The Yellow Door
My wife and I once had a beach house, but we moved to the city when the children were small and I told myself the commute made more sense, and that was true, and it was also the first of many excuses I would make over the years for not going back. I had not been there in twenty-six years. Julie went four times a year.
Spring, when the palmettos came green and the air smelled like salt and rain moving together. Summer, when the beaches filled with families and the seafood restaurants along the coastal road kept their neon signs on late. Fall, when the crowds thinned and she said the sky turned the color of old silver.
And once in winter, for what she called her contemplation season, when the shoreline went gray and quiet and she said the ocean sounded more honest than it did in any other month. She always invited me. I always had an excuse.
Work commitments, even after I retired. Golf tournaments. A routine doctor’s appointment I could easily have rescheduled.
Once, I told her I couldn’t go because the gutters needed cleaning. She looked at me for a long moment after that one, patient and still, as if she were waiting for me to hear myself. I never did.
My name is Howard Mitchell. I am seventy-four years old. Six months ago I buried the only person who ever truly understood me, and since then I have been sitting in our city house surrounded by the evidence of her life, trying to remember how to be a person without her in the room.
Julie had been my wife for thirty-eight years. She was the woman who knew how I took my coffee without asking. The woman who could hear one sigh from across a room and tell whether my back hurt or my pride did.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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