Marc recognizes the woman as soon as she steps through the door, not by her face—she never did send that picture—but by her hesitation. She stands in the café entrance for a moment, teeth worrying at her lower lip, eyes bouncing from table to table. When her gaze settles on him, he raises a hand in a gesture that is not quite a wave.

It’s not much, but it’s enough to encourage her. She makes her way over to him, carefully high-stepping over backpacks and jackets and feet. Her hands are lost in the oversized sleeves of her fall coat.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says. Her voice doesn’t sound the way he thought it would from her messages. It is louder, less playful. She stands by the table, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, but does not sit down. “Traffic, you know.”

She is older than he thought she’d be. Her sensible blonde bob is shot with grey, her eyes set deep in a network of creases and crow’s feet. The hands clutching the strap of her purse are thin and thickly veined, with wide, slightly knobbly knuckles. Still, he thinks, not bad. Not bad at all.

“That’s alright,” he says. He sent her a photo of himself the night before, and he is suddenly, horribly conscious of the fact that it was at least ten years out of date. It did not include the little potbelly he’s grown since hitting fifty, the thinning hair he can’t quite coax into a combover. Is she looking at him the way he is looking at her? “What would you like? Coffee, or…?” He reaches for his wallet, but she raises a hand to warn him off.

“Oh, I’ll get yours for you. Seems only fair, doesn’t it?” And she laughs, a little bark that rings loud over the soft buzz of conversation. “What’ll it be?”

He had expected to pay for them both, but he certainly isn’t going to turn down a free coffee now that his hours have been cut. Especially not in this cafe, where even a small drink costs over five dollars. “Latte,” he says. “Soy, if they have it.”

He watches her turn to stand in the line by the counter and wonders if that is a creepy thing to do. Surely not—surely looking at a woman you have agreed to meet for coffee is allowed. Still, he is uncertain. His daughter Marie has told him dozens of stories about the men she meets at university, their bad behaviour, their wandering eyes and hands. Every so often she will describe a young man’s actions as “totally creepy,” and Marc will realize, with a twinge of unease, that she is describing the sort of thing he did as a young man, chasing girls.

Better to be careful, he thinks, and averts his eyes, studying the map of water stains spreading across the ceiling. There’s Tasmania up there, and the Isle of Skye, and something that might be Indonesia if he tilts his head. Places he’s never been, places he’ll never be. Angie always wanted to travel, asked him every year why they couldn’t take a trip to some place she’d read about in one of her books. Add that to the long list of reasons why they didn’t work out. Another thing to think about when he’s awake at four in the morning, listening to the bathroom faucet drip.

He shakes his head to clear it and tries to focus instead on this day, this date. The excitement he’d felt when he realized that this woman was someone he wanted to meet, that this might actually become something.

Wednesday, she’d written, the last message in a string of them that had veered wildly between sentimental and sexually explicit. The cafe on Ronson Ave, 2PM. Don’t be late, baby.

The woman makes her way back to the table, a white china mug in each hand. They tremble a little bit, her hands. Coffee spills over the rims, leaving a brown trail on the linoleum behind her. She doesn’t notice until she sets them down on the table and sees the wet rings around their bottoms.

“Fuck,” she says. The cursing is unexpected. She seems like the kind of woman who would say “fudge.” “Sorry. Can’t believe I’ve already made a mess.”

“It’s okay,” he says, and means it. The fact that she is nervous reassures him. Nervous is a cousin to excited.  “No use crying over spilled coffee, right?”

The laugh again, abrupt and resonant. Beyond her a few people turn, looking for the source of the noise. Is this another manifestation of nervousness, or is it just how her laugh always sounds? If the latter, is it something he will be able to live with?

“Right,” she says, and finally sits. “Well. Thank you for meeting me.” She curls both hands around her mug for a second, squeezing, before busying herself with the wire rack of sugar packets. There is jam in that rack, too, little individual packs of strawberry and blackberry. Marc fights the childish urge to rip one open and scoop out its innards with his index finger, as well as the slightly less childish urge to pocket a handful of them for use at home. Jam is expensive.

“Of course,” he says, for lack of anything else to say, and smiles. Women like his smile; it softens the crags and valleys of his face, gentling its harsh landscape. But she is too busy stirring multiple packs of sugar into her coffee to see it. The smile tightens with each passing moment, until finally it feels too much like a grimace and he drops it. Of course, that is when she finally looks up.

“I’ve never done this before, you know,” the woman says. He wonders what her real name is. On the website she is HunnyBunny72, but he can hardly call her that in person.

