Part Two: Nora
Her name was Nora Kessel, or had been — he didn’t know if she had returned to her maiden name, he realized, and the realization that he didn’t know this landed with more weight than it should have.
He had met her at a conference, of all places — a logistics conference, the kind of event he attended for the right conversations rather than the programmed content. She had been there on behalf of a non-profit she worked for, something to do with supply chain transparency in humanitarian aid distribution, and she had been in the wrong panel room and had taken notes anyway because, she explained later, she didn’t like to waste a seat. He had sat next to her because the other seats were taken and had spent forty minutes in a panel about last-mile delivery infrastructure half-listening to the panel and mostly aware of the woman beside him who was asking questions in her notebook that were, over his shoulder, better than the questions anyone on the stage was asking.
He had asked her to dinner.
She had said she was busy.
He had asked again.
She had said she would think about it.
The thinking had apparently concluded favorably, because she called him three days later and said she was free on Tuesday.
They had been together for two years before they married. Married for one and a half years. Divorced for — he calculated — twenty-one months.
The marriage had ended the way certain fires ended: not with a dramatic collapse but with the gradual exhaustion of fuel, the slow discovery that what had seemed like endless supply was in fact finite. He had been working the hours he always worked. She had been doing the work she had always done. In theory these were compatible. In practice they had become parallel lines that occasionally intersected and increasingly did not, and the spaces between the intersections had grown longer and the intersections themselves shorter until they were mostly two people who came home to the same apartment at different hours and left notes for each other on the refrigerator.
The divorce itself had been cordial in the particular way of two people who had too much respect for each other to be cruel and too much grief to be fully civil. They had arranged things quietly and without lawyers until the final details required lawyers, and then with lawyers, and then it was done.
His mother had said, at the time: I liked her.
He had said: I know, Mum.
She had said: I’m not saying it to make you feel worse. I’m saying it because I want you to know that I know what you’re losing.
He had not answered that.
He thought about it sometimes.
He was thinking about it now, standing on the southern path with his mother’s hand on his arm, looking at the bench where Nora was asleep.
