It happens on a crowded city street with the sun reflecting off a skyscraper’s windows and people pushing past them.
A group of tourists ask him to take their picture just as he’s about to say that he couldn’t see her in the picture ten years from now. And he snaps the picture with a frown on his face still telling them to smile. He does it wrong the first time and has to try again while she stands behind him with her arms folded across her chest, waiting. He tries to laugh out a, “Technology never agrees with me,” but he mostly sounds angry and the worried Midwesterners’ smiles tighten a little as he presses the button again.
He hands the camera back to the man who’d handed it to him without saying a word, just nods and turns back to her.
She’d gone back to the hotel and changed before her lunch and now she’s in jeans and her hair is down and the wind picks up, blowing it across her face. And he wishes he didn’t feel that weird pang of love or guilt or something when she hooked her index finger on one of the strands and pulled it back behind her ear.
Still he’s saying, “I didn’t want to do it this way, but-”
It happens as a taxi stops for a guy yelling at someone on his cell phone, not out of anger but because they just can’t hear him.
She puts her hands on her hips and says, “What way did you want to do it?” A woman walking by bumps into her elbow, sending her stumbling forward as the taxi door shuts and it pulls away from the curb, the man still yelling into his phone about being home soon- soon, no, half an hour and I’ll be there, hello?
He reaches into his breast pocket, finding the rough edges of foil first. And when he hands it to her, he’s afraid she might tear it into pieces, leave them scattered on the concrete, let them fall into the storm drain. He’s afraid she won’t understand and she doesn’t because her forehead crinkles a little and she laughs, “Cute,” and hands it back to him.
He puts it back, making sure not to bend the corners. He says, “No, it’s not-”
It happens by a street vendor selling sweatshirts and hats with the C missing from NYC.
“No, no. I get it,” she says and she turns her eyes to watch a couple speaking German buy matching sweatshirts. The man pays while the woman watches him a smile spreading wide across her face. She kisses him after he gets his change and says something to him. He doesn’t respond, just laughs and puts his arm around her shoulders as they walk away.
“She’s my best friend,” he says helplessly because he knows it’s the wrong thing, knows it won’t help. So before she can react he keeps talking, “Look, I’m sorry. I just-”
She doesn’t say anything, just looks at him as a rush of people pushes between them. And it’s hard for him to gauge what she’s feeling between bobbing heads.
It happens on a busy sidewalk and he has to talk louder than usual and cars seem to honk their horns whenever he opens his mouth.
He’s saying over the traffic and the people, “I have to go back. I can’t stay here.” And he has to talk even louder to clarify for her that he doesn’t just mean that in a geographical sense but in every other sense too. Louder still when he says, “It’s not that I didn’t ever love you. Or- I think I was starting to, but-”
A cloud passes over the sun and suddenly everything’s gray. She looks up and down the street, at the tops of the building he’s standing in front of, at their shoes on city concrete. She looks anywhere but at him, her mouth twisting. And then that cloud moves again and he has to squint to really see her.
It happens in a city that’s foreign to him, but not to her where she orders dinner for him and tells him how to get everywhere and leaves him reeling as she hurries onto a subway car without him.
She pulls her sunglasses down over her eyes and says, “You know, I always knew this would happen eventually. Ever since- And I guess I thought maybe I could stop it. I could get you away long enough for you to forget. But-” She stops, shrugs and shakes her head.
“Karen-” The street vendor is eyeing them now and he’s sweating in his suit. He pulls at the knot in his tie, loosening it a little. “I’m-”
But she’s walking backwards, hands in her pockets, saying, “Look, I’ll just get a ride back from one of my friends in the morning or something, okay?”
She turns around, walking back down the street as he calls after her, “Oh, uh, okay.”
She looks over her shoulder and as the sea of pedestrians becomes wider and wider between them she asks, “You can find your way back?”
And as she’s disappearing he lets out a quiet, “Yeah,” and tries to keep his eyes on the back of her head until he can’t tell hers from any of the others.
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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