REUNION by Edward Mullany
Jack and I were at the department store, and, as usual, Jack didn’t want to be there, only this time he’d come with someone else.
I sat with him on the edge of one of those nice-looking beds. I’d been shopping all day, so in a way I was able to rationalize it.
From a nearby fitting room came the voice of a woman who evidently believed Jack was the only one who could hear her. We looked at each other with raised eyebrows. I knew who the woman was. But Jack and I had been divorced long enough to know that speaking of each other’s mates when those mates weren’t there to defend themselves inevitably led to suspicions of jealously, even if what was said was meant to be funny, so we’d made it a rule to keep our mouths shut.
“You’d better go see what she wants,” I said, and lifted one of my shopping bags in her direction.
Jack got up, but not before looking inside the bag. It was Christmas, and old habits die hard.
“What’s going on?” said the woman from the fitting room. She’d come out in a silk nightgown that looked better on her than it would have on me, but when she’d seen us she’d stopped, as if the sight of us together had made her forget why she was here.
“It’s all right,” said Jack. “You look great, sweetheart. Is that the one you want?”
The woman looked at me. Jack’s hand was still in my shopping bag. He took it out slowly, like a child caught in the act of something insidious. I didn’t say anything. But I did something I knew would communicate what I wanted to tell her, something that, even though I despised myself for it, I found myself unable to help. I smiled in a way that was suggestive rather than friendly, and arched just one of my eyebrows. The woman turned away in tears.
Later, when I met my husband in the mall, he tried to peek inside the shopping bag like Jack had done, but it wasn’t the same, and I snapped at him.
Edward Mullany’s fiction has appeared in Shadows, 42nd Parallel and Gulf Coast.