabinet, and read fifty pages of Dr. Zhivago in twenty-six minutes, with little to no comprehension.

An aggressive curiosity drove her to call him back. What had he been thinking, to reach out to her? Who was she to him? Who was she to anyone? What world was this? What world?

They agreed to meet at the harbor market by the fish monger famous for throwing fish, close to where cruise ships arrived and took off, streets perpetually clogged with vacationing tourists.

She’d suggested the place on a whim: he hated tourists, and for the moment, right now anyway, she hated him.

Sabra taught reading classes at a community college in a former lumber and sawmill city to the north known for its airplane assembly plant. At first, she’d devised her own methods to reach her classes of laid-off factory workers, second-language learners scrabbling for a foothold, housewives hankering to reinvent themselves, and wary teens who’d wandered in from nearby meth-ravaged towns. She’d invented games, lowered their resistance, made them laugh, and then whip-cracked the reluctant readers through one of the twenty-seven classics she’d sped through herself the summer after she’d graduated college, while she was still briefly contemplating a literature PhD. The novel study was intended as a capstone to the class, a kind of look what you can do now. Some students grumbled about the work and others faked their way through it, but a surprising number actually did it. Sabra briefly imagined she’d tapped a hidden yearning in her students, a hunger for beauty and meaning, the ache she herself had once felt. And who knew? Maybe some of the timid housewives and laid-off mechanics would opt, after an illuminating death march through Villette, to pursue a PhD in literature themselves.

“It’s never too late for them to become what you might have been,” Tom had quipped, a twisting of George Eliot’s epithet and the institution’s motto. Which was ironic: his glacial progress through his own PhD program was the reason she’d accepted a just-for-now job, they’d lived in a just-for-now house, and they’d put off, just for now, a period that stretched on, somehow, for a decade, having children. He hadn’t even let her get a dog.

The trick to speed reading, Sabra learned, after the college implemented an automated program that achieved more consistent results, was not looking back. You give it one good look and move on. Now she just took attendance and circulated around the lab as lines of text streamed faster and faster across her students’ screens.

“Don’t look back,” she sometimes said, as if they could look back if they tried.

   “Sabra!” Tom shouted. He waited until her eyes were upon him to wave, a bigger wave than it needed to be, the way everything he did was too big.

Tom. Big Tom. He’d been engaged in hushed discussion with the balloon hawker, a hunched and barely conscious looking man in a soiled coat. He was always finding unlikely friends. She could never compete. She’d be voted out of any given lifeboat before him, off any island, by any given crowd.

“How are you, old friend?” he said when she reached him. He chucked her against the arm and then the shoulder, as if he could not stop touching her, but only with big, friendly male gestures, such as she imagined occurring at a gathering of former football players or a reunion of wrestling opponents, pro wrestlers, longtime antagonists meeting up years later for a beer to show each other they had not meant any of those murderous acts of staged aggression, the crotch punches, the flaming arrows, the unleashed wild bears.

Tom pulled a pink balloon animal out of the folds of his overcoat like something obscene. He thrust it into her hands. It had four segmented limbs, balloon nose, tail.

“Dog?” she guessed. She thought of the dog she’d always wanted. The theoretical dog.

“Ha ha, look again,” he said. “I’ve always seen you more as a cat person.”

“I’ve always seen you more as an asshole.”

“I don’t think the balloon man makes those. Should I inquire?” He smiled. Rakishly? Goofily? She could never decide. He showed no sign, anyway, of the previous day’s desperation. If it had been that. It had probably just been histrionics. It had probably been a show, a lure. There was never any telling with Tom.

He touched her elbow. Second touch. No third: there’d been that handshake.

She let him lead her. She leaned into him, just a little. Dangerous, she told herself, but she didn’t pull away.

It was one of those rare, bright, achingly clear fall days that left Sabra craving cloud cover and escape. Sunlight blazed and snapped across the bay, painful to look at.

“Could you have arranged for a more perfect day?” Tom announced in a new, booming voice. “You’re a genius, Sabra, is what you are.”

“I thought you hated this place.”

“Is that why you picked it? I didn’t realize you still cared.”

“About you?” she said. “I don’t.”

She’d gone too far. It was a thing that happened, but only with him.

“That was a quick answer,” he said.

“It was an easy one,” she said. “Ask me another.”

“You’re bitter.”

It stung. She hadn’t wanted to be bitter. But who did?

