"Is your heart unblemished?" She wanted to accuse her friends when they looked at her accusingly. Anthea walked around with a molester's bite out of hers. Dan's heart was shriveled to a raisin, dried by Alexa's withering gaze. Mark's heart was deep fried in hot oil years ago -- Allison decided he was too crisp and greasy. War victims hobbled on crutches: a limb amputated by mortar fire; a face disfigured by shrapnel. Cancer survivors survived less a breast, a colon.
She looked perfect and whole, ate dinner with her husband and sons, watched Sex and the City, laughed with friends at the madcap capers of Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte. But it was sideways laughter around the tree-root shaped hole in her heart, long, deep, forked, a tree root yanked violently out. Cauterized, the edges of the scar posed little danger of infection. Except sometimes at three a.m., or when the day was shitty and she'd heard his favorite music.
In the middle of the night she'd wake up, her mind walking the old Indian trails of him. When she saw him in the neighborhood -- always at a distance -- she still got hammered. Just by the sight of his car, his still, solid silhouette behind the wheel.