The Small Comforts



I.



Anna Kowalski was thirty-one years old the first time she realized she had been spending five years of her life with a man who had never once introduced her to his mother.



She was sitting at the kitchen counter in the Euclid Avenue apartment, eating cereal out of a bowl that said WORLD'S OKAYEST EMPLOYEE in faded letters, when the text message came through on her phone. It was from Chris. It read: Tanya's back. We ran into each other at a conference.



Anna put her phone down. She finished her cereal. She washed the bowl and put it in the drying rack next to the sink, where it joined a collection of other dishes that had been drying for three days because she had been meaning to put them away and had not gotten around to it.



Buster the cat jumped onto the counter and sat next to her bowl, watching her with yellow eyes that said, in a language Anna understood perfectly: you are late again.



"I know," Anna said. "I'll feed you in a minute."



She did not text Chris back. She went to work at the bookstore in Ohio City, shelving mystery novels in the morning and helping a teenager find a copy of The Bell Jar in the afternoon, and then she went home and fed Buster and opened her laptop and scrolled through job listings on LinkedIn until twelve o'clock, when she closed the laptop and made pasta and ate it standing up at the stove, the way she always did when she was alone.



That night, Chris did not call. The next day, he did not call. On the third day, she found out from her sister Debby, who had seen a post on Facebook — Tanya Rossi, back in Cleveland! Having brunch with Chris Moretti at the Tower City café! — that they had been having lunch. Several times.



Anna sat on the edge of her bed and looked at Buster, who was sleeping on a pile of laundry in the corner, and she thought about the word arrangement, which Chris had used exactly once, three weeks earlier, when he had said, over breakfast: We should talk about an arrangement for the baby.



She had not asked what he meant. She had not asked what kind of arrangement. She had said, OK, which was her habitual response to anything she did not know how to respond to, and had gone back to reading the book she had been reading, a biography of Emily Dickinson that she had checked out from the library and had not finished because the last thirty pages had been stuck together by something sticky, probably coffee, and she had not wanted to damage them by turning the pages.



II.



She found out she was pregnant on a Monday morning. She took the test at the drugstore on Lorain Avenue, in the aisle between the painkillers and the cold medicine, and she stood in the aisle for five minutes looking at the little plastic stick with two pink lines on it, thinking about how the world had been going on, day by day, meal by meal, book by book, and now it was going to include this — a pink stick with two lines, a future that was not hers to plan or refuse or change.



She told Chris on Tuesday. He said: Let me think about it. She said: OK.



He did not call her back for three days. On the fourth day, he called and said: Tanya and I talked. She thinks we should handle this the right way.



Anna sat on the edge of her bed. Buster was on the floor, eating from his bowl. The apartment smelled like old pasta and cat food and the faint sweet smell of the candle she had lit three days earlier and had not blown out because she kept forgetting and then kept forgetting to forget.



"What's the right way?" she said.



There was a pause. Then: "A clinic. We can pay for it. Tanya knows a good one."



Anna looked at Buster. Buster looked at her. His ears were twitching. His tail was still.



"OK," she said.



She went to the clinic on the East Side on a Saturday morning. It was in a strip mall next to a nail salon and a Vietnamese restaurant that smelled like fish sauce and lemongrass. She parked in the lot between a Ford F-150 and a Hyundai Elantra, walked into the building through the door that said REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH SERVICES, and sat in the waiting room for twenty minutes reading a magazine about home renovation that she would never be able to relate to because she did not own a home and did not know anyone who did and had never thought about renovation because her idea of home was a place where you did not have to think about anything.



The procedure took ten minutes. The doctor was young and kind and did not make eye contact, which Anna appreciated. She lay on the table, looked at the ceiling, counted to sixty, and then got up and put on her clothes and walked out into the parking lot and sat in her car for five minutes, staring at the Ford F-150 next to her, thinking about nothing.



Then she drove home. She fed Buster. She opened her laptop. She applied for a teaching job at a community college in Akron.



III.



Akron was gray and flat and everything she needed. She moved into a one-bedroom apartment above a laundromat on South Main Street. She adopted a second cat, a orange tabby she named Ginger, because Buster was black and Ginger was orange and that was the kind of logic she understood. She taught Introduction to American Literature to students who looked at her the way teenagers look at everything — with a mixture of suspicion and boredom, as though the world had handed them a puzzle they had not asked for and had no intention of solving.



She met David at a parent-teacher conference at Lakewood High School, where he was volunteering with his daughter's science fair project. He was a divorced physics teacher from Lakewood, two kids, Korean-American, fifty years old, wearing a cardigan and glasses and a face that had spent fifty years learning the difference between patience and waiting.



They talked about a science fair project — a volcano made from baking soda and vinegar that was supposed to erupt but was leaking instead. Then they talked about books. Then they talked about nothing, which in Anna's experience was the best kind of talk.



They started dating three weeks later. He brought her soup when she had the flu. He remembered that she did not like cilantro. He asked her how her day was and actually listened to the answer.



They got married at the Summit County courthouse on a Tuesday in March. There was no ceremony. There was a judge — a woman in her sixties with gray hair and reading glasses — who looked at them over the top of her glasses the way one looks at a pair of socks that have decided to get married, and they signed the papers, and then they went to a diner on Detroit Street and ate pancakes.



"You're quiet," David said.



"I'm thinking," Anna said.



"About what?"



"Whether leavened bread is more honest than unleavened, because at least it admits it's full of air."



David laughed. It was a warm, unselfconscious laugh, the kind of laugh that comes from someone who has spent enough years to know that laughing at nothing is one of the few things that is always allowed.



"Both are honest," he said. "One's just more optimistic."



IV.



Chris found her four years later. He had been back in Cleveland for two years — he had left after the clinic, gone to Miami for six months, come back to Cleveland for a promotion, stayed — and somewhere in that time, he had decided that he wanted her back, which was a decision he had never consulted her on and was not going to consult her on now.



He found her on LinkedIn. He drove to Akron on a Saturday morning, parked his BMW in the community college parking lot, and stood outside the building, watching her walk to her Honda Civic with a man who was holding a paper cup of coffee in one hand and her tote bag in the other.



Anna saw him. She stopped. She looked at Chris the way one looks at a parking ticket — with a mild, passing annoyance, and zero desire to engage.



"Chris," she said.



"Anna. I just wanted to—"



"I'm married."



David set the coffee down on the hood of the Civic and turned to look at them. He was wearing a beige cardigan and jeans and sneakers that had been clean once and were not anymore. He looked at Chris the way one looks at a weather report — with mild interest and no expectation of change.



"David," Anna said. "This is someone I used to know."



David nodded. He picked up the coffee again. "Hi," he said.



Chris looked at David, then back at Anna. "Anna, I made a mistake. I was stupid. I was—"



"You were someone else's project," Anna said. "And now I'm someone else's wife. That's the story. You can stop here."



She got in the car. David got in the passenger seat. He took a bite of the donut he had bought at the diner across the street. He looked at Anna. "Everything okay?"



"Yeah," she said. "Just someone I used to know."



She started the car. She backed out of the parking space. She drove past Chris, who stood in the parking lot watching her go, and then she drove past the community college and past the strip mall and past the laundromat and past the diner on Detroit Street and into the gray, flat, honest sky of Akron, where the air smelled like rain and asphalt and the small, unremarkable comfort of a life that was finally, after five years of almost, hers.



Chris drove back to Cleveland. He called her number once. It went to voicemail. He listened to the greeting — her voice, warm and casual, saying something like: You've reached Anna and David's place, leave a message — and he put the phone in his glove box and did not take it out again.

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