Beneath the Surface(34)

Sheryl shook her head. “Not really. I just thought I’d give it a try.”

Kristin didn’t inquire further. It was odd to find Sheryl like this, but so many things had been a bit off between them lately. “How about I get us a little snack to go with it then?”

“Sure.” Sheryl smiled, pulled Kristin close to her, and kissed her neck. “Hurry.”

Kristin went into the kitchen, sliced some bread from a fresh loaf Sheryl must have picked up earlier that day, and poured some olive oil into a small dish. When she gathered the crumbs in her hand and opened the bin to throw them away, she saw a crumpled-up supermarket receipt sticking to the top of the plastic bin liner. She automatically reached for it. The price of the loaf was listed on it, as was a piece of vintage cheddar, and a bottle of red wine. Kristin had to look twice to make sure she wasn’t imagining things, but there it was, in black and white. The bottle of wine Sheryl had just claimed to have received from someone at work.



Sheryl felt trapped, caught red-handed, as though she had committed some sort of vile act, or worse, had been cheating on her partner, while all she had done was bought a bottle of wine and drunk from it. Kristin never came home early. Often, when she arrived back from a business trip around lunchtime, she would go straight to the office and put in a few more hours. This was unheard of. But Sheryl could hardly hold that against her. Not when she had just lied. And why had she? It had just seemed impossible to tell the truth. Sometimes, that was all a lie was. There was no bad intention behind it, just a complete and utter inability to own up to something that had grown into a weakness. It wasn’t as if Kristin knew that Sheryl had bought the bottle herself, but that wasn’t even the point. The point was that she had lied and no matter the reason or how easy it was to justify, Sheryl was not a liar. Not like that. Not to her partner. She would tell her the truth as soon as Kristin returned from the kitchen.

There she came already. A basket of bread in one hand, a small cheeseboard in the other. A tight smile on her face. As Kristin sat down, Sheryl tried to determine whether it was shame, that gut-wrenching emotion, that she was feeling the most. As a child, Sheryl had been no stranger to shame. It seemed to be abundantly available all around the house. Until, years later, she had said: no more.

“I bought the wine,” Sheryl blurted out. “I can’t really explain why, but I’ll try if you insist.” She said it to the space in front of her, the lawn that could do with a mowing and the weeds growing between the flowers. Kristin’s mother would need to come around and tend to their small garden. It was one of her favorite Sunday morning activities—one that had kept Sheryl from taking responsibility for it.

“Are you okay, babe?” Kristin’s voice sounded worried.

“I guess me sitting here with a glass of store-bought awful wine says it all.” Sheryl turned to look at Kristin.

“What’s going on?” Kristin touched her gently on the arm.

“I miss us.” Saying those three words roused an unexpected bout of nostalgia from Sheryl’s soul. She’d never before been under the influence when they’d had a fight. Well, this wasn’t a fight yet, but the alcohol seemed to give Sheryl the ability to, oddly, see a few things a lot clearer, and she knew where this was headed. Another impossible confrontation between Kristin’s ambition and Sheryl’s loneliness.

“Me too.”

“Then what are we going to do about it?” A feistiness she remembered from her activism days but never really played a part in her relationship with Kristin was coming to the surface. “This is as good a time as any to talk about the hard stuff, because what else are we going to do? Wait until it magically blows over?”

“This is about Hong Kong, isn’t it?” Kristin withdrew her hand.

“Among other things.”

“We’ll need to make a decision soon.” Kristin shuffled in her seat. “Have you thought about it?”

“I was just sitting here pondering it while drinking a glass of wine.” The alcohol gave Sheryl the unexpected ability to control the anger she already felt boiling inside of her. Anger because she felt so blatantly disregarded, because the solution to the Hong Kong problem was so very simple—at least to her it was. Sheryl would never have guessed alcohol could do that to a person. It wasn’t the kind of being-under-the-influence she remembered seeing as a child.

“I know you don’t want to go.” Kristin’s words dripped with passive-aggression.

“Give me one good reason why I should give up everything here and move to another country? Just one.”