Welcome Back
The receptionist looked up from her computer, saw my husband, and smiled like she’d been expecting him.
“Mr. Harris,” she said. “Welcome back.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was such a sweet thing to say.
“I’m surprised you remember us,” I said. “We haven’t been here in forty years.”
The receptionist’s smile disappeared.
It didn’t fade. It just disappeared, the way a light goes off when someone flips a switch. She looked at my husband, Robert.
Then back at me.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought Mr. Harris had stayed with us more recently.”
I turned to him.
“What?”
Robert barely reacted. He was holding our two suitcases, one in each hand, and he didn’t even put them down. He just looked at the receptionist with a calm, flat expression I’d seen him use on car salesmen.
“She must have me confused with someone else.”
But the receptionist was already looking at her computer. Her fingers moved on the keyboard.
“No, I’m quite sure,” she said. “Same name.”
Then she frowned.
“Mr. Harris usually requests the same room.”
“Usually?” I said.
Robert cut her off.
“We’d like to check in.”
He didn’t raise his voice. He never raises his voice. But something about the way he said it made her stop talking. She closed her mouth. She looked down. She typed something, printed something, and slid two key cards across the counter without another word.
“Room 312,” she said quietly. “Enjoy your stay.”
Room 312.
That was our honeymoon room.
I hadn’t told her that. I hadn’t told anyone that. I wasn’t even sure I remembered the number until she said it out loud.
And that bothered me more than I wanted to admit. Standing there in the lobby with the ocean glittering through the big front windows, I had the strangest feeling.
It almost felt like they both knew something I didn’t.
The Harbor View Inn sits on a cliff above the water on the coast of Maine. It’s white, with green shutters and a long porch full of rocking chairs. Forty years ago, it looked exactly the same. I swear the rocking chairs were the same rocking chairs.
We got married on a Saturday in June, in my mother’s church in Ohio. I was twenty-three. Robert was twenty-five. We drove sixteen hours in his Chevy with tin cans still tied to the bumper because neither of us knew how to get them off. We arrived at the Harbor View at two in the morning, exhausted and laughing, and the night clerk gave us a bottle of free champagne because he said we were the happiest-looking people he’d seen all summer.
We stayed for five days. It rained for four of them. I didn’t care.
When our fortieth anniversary started coming up, our daughter Jenny asked what we were going to do.
“Nothing big,” I said. “Dinner, maybