Something like a song or a  siren interferes with your journey, and you lift your head to squint at the red numbers on the other side of the room.  While you are absolutely certain that the first is a seven, you can’t tell if the second is a three or a five. You’re inclined to take your chances on the three, to grant yourself permission to fall back down into your pillow, so you can find out where in the world you were headed with the Chinese broadsword, the potato masher, and the little blue wagon, but you haul your ass out of bed, nonetheless.

After you’ve showered and dressed for walking-around-in-feels-like-winter weather, you descend the stairs into an invisible fog that smells like bacon. Your husband greets you with an extra-large, decaf coffee that he’s poured into a thermal travel cup. Ever since your alarmingly-high cholesterol result last spring, you’ve been making brownies with olive oil and egg whites, and so your husband has learned to fry just enough bacon for himself.  Nevertheless, beneath a bowl in front of your regular seat is a steaming plate of scrambled eggs. You know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, so you eat them anyway, savoring their buttery edges.

Your husband tells you that while you were sleeping, he filled up your gas tank and changed out a windshield wiper. As if he can read your mind, he says it will be partly cloudy with a high of 44,  not a bad day, but don’t forget there’s always an umbrella in the trunk.

The dishwasher is already running, so you put your plate in the sink, and turn to kiss your husband. He pulls you in close for a hug that makes you gasp before he ascends the stairs, humming, to shower.

You almost rush out the door without washing down your once-a-day women’s vitamin with your ginger-echinacea juice. You’re dismayed to discover that the only glass in the cabinet has a hairline crack, and you think of tossing it into the recycle bin with the IPA bottles. You hesitate not because you’d have to open the dishwasher and interrupt its cycle but because the hexagonal tumbler is from a set your mother gave you eleven years ago—the last Christmas of her compromised life.

You run your fingers along the inside and outside of the glass. The walls are smooth. You pour your juice, down your vitamin, get on your way.

When you arrive two hours later, they are waiting for you at a picnic table outside the entrance to the sculpture garden.  Your sister fastens a paper bracelet around your thin wrist,  and you quickly Venmo your brother-in-law $18.50.  

They haven’t purchased a bracelet for your husband, because you texted your sister and  your best friend from high school last night that the man you’ve been with for the last 26 years is still a little freaked out about the masking mandate being lifted and considers himself higher risk because he smoked cigarettes as teenager. No one asks if you told him the art is scattered in meadows and woods, atop hills and along ponds, across 42 acres—all of it outdoors.  

You can’t get over how much your three nephews have grown; the eldest is almost as tall as your brother-in-law, though still pimpled-faced and willing to assume the persona of a Marvel villain as he leaps off pedestals and duels with his siblings among dozing bronze bulls, wrought-iron aliens, and the gargantuan ankles of a too-giddy Marilyn Monroe. 

You assume similar abandon, darting and dodging with your brother-in-law and your best friend in a copse of granite monoliths,  determined to avoid the sneaky hand of your quick-footed sister.

After lunch, you take in a series of vignettes sculpted in homage to famous painters of the late 19th and early 20^th centuries. You sister insists on posing you and your best friend with Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol.  Each of you take turns covering you ears with your palms and imitating the open-mouthed despair in Edvard Munch’s The Scream.   

You are near the end of your tour when you come upon four figures that you vaguely recognize from a painting by Eduoard Manet. In the rear of the scene, a white-frocked woman is wading in a garden stream, dipping her hand to wash her face. But it is the foreground that gives you pause.  Two men clad in trousers and ties, buttoned vests, and overcoats, are seated on the ground beside a picnic basket tipped over with apples and pears. One of the men, clutching a walking cane, is conversing casually with the other as if they are the only two present.  But sharing their blue blanket is a naked woman. She is posed in a thinking posture,  elbow on bent knee and thumb and forefinger clasped around her chin, looking away from the men, directly at you.

You want to take a moment longer to deconstruct the scene, but your leg-weary cohort has moved on.

Before you depart, you promise that you will meet all them more often, to get together and do fun things like you used to. They remind you that your own kids are grown, that all you have is time and no excuses.

As you tilt your EZ Pass at the turnpike scanner, you think of your husband at home watching the Mets and you try to remember when he began to favor baseball more than kyaking or hiking or spending an afternoon with anyone else but himself.  It occurs to you that your husband is becoming a lot your dad, who cultivated an NFL obsession in middle age.

Your phone buzzes.  Seeing that it is your best friend, you park at a rest-stop and call her back.

She  wants to answer the question you never asked, why she divorced a little over a year ago.  She tells you that she cheated on her husband with a work colleague, a guy who disgusted her, fat and bald, but paid her attention. And then it turned into something else that she didn’t really want, but it was better than  what she had — until he ended it two years in.  You can’t believe it’s been more than two years since you phoned your friend.  You ask what about her husband, a likable enough guy, as far as you could tell. She says it was a good thing they didn’t have kids.  You say good bye 76 minutes later.

When you get home, it is dark and your husband’s pick-up truck is not in the driveway, but you find a plate of homemade lasagna and buttered garlic bread under foil. You are just sitting down to eat when he bursts through the door.

Finally home, he says.

You explain that you were delayed because of a phone call.

Yeah right.  I bet you didn’t even go to that sculpture garden.  Who were you meeting?

You can see that he has been drinking, likely at the local sports bar without a mask, but he couldn’t have been gone too long because the plate is still warm.

So how was it?

How was what? You are annoyed. You scan the kitchen for the rest of the bread.

The fucking sculpture garden. You can’t even make up a lie about it.

You slam your phone onto the kitchen table and show him your call log and scroll through photo after photo of your nephews, your brother-in-law, your sister and best friend, concluding your montage with a flattering depiction of yourself  screaming. 

His face falls. 

Okay, okay.  I’m sorry. Looks like it was boring, glad you got to see your family, glad I didn’t go.

You let him hug you. 

I love you, he says, and retreats toward the television, singing a song you used to dance to.

You kick off your shoes,  stab a forkful of lasagna, and scroll back through your photos to study the expression of the woman in the garden by Eduard Manet.

– Patricia Carlozzi