“Neither have I,” he replies, his standard response. It tends to put women at ease, banishing their secret terror that everyone they know is getting laid all the time, that they are the only ones who don’t get out as much as they should. It has the reverse effect on this woman. She looks suddenly terrified.

“Really?” she says, two syllables packed with frayed nerves and second thoughts. “Never?”

“Well, not never,” Marc amends, rather hastily. He can feel the sweat starting under his arms already. “I… not often, is what I meant. Not all the time.”

She relaxes a little bit, although her eyes keep some of their wariness.

“Selective, are you?” she says, and takes a long sip of her coffee, then makes a face. “That’s good. Glad I made the cut, so to speak. I like your cologne.”

Marie got him the cologne for Christmas last year, a present sent through the mail and opened in a studio apartment with a twin bed and no tree. He couldn’t afford to fly her down for the holiday. After everything that went down with Angie, lawyers and all the rest of it, money’s made a habit of disappearing faster than he can make it. For a while Marie had made some noise about coming down on her own dime, but he knew she couldn’t really afford it. When he didn’t take the bait, she let it drop.

“Thank you,” he says, and then, because he knows it will come up at some point, and he wants to get all the possible reactions out of the way early, he adds, “I’m divorced.”

It still feels strange to say it out loud. He and Angie have been officially done for a year and a half, unofficially done for two years before that, but he still can’t think of himself as a divorced man the way he used to think of himself as a married man. “Marriage is a state of mind,” that’s what the therapist said that time they gave counseling the old college try. It’s a state he’s still in.

“I’m not,” the woman says, and raises her left hand. A band of gold gleams on her ring finger. “Obviously.” She waggles the finger back and forth, then looks at it as though she hadn’t meant to move it at all. An alien appendage, animated by someone else’s thoughts.

This is not something Marc had anticipated. The thought of making it with a married woman is more disturbing to him than he thought it would be. In his mind’s eye he sees the priest that counselled he and Angie before their wedding, how his nostrils flared and gave them a glimpse of the bushy hair inside as he intoned that adultery was one of the gravest sins a person could commit in the eyes of the Lord. They had laughed about that later, he and Angie, at his nose hair and the sinister emphasis he put on the word “adultery.”

“Oh,” he says, and takes a gulp of his latte. It leaves a thick feeling on his tongue that makes him want to spit.

He thought he was being smooth, but the woman raises an eyebrow. It is darker than her hair. “Does that matter?” she asks. That wary look is still in her eyes. She’s making up her mind about him. “I mean, does that mean—”

“No,” he says hurriedly, shaking his head. “No, of course not.” And perhaps it shouldn’t. He remembers his buddy Dave from the warehouse talking about his marriage, how he and his wife had decided to “open things up.” It was good for them, he said, they came home and compared notes, told one another stories about their dates. Maybe this is the same kind of thing. Maybe he isn’t an accessory to infidelity, but boldly going where, admittedly, at least one man has gone before.

“The fucking prick,” she says quietly, then, louder, “The fucking, fucking prick.”

Her voice rises so sharply on the last word that an old woman turns to scowl in their direction.

“Do you mind?” she hisses. “There are children here, you know.”

She jerks a thumb in the direction of a booth several yards away. Sure enough, there are two little girls sitting there, one with untidy braids and one with a high, tight ponytail, both focused with solemn intensity on colouring books. Their mother watches them from under her lashes, sipping slowly at her coffee. They do not seem to have heard the obscenity. Still, Marc finds himself flushing guiltily, his shoulders hunching up to cover his ears.

“Sorry,” he mutters.

“Sorry,” his date echoes, looking past the old woman to the girls in the booth. Her hands rip open another pack of sugar and stir it into her coffee. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

The old woman rolls her shoulders, coughs a little, mutters something as she walks away. Marc’s date keeps stirring, her eyes still locked on the little girls, their chubby fists full of crayons.

“Are you alright?” Marc asks, a little unnerved by the steadiness of her gaze, the quickness of her hands. “Do you want to leave, or…?”

His date starts and shakes her head a little longer than she needs to. “No,” she says, loudly; then, softer, “No, thank you. The only thing that would feel worse than this would be going home. Sitting in that quiet, that…”

She stops, sighs, drops her head in her hands. Her fingers curl around the soft edges of her face the way they’d curled around her coffee cup moments before. “He’s cheating on me, you know,” she says, her voice only slightly muffled by her hands. “That’s why I’m here.”

Marc flinches. So this isn’t a boldly going situation.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, and means it. He remembers the time Angie cheated on him, the sickening kick to the gut when he had looked at her phone and read the texts she’d sent the other guy. Tom, a guy with thick glasses and pipe cleaner arms. Harmless to look at. She worked with him. Marc had even met him once or twice. “Have you been married long?”

