Sunday arrives the way Sundays arrive; without announcement, without having asked permission, with the specific quality of light that belongs only to Sunday mornings in houses that are mostly quiet. Fiona makes coffee. Gregoir is still asleep. The garden is doing what gardens do in November: holding on, quietly, without being asked to.
She has been thinking about calling since Thursday.
Not with worry; she is careful about this distinction, has always been careful about it, the line between missing someone and worrying about them. She misses him. That is allowed. Mothers miss their children without it meaning something is wrong. He is working hard. He is travelling. He is somewhere in the world doing the thing he does that she pictures vaguely and understands partially and is proud of entirely.
Sunday is when she calls. That has always been the arrangement. Not spoken, not agreed upon formally, just the shape that formed over years of Sundays. He picks up. They talk for however long they talk. She asks nothing that would require him to explain himself. He tells her small things; the weather wherever he is, something funny, something that happened that week that wasn't the thing she was really asking about. She receives it.
That has always been enough.
She drinks her coffee standing at the kitchen window. The clementines Gregoir bought — some are still on the counter, two left, the rest eaten over the week in the ordinary way of things that get eaten over the week. She thinks about Elena, about the painting she described, the problem she'd been working on for months. She should ask if she has finished it. She should remember to ask that.
She picks up her phone at nine forty-seven.
His name is in her contacts without a last name. Just his name, the one she gave him, the one that exists in her phone and in her mouth and nowhere else in the world that she is aware of.
She presses call. She puts the phone to her ear.
It rings.
Once. Twice. The specific sound of a phone ringing somewhere she cannot picture, in a city she cannot place, held by hands she would recognize anywhere. Three times. She looks at the garden. A bird lands on the fence and leaves immediately, as though it had somewhere more important to be. Four times.
Voicemail.
His voice, recorded, compressed, shorter than his real voice, the version of him that exists in the infrastructure of a phone company somewhere says to leave a message.
She almost does. She has the shape of a message ready. Something light, something that doesn't ask too much, the kind of message you leave when you're not worried, just calling, just Sunday. But she holds the phone to her ear and listens to the beep and then she doesn't say anything. She hangs up.
She stands at the window with the phone in her hand.
He'll call back. He always calls back when he misses a Sunday. He'll call back later today, or tomorrow, or he'll text something brief and slightly apologetic and she'll respond with something that says it's fine without saying it's fine because it is fine, it has always been fine, he is busy and working hard and somewhere in the world being the person he became without her fully knowing how.
She puts the phone on the counter next to the clementines.
She finishes her coffee. Upstairs she can hear Gregoir moving; the specific sounds of him waking up, which she knows as well as she knows anything. The house holds its Sunday shape around her. Ordinary. Quiet. Hers.
✻ ✻ ✻
He always picks up.
> Chapter complete. He always picks up. Continue to Chapter 2? [Y/N]