Barb Johnson | 2009 Fiction Honorable Mention

Excerpt from The Invitation

Sex isn’t love, Maggie told me when she was trying to convince me that what she’d done with another woman hadn’t meant a thing. “One stupid moment,” she told me. “Just one!” She wanted me to stop being mad. She wanted to stop feeling guilty. Who wouldn’t? “It’s you I love,” she kept saying. Sex isn’t love. I know that. But just like everything else I know, it’s taking a long time for my feelings to catch up to it.

———

Maggie checks for evidence that I’ve been working on the invitation. “How’s it coming?” she asks, looking from a stack of towels on the counter to a solitary vase of yellow hibiscus on the table.

“How is what coming?” I ask. I’m being a jackass. I know that.

Maggie nudges me in the hip with her foot. She says, “You realize that you’re not going to wear me down with your indifference, right?”

“It’s not indifference I was going for,” I point out. “I hoped you’d be discouraged by my complete opposition.”

“You said you were fine with having an anniversary party as long as we didn’t make any big announcements. As long as we didn’t make it a thing.”

“I did not say I was fine. I said okay. Okay is made up of tiny molecules of ambivalence, Maggie. It’s the opposite of fine.”

Maggie hops off the counter, backs me up to the wall, makes me look her right in her eyes. “You want to take this step, Delia. You want to let the past go and be happy about our anniversary. And you want other people to be happy about it, too. I know you.”

“You’re starting to know me,” I tell her. That’s a thing we say to each other when we don’t think our complexity is being fully appreciated: You’re starting to know me. “Twenty years is nothing,” I say. “Twenty years is still casual sex.”

“Ha!” Maggie laughs and backs away a little. “I know you. You need to drag your feet when you’re afraid, and I need someone to resist my efforts. And that,” she says, kissing me, “makes us perfect for each other.”

“I’m not afraid,” I say to Maggie’s back as she’s leaving.

“You are,” she calls over her shoulder. “And you’ve been smoking, too. But I know you. You’ll pull it together.”

When there are only two weeks left before the big day, I still haven’t started the invitations. I’m in the Laundromat’s big kitchen, folding and wrapping, and Maggie comes in to quiz me. She’s a patient person, but her tone says she’s about had it with me.

“I’m working on it,” I say. And maybe I am. It always takes me a while to know what I’m actually up to.

Maggie goes back out front. I follow her. I want to tell her that I’m not sure why I’m dragging my feet. Before I can say anything, though, I notice a blank spot on the wall.

“Hey,” I say. “Where’s the picture of Saravuth?” Saravuth is one of the men whose fight face Maggie has captured and hung on the wall.

“Shot,” Maggie sighs. “I gave the picture to his brother to carry at the funeral.”

Maggie goes to sit out front, and I stare at the rash of empty spots on the wall. One a month, almost, is how fast the men disappear. There’s real trouble in the world. The kind that can’t be fixed. The kind we lie awake keeping vigil against. Love is not trouble. It is all we have to light our days, to bring music to the time we’ve been given.

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