“Twenty-five years,” the woman says, coming for air. Her face is red, but her eyes are dry. “A quarter of a century, if you want to think of it that way. I don’t. It makes me feel old.”

“You’re not old.” This is a little generous on Marc’s part, and the woman seems to recognize it. She smiles. It’s a quick smile, the briefest of flashes, but it softens her, makes her prettier. Gives him hope.

“You’re sweet,” she says. “But I am old. And I’m not even old enough to be an old woman yet. At least that seems like it could be fun. You can do and say whatever you want, and no one can get mad at you. They think, oh, she probably doesn’t even know what she’s doing, and they let you get away with…” She pauses, her eyes wandering to some point above his head. Tasmania, he thinks. “My mother, when she turned seventy, she started shoplifting. She’d always been so good, so… solid, you know? And then I get a call at work, and it’s the police, and they have her in handcuffs. Handcuffs! I went to get her, and had to sign all kinds of crap, and promise that I would keep a closer eye on her. As if I could. I couldn’t keep her locked in the house, could I? Chained to the bed, with a camera pointed at her twenty-four hours a day?” Her voice begins to rise in volume again.

“No, of course not,” he says, hoping that his own voice is as soothing as he means it to be. He doesn’t want another scolding. “She lives with you, then?”

“Lived.” The woman shrugs. “She died in March. A stroke. I found her in the living room.”

“I’m sorry,” Marc says again, and winces at how flimsy the words sound. The woman seems to think the same thing. Her lip curls, not in a smile this time, but like a dog’s.

“Everyone is,” she says, and there is a bite to her words that makes Marc want to push his chair farther away from her. “That’s all I got for months afterwards. ‘We’re sorry, so sorry, we’re very, very sorry.’ I could choke on sorry.”

“I,” Marc starts, but she holds up a hand, stopping his words.

“You mean well, I know that. It just gets exhausting, people saying they’re sorry. Like you’re meant to forgive them. It’s just death. It happens. I had a few good cries about it, then moved on. To be honest, some days I feel… not glad she’s dead, not that. She’s my mother. I miss her. But I’m glad the house doesn’t smell like her anymore. She always covered herself in talcum powder, and she started wetting herself at the end. That smell soaked into the entire house. The walls, the furniture, my clothes. No matter how often I washed them, there would be that piss-and-talcum smell. No one else could smell it, but I could, and I hated it. When it finally started to fade I would come home from work for lunch just so I could enjoy my house smelling good again.” She looks at the spoon lying on the table, moves it an inch to the right, then two inches to the left, gives up and folds her hands together. “That’s how I caught him at it. The smell.”

“Him?”

“My husband.”

Marc wonders if he should change the subject, try to redirect the conversation to less upsetting matters. That is what he would have done on a date with Angie when she was in a pet, tried to distract her or jolly her out of it. But the woman seems to be on a roll.

“I came home for lunch,” she says. Her voice is quiet now, even, measured. “His car wasn’t in the driveway, but when I got to the front step, I could smell something. His smell, my husband’s, which is sweaty and sort of organic. Like a cheese. And I could smell a stranger. It was a woman’s smell, sort of bloody and fleshy. I knew what was happening then, I think. I opened the door carefully, shut it so the latch didn’t click. Walked up the stairs with my shoes off. I didn’t want to give them a chance to start throwing on clothes and coming up with excuses.”

She falters on this last word, stops and stares into her coffee. There is a sheen on its surface like the rainbow skin on a spill of oil. More out of a sense of obligation than anything, Marc reaches out to cover her hands with one of his own. They are cold and surprisingly dry. He had expected soft skin, well-lotioned and perfumed, like Angie’s. These hands could be his own, all scales and hangnails.

Gently, hoping against hope that she’s done, he says, “We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t—”

“No!” The word is like her laugh, gun-sharp, and he winces again. She seems to notice and says, more quietly, “I have to talk about it. You have to know why I’m doing this. I’m a good person. I am. I’m not just… this isn’t for no reason. It’s important to me that you know that.”

So there’s no getting out of it, then. Marc breathes in deep, tries another gentle smile, and says, “Okay.”

The woman draws her hands out from beneath his and fusses for a moment with her hair, an earring, the collar of her blouse, before continuing.

“They weren’t in our bedroom,” she says. “They weren’t in my mother’s room either, the one that was our son’s before he went to college. They were in my daughter’s room. Chloe’s room. End of the hall, right next to the bathroom. I could hear them as I came down the hall. Or, not them. Just her. He was completely silent. He never was with me—there’d always be a sound, a grunt. Something. That seemed… I don’t know. It seemed important.”

