Make of that as you will.

My love, truly and eternally, to both of you, along with my apologies for past and future rudeness, not to say present ones. I won’t expect any red carpets, but pour me a drink; I’ll need one.

Rhoda

I felt as though I needed a drink myself, but it wasn’t even noon yet. I started across the road, then stopped, suddenly dizzy. I rested for a moment or two, leaning my weight against our mailbox, looking up at the house and the grounds. Rhoda had been here just once, five years ago, a year after we moved in, a year before she married Bob Dandridge and moved out to the West Coast. That one visit was a brief one. She drove up from New York with some anonymous young man who did something ostensibly creative for an advertising agency. We had two other couples for dinner. Rhoda and her young man stayed the night, the other couples did not. I remember feeling annoyingly married, envying her the delight of sleeping with a non-spouse, and being uncomfortable with my own role. Annoyed, too, to find myself slipping too far into that role and almost having the gall to disapprove of her sleeping with her advertising man.

How much of the disapproval was jealousy?

How much of all disapproval is jealousy?

Questions, questions. I steadied myself and headed up the flagstone path, wishing it had creeping thyme between the stones, remembering the smell of the thyme underfoot on the flagstone path of my grandmother’s garden, remembering this and thinking of that and trying not to think about Rhoda’s letter, because, you see, I did not know, really, how I felt about it. Her visit. Or how I was supposed to feel. Or how I wanted to feel.