The way one hot day runs into another in July makes me anxious. I lose the sense that time is moving forward. August brings relief, a reawakening. Even if the heat doesn’t end, the late afternoon light mellows and the animal self knows instinctively that summer is slowly descending towards fall. For me, it is a time layered with memories.

On a Sunday in early August, as my first summer alone began to ebb, I pulled out some pots to make a decent dinner for one. A bout of food poisoning had left me craving strong flavors. I quartered and diced Jersey tomatoes while the water for pasta came to a boil, creating a savory end to a quiet weekend. The next day, my estranged husband called me at the office to ask why I hadn’t answered my door. At the same time I was cooking Sunday dinner, he was out on the front steps of my building, ringing the bell and pounding on the door. “I know you were home,” he said. “Your windows were open. Why didn’t you let me in? Who was with you?”

“The doorbell doesn’t work,” I said, “and I didn’t hear you knocking. I was in the kitchen. It’s pretty far back from the street. Why were you there?”

“Jackie is back from Mexico,” he said. “She knows where you live. Her apartment is a few blocks from yours. I went to see her yesterday and then I came to see you.”

I let his statement hang there in the air while I thought about Jackie (not her real name). Before she was his friend, she had been mine, a woman a few years younger than me who had become my closest friend when I went back to college. He gravitated towards her while I was in law school. He always insisted there was nothing inappropriate between them. She had taken a transfer to Mexico back in March, around the time we separated. Not long afterwards, he had unwittingly offered an honest description of their relationship to a mutual friend who later shared with me what he’d said:  “I don’t know why Mary is so upset about Jackie and me. Every time we went anywhere, we always asked her if she wanted to come.” He had invested the best of himself somewhere else.

Their presence in my new neighborhood felt like a form of trespass, but I kept my anger at the intrusion to myself.  “You know,” I said, “it will be better for all of us if you don’t come by again.”

A few weeks later, on the eve of our ninth wedding anniversary, I took my wedding dress out of its’ plastic bag and stepped into it. The gown still fit, and I still loved it. A Christian Dior design carried by Vogue Patterns, it was machine washable and cost me less than $50 to make. After a few turns before the age-spotted mirror, I slid the zipper down and let the soft fabric crumple to the floor. Next, I pulled out our wedding album and flipped through the photos of a perfect August afternoon. Cool air from Canada had driven out summer’s humidity and sharpened every detail of the dresses and the flowers. Soft clouds rode high in a blue sky. Anyone I greeted later in the receiving line could see I was in love.

Now I was learning to stop being married. I put the dress, the photo album, and the rest of the mementos from the part of my life that was over into a garbage bag and lugged it down to the curb. In the morning, when the trash trucks came, I was already gone.

 

Seven years later, on another August afternoon, I drove home from work on Aramingo Avenue. I had the radio tuned to NPR and was listening to a story about a song written by Rowland Salley that had inspired several covers and the title of at least one mystery story. Interspersed with the narrative were short clips of versions sung by John Prine, Shaun Colvin, and Salley himself.

A line about losing yourself in love snagged in my throat. One croaking sob escaped before I slapped a hand over my mouth. Nine-month-old Michael was dozing in his car seat behind me. I didn’t want him to wake up to the sound of my crying. I couldn’t understand why tears were running freely down my cheeks. I’d been out of Santa Theresa, the prison in Guatemala, for nearly a year. I had lost Luis, but then Michael had come to us when he was sixteen days old. His pending adoption had recently begun to move forward. I should have been happy, not grief stricken. Then I remembered the date, August 20^th.  In that other life, it would have been my sixteenth anniversary. The music had released fragments of the past that I thought were safely buried. I’d come within reach of all that I wanted, but I still had to let go of what I’d left behind.