“I know. I can pay you for it, half, I’m saying, if that helps at all, or …”

“No, come on, please, you know it’s not about that. The cost. I’m just saying that it’s a shame, some beautiful room overlooking the water standing empty this weekend because we didn’t get it together … that’s all. It bothers me somehow.”

“It was just the image of him, sitting there in the breakfast nook with that carton of Count Chocula, that did me in. I saw him with a puddle of brown milk in his bowl and it all made sense to me, what I’d been doing to him. The hurt that was piling up because of this. Us.”

“Us? You mean like us us?”

“Yes. You and me.”

“So, is that how you think of us? In terms of hurt?”

“In some way, yes. I mean, I’ve loved it when we’ve been together—at our best it’s breathtaking and exciting and, well, so many things. Like indoor fireworks. I’ve felt all this, just … stuff with you that I haven’t felt for the longest time, but …”

“What? What is it?”

“As I sat there watching him eat, trying to scoop up those last little marshmallow pieces with his spoon and make his way out of that puzzle, I felt some kind of pleasure. Only a second, really, but it was so deep and so honest, and it was in that instant that I remembered everything about why we had come together and married and had children and had lasted this long. Through sickness and money troubles and recessions and a war and even you and me. We had weathered all of that and were still together—that man in there and myself—because of a kind of pleasure we brought to one another, something that … if I’m honest about it … you and I will probably never have a chance of finding.”

“Jesus, that’s …”

“I’m just being honest.”

“Yes. Brutally honest.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You could’ve … I mean, you could just say, ‘I can’t make it this weekend.’ You don’t have to drive a stake through the heart of it, do you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes, maybe I do.”

“Jesus. That’s … shit.”

“I wish I had a picture that I could show you of the moment I witnessed there. That second of pleasure. I think then you’d understand.”

“I don’t mean to be blunt or anything, but honestly … I doubt it.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I think you’re just feeling guilty.”

“Yeah, that might be it, too. God, I don’t know …”