“I’m giving this meeting thirty more minutes,” she announced in her teacher voice. This seemed tough, but fair. “Thirty more minutes,” she repeated, with an emotion she recognized as relief. There was an end to this, and it was only thirty minutes away. “If there’s something you want, ask now.”

Villette is a love story in which the heroine, a teacher, falls in love with a difficult man, prickly and unattainable. She attains him, in a way, their love progressing through letters. At one point, after misunderstanding and misfortune, the man himself comes to her, but she rushes off and leaves him to retrieve a letter that has just arrived. The letter is from the man. It’s as if the letter means more than the man. What is a body, an actual physical person, compared with idea of love? This is the question Sabra wanted her speed-reading students to consider, but they had found this line of questioning unsatisfying. “Look, he’s not exactly a catch, is he? What’s up with the slim pickings?” an out-of-work machinist had complained. They’d also quibbled with the ending: a promise of marriage, with a strong suggestion the man dies in a shipwreck. “Too easy,” pronounced one student. Only now does Sabra see it as a happy ending, really a nearly perfect one. The heroine gets the promise of marriage without the actual need to marry the man. She doesn’t have to watch love turn to shit. She doesn’t have to see it degrade. She never has to hear about anyone named Erikka. She isn’t given balloon animals, and then made to feel cold hearted and lacking in joi de vivre for not being similarly impetuous and not having received the balloon animal in a spirit of laughter and fun.

“I think she’s cheating,” Tom said.

Why, she thought, as she looked at him across the table in the packed tourist cafe she’d led him to, am I here?

“She’s cheating?”

“I think so.”

On the way Tom had bumped against her three more times and taken her elbow twice. Regardless of whatever else he’d come to tell her, his body was giving her a friendly hey-o and shucks, welcome back. And regardless of everything she knew about him and about herself, and regardless of the way their marriage had ended, regardless of the fruit trees and the stunted fish, and regardless of Erikka, regardless of Erikka, her body had responded. Was responding, even now. If she’d led him to a bar instead of a cafe, if she’d said less and smiled more, if she’d figured out a way to be near him without actually having to listen to anything that came out of his mouth, if she’d managed to harden herself, just a little, toward Erikka, to forget female solidarity and fairness, to forget everything Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot had taught her, would she find herself married again? And would that be a good thing?

“I don’t think I’m the right person to tell this to.”

“You’re the only person to tell this to. The only person I can tell this to. Everyone else—our friends—will hate her if I share this. But you….” He looked at her. A few different moods floated over his face. Moods and seasons. She imagined he was thinking about those words and their implications. It doesn’t matter what you think, because you’re not going to be part of our lives. That was one way to look at it. And our friends. Ours—meaning theirs. How many of his friends had once been hers? Some. A few. Not many—but too many. She resented every one of them, every one of the defectors. The ones who were rooting for him now, in his new life. The ones whose impressions of Erikka he was so careful to protect.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

He touched her inner wrist with his knuckle, traced the blue-green vein through the translucent skin of her forearm. “Nothing.”

 Then she understood. Her body understood. Her body finally communicated to her brain what it understood. He wants you for a fling. And you—you are capable of this. Aren’t you? Weren’t you just thinking….

“Hell, no.”

“Sabra—”

“Um, no. No. Jesus.” She laughed once, the sound harsh like the honking of a swan. Her chair squeaked as it slid back. The last thing she saw, as she angled her body through the packed cafe toward the exit, was his face sagging low over the tabletop like a punched balloon.

Free of Tom, she drifted back through the crowded streets like a tourist. She found her way to a bench by the waterfront. She still had the balloon animal, the ridiculous pink phallic thing.

It was still bright outside, somehow, but cold, colder than it looked. If it was bright in Seattle, then it was cold. Unless it was summer. Then it could be bright and hot. That was the thing about clouds. They could have an unpredictable effect. They kept it warmer, sometimes. They kept the warmth in.

Well, they’re gone now, she thought. For better and worse.

She tried to leave the balloon dog on the bench, but someone immediately picked it up and ran after her. “Excuse me? Miss?” She ignored the woman’s calls for as long as she could. The voice sounded pleasingly young and exciting, a voice with a lot of years ahead of it, years and choices, years and adventures, or so it seemed, but when Sabra finally turned she saw it was an old woman. A nearly hairless crone, probably homeless, and crazy. She spoke with a lovely young voice. She had tears in her eyes. “I think you lost your dog.”