“What kind of sounds was she making?” Marc asks this without meaning to, the question lurching up unbidden from the cellar of his mind. He remembers the nights he had spent lying awake after Angie’s affair, picturing Tom from the office fucking her in every conceivable position, defying biology and physics with his enthusiastic copulatory gymnastics. That was what had killed their marriage in the end—not her infidelity, but how often and how vividly he imagined it afterwards.

“I don’t know. Normal ones,” the woman says, rather irritably. “I stood there and watched them for a while. The door wasn’t open all the way, just half, so all I could see was him from the back. They weren’t on the bed. They were up against this white rocking chair that Chloe bought at a flea market years ago. Not even sitting in it, just sort of leaning against it. He was standing, and she was bent over, and every time he moved the top rail of the chair would bang up against the wall. I found that kind of funny, that bang bang bang. I nearly laughed. And I nearly laughed at him, standing there. He’s got these mats of hair all down his shoulders and back. His ass kept clenching and relaxing over and over again, like a fist. It’s a disgusting thing, isn’t it, an ass? I don’t understand why so many people like them.”

Marc shrugs. He has no feelings on the subject.

“So I’m standing there,” she continues, “watching them, feeling like a character in a movie. Not even a character with a name—Wronged Wife Number Three, something like that. And I’m feeling the moment stretch out, and knowing that it’s getting to the point where it will be weirder and weirder if I say anything. The normal reaction isn’t to watch, right? It’s to yell, or to break things. But I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to take it in, really understand what was happening. And then…”

Her hands, placed once again on the table, begin to tremble again. The ring on her finger taps out quiet Morse code.

“And then?” Marc prompts, when it seems like she isn’t going to say anything. It’s not that he wants to hear this story, exactly, or even wants to be there at the table with her. But at this point he figures he should at least find out how it ends, both the story and the date. It’ll be a funny story to tell Dave. Or Marie. Or even Angie, if they ever get to the point where they can speak to one another without the conversation trailing off into nastiness.

The woman takes a deep breath, the last gulp of air before a deep-sea dive.

“She moved,” she says. “The girl he was with, he did something to her that hurt her, and she said ‘ow’—the only word I heard her say—and sort of shimmied and twisted a little. Just enough so I could see part of her. I wasn’t curious about what she looked like. I knew she would be prettier than me, younger than me, thinner. They always are, aren’t they?”

Marc remembers the Tom that had existed in his mind’s eye, all muscle and thick hair and long, hard cock. He nods. His date leans a little closer across the table.

“I didn’t see her face,” she says. Her breath comes out in wet and sour puffs. “All I really saw was her hair. It was red.”

She delivers this last sentence in the tone of someone dropping a final brick on top of a pile, leans back in her chair and looks at him expectantly.

“Red,” Marc repeats, wondering what, exactly, he is meant to take from this fact.

“Red,” she says, in the exact same tone. Then, “So, how are we going to do this?”

The letdown of the story’s sudden end makes Marc feel weak and breathless, the way he feels when he collapses into bed after a long, wrenching day at work. That’s the climax of the story, that her husband has a thing for redheads?

He looks at the woman sitting across from him and realises that he does not want her. The version of her that existed in messages is nothing like the trembling, shouting mess in front of him.

“Look,” he says, “are you sure you want to? You have every right to be angry, to be hurt. God knows…” He shudders, remembering the torrid fantasies he entertained after Angie’s affair, fever dreams in which he fucked every woman he knew right in front of her, in their home, in their bed. “God knows I’ve been there. But wouldn’t you rather it end in a way that’s, that’s clean? A divorce, maybe—if you confronted him—”

The woman stares at him as though he has begun speaking in tongues.

“Did you not hear what I said?” she asks. “Her hair was red. Red.”

Marc takes a moment, thinks over the past few minutes in case there is something he has missed, then says, “I don’t know what that means.”

His date opens her mouth, then closes it firmly.

“Right,” she says, and reaches into the pocket of her coat. “I suppose you wouldn’t, would you?”

Her wallet lands on the table between them with a fleshy thump. From it she pulls out a small photograph. Marc takes it gingerly, trying to touch as little of its surface as possible. He hates the sticky feel of photographs, prefers the pictures he takes with his phone.

“You found a picture of her?” he says. The young woman in the photo is redheaded, pretty, with a smile that makes her look both pleased and faintly puzzled. She is standing in front of a fountain, one hand up to shade her eyes from the sun. “Did he have this on him, or something?”

“This isn’t the woman,” his date says. “This isn’t her. This is Chloe.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes. My daughter.”

