Twenty Years and a Balcony Cabin

The binder sat on the dashboard like it owned the car.

Scott drove with one wrist hooked over the wheel and the other hand resting on Amy's knee, the way he'd driven every road trip for twenty years, and Amy rode shotgun with the itinerary running behind her eyes like a ticker tape. I-75 south out of Macon, the turnpike, the Beeline, straight into Port Canaveral. Under four hours if traffic behaved. She'd built in a buffer. Traffic never behaved.

"Tell me you didn't laminate the luggage tags," Scott said.

"I laminated the luggage tags."

"Ames."

"They won't get wet that way. It's a boat, Scott. There's water involved."

"There's a whole ocean involved. I heard."

The cooler rode in the back seat with the suitcases, packed before dawn: water bottles, the good seltzer, and that champagne she'd been saving since Christmas. Twenty years. She kept snagging on the number like a nail head in carpet. Twenty years of this man, this marriage, this exact voice needling her about laminating things, and she still turned around in parking lots to make sure he was coming.

And underneath all of it, quiet as a pilot light, the other thing. The thing she'd been not-thinking-about for three years now. The thing that lived in a locked drawer at the back of her skull and rattled its handle every time a certain kind of woman leaned over their table at a restaurant and laughed at something Scott said.

She'd been managing it. That was the word she used, even in her own head. Managing.

They stopped for gas outside Jacksonville, and Scott went in for the bathroom and a Coke, and Amy stayed with the car and watched through the window as a woman in a sunflower sundress caught his elbow at the door and said something that made him laugh, head tipped back, easy as ever. He said something back. The woman touched her own hair. Scott, oblivious as a golden retriever, came out two minutes later with the Coke and a story he'd already started telling through the door.

"Some guy in there thinks the Falcons are taking the Super Bowl," he said, handing her the receipt. "I didn't have the heart to argue."

Amy took the receipt. Her hands were steady. Her pulse was not.

"What did she want?"

"Who?"

"The woman. Sundress. She was talking to you."

Scott glanced back at the store, genuinely blank. "Did she? I was looking at the corn dogs."

Amy laughed and put the moment in the drawer, where it glowed like a coal. Three years of that. Collecting small moments, pressing them flat, keeping them, hating herself a little for the keeping, and aching in a way she couldn't file under anything respectable.

"You've got corn dog residue on your shirt," she said, and reached over to brush it off, and he caught her hand and kissed her knuckles without even looking, automatic, twenty years deep, and her chest hurt with how much she loved him and how badly she wanted, occasionally, to watch him be wanted.

That was the shape of it. She'd never said it out loud. She'd barely said it to herself, in the shower, in the dark, with her face turned into the steam. But the shape of it was simple and terrible: she wanted to see Scott want somebody. She wanted to watch.

Port Canaveral came up on them faster than she expected, all cranes and gates and a ship the size of a small city sitting white and impossible against the blue. Amy had the documents out before Scott turned off the engine, passport folder in hand, boarding confirmations printed, and those laminated luggage tags clipped and ready. She marched them both through the terminal like a woman leading a tour group of two.

"Ma'am, I can help at this counter," a staff member offered.

"I don't need help. I need a stamp."

Scott trailed her with the suitcases, whistling. "God, I love it when you do this."

"Do what."

"Commandeer."

The ship swallowed them through a set of glass doors into an atrium that smelled like salt air and carpet shampoo, with someone's tropical drink cutting through both, and a crew member with a microphone was telling a crowd of four hundred people where the buffets were, and Amy felt the specific anxiety of being a small organized person inside a large disorganized machine. She checked them in. She checked the check. She found the elevator bank and rode it up beside a woman in a white dress so elegant that Amy forgot, for a second, what floor they were going to.

The cabin was on Deck 9, aft, and when she swiped the keycard and pushed the door open she felt the tension in her shoulders drop two full notches. Balcony cabin. Their balcony. A bed big enough for the two of them and their twenty years of sleeping geometry, a desk, a couch the color of oatmeal, and beyond the glass door a rectangle of open sky and open water that made her breath go strange.

"Okay," Scott said, and dropped the suitcases, and walked straight out onto the balcony like a man called by name.

Amy inspected. Bathroom, towels, outlets, closet, safe. She tested the safe with the instruction card. She straightened the desk chair that didn't need straightening. Down on the pool deck, visible in slices between the decks above, people were already staking out lounge chairs like it was a land grab, and somewhere below a deck party was tuning up, bass thudding up through the floor. She found the weekly planner folded next to the phone on the desk, set it aside without opening it, and went out to stand next to him at the rail.

The ship shuddered beneath them. Somewhere far below, a horn sounded, long and low, and Port Canaveral began, slowly, to slide.

"Twenty years," Scott said.

"Twenty years."

"You cryin'?"

"No."

"You're cryin'."

"Shut up." She leaned into him. He put his arm around her and she fit against his side the way a key fits a lock, worn smooth, perfect, and out on the water a smaller boat cut a white line across all that blue and she thought, not for the first time, that she had everything she'd ever asked for, which was exactly the problem. She'd never once asked for the other thing.

They cracked the champagne on the balcony because the cooler had come all this way and by God it was going to earn its keep, and by the time the sun started dropping they were slightly giddy and the ocean had gone the color of a bruise, orange at the edges, gorgeous, indifferent. Scott ordered room service sandwiches they didn't need and ate most of them, and then he stretched out on the bed and picked up the weekly planner and read it out loud in the voice of a carnival barker.

"Tomorrow. Trivia at four. Belly flop competition right after. Then karaoke at seven, God help us all." He turned a page. "Hey. There's a hypnotist."

Amy's stomach did something complicated. "A what?"

"Hypnotist. Tomorrow night, nine o'clock, main theater. Maddie Pierce." He squinted at the page. "Madison Pierce, actually. 'The Maddie Pierce Experience.' Sounds filthy."

"Give me that."

He handed it over and she read the listing twice, and the drawer in the back of her skull rattled so hard she could barely hold the paper steady. She got up, ostensibly to get water, actually to get her phone, and looked Maddie Pierce up while Scott rummaged for the last of the seltzer. The website was good. The photos were better. A woman with dark hair and a smirk that suggested she'd heard every objection in the world and enjoyed all of them, standing on a stage with a row of volunteers behind her looking like they'd forgotten their own names and were grateful for it.

Amy put the phone face down on the counter and breathed.

"Ames? You good?"

"Fine." She came back to the bed. Sat on the edge. Looked at her husband, gray coming in at the temples, socks on, crumbs on his shirt, the love of her entire life. "I dare you to volunteer at the show."

Scott blinked. "Volunteer."

"Onstage. Tomorrow night. I dare you."

He grinned, slow, and she watched the idea land on him like a thrown ball he was deciding to catch. "You dare me."

"That's what I said."

"What's it worth?"

"Does it have to be worth something?"

"Everything's worth something with you. Twenty years, I know the exchange rate." He sat up, took her hand, thumb moving over her knuckles. "Okay. You dare me, I'll do it. I'll get up on that stage and quack like a duck if some stranger tells me to. For you."

For you. Amy kissed him, hard, and hoped he'd read it as anniversary enthusiasm, and out the balcony door the ocean kept moving, enormous and dark, patient, and the drawer in her skull rattled and rattled and did not open.