Again that expectant look, the sense that she is waiting for him to put two and two together.

“He was in her room,” his date says. She is not gritting her teeth, but he can tell that she wants to. “He was in her room, and he chose a girl with red hair.”

Marc looks at her, looks at the picture. Her daughter. His daughter. “Christ,” he says, feeling the hideous inadequacy of it on his tongue. But he can think of nothing else to say. He thinks of Marie, her curls, the way she laughs through her nose like a bull about to charge, and his stomach lurches.

“Did he ever,” he begins, but the woman is already shaking her head.

“I don’t know,” she says. “And I can’t ask. If it happened and she doesn’t want me to know, she won’t tell me. If it didn’t… she was always a daddy’s girl. Went to him with all her problems, told him things she would never dream of telling me. If I say anything… it would kill her to know. So I can’t let her find out.”

She is on the verge of tears. He can hear it in her voice, that trembling note creeping in and making the syllables waver. He imagines her cracking into a thousand tiny pieces, little pin-sharp slivers of woman to be swept up and thrown away.

“She’s away now,” says the woman. “First year of university. She’s pre-med, wants to be a doctor. Wants to save people. She’s going to do more to make the world a better place than I ever did. But this… this is something I can do to make it better. I can keep her safe.”

“Safe? How will—”

“You can do it in the house,” she says. Her voice is low again, pitched so that only he can hear her. “He’ll be home this Saturday afternoon. Make it look random, a break-in that went wrong. You can knock some stuff over, take a couple of valuables, set the scene. I’ll make sure I’m out that day. Have all my alibis in place. I’ll make sure people see me, just like you said.”

Just like he said. In his mind Marc frantically scrolls through days of messages with HunnyBunny72, trying to find a single exchange that involved alibis, break-ins, keeping girls safe.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I think there’s been—”

“I have everything in the trunk of my car,” the woman says, leaning forward. There is a glint in her eye that wasn’t there before, the bright light of intent. “Gloves, the crowbar for the back door, the gun.” Seeing his open mouth, his furrowed brow, she adds, “I have the money, too. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“The money?” Marc repeats weakly. The reality of what she is asking of him is beginning to set in. A crowbar for the back door, a gun. Money.

Money.

She reaches back into her coat pocket and pulls out a roll of bills. The thump it makes when she places it on the table is unnervingly solid.

“My rainy-day stash,” she says, watching him. “Old school, hidden in a shoebox at the back of the closet. I’ve been adding to it for years. Never thought I would need it for this, but…” She shrugs.

He picks up the roll, marvelling at the weight of it in his hand. There is no mistaking that dirty, coppery smell for anything but money. His fingers close around it of their own volition, covering the blank green faces staring out at him. To hide it, he tells himself, to make sure the other people in the cafe don’t see it. That’s all it is.

Wednesday. The cafe on Ronson Ave, 2PM. Don’t be late, baby.

“Is it Wednesday?” he asks.

The woman frowns. “Tuesday,” she replies. “That’s what you said in your email, right? ‘Tuesday, two o’clock, have forty percent and everything ready to go.’” She does a passable imitation of his voice, one that he would feel slightly insulted by in different circumstances.

Tuesday. Not Wednesday at all. He looks at this woman, this stranger, and squeezes the roll of bills in his hand. It is so thick it barely gives under his fingers.

“It’s twenty grand,” she said. She has not missed the awe with which he tested the weight of the bills. “You get the other thirty afterwards. That’s how you guys do it, right?”

In his mind’s eye he sees his dingy studio apartment, the boxes of Kraft dinner lining his cupboards, the twin bed he got second-hand with the mattress that sags and squeals whenever he sits on it. Sees the numbers in his bank account ticking lower and lower, each rent cheque and gas payment kicking him further down towards the red. Sees Marie, her voice soft and anxious, asking him if he’s sure he doesn’t need any help this month, she can put off buying that textbook, the class doesn’t start until practically February, and they barely ask you about anything in it anyway…

Marie. In the photograph Chloe smiles her pleased and puzzled smile, looking out into a world that is uglier than she deserves. He imagines her with curly hair. He imagines he can hear her laugh, like a bull.

“Yeah,” he says finally, then sits up straighter in his chair. His hand slides into his jacket pocket, the weight of the money a reassuring drag. “Yeah, that’s how we do it.”

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Elliott Gish is a writer and librarian from Nova Scotia. Her short fiction has appeared in the New Quarterly, the Ex-Puritan, Grain Magazine, the Dalhousie Review, and many others. Her debut novel, Grey Dog (ECW Press 2024), was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction. Elliott lives in Halifax with her wife and a small black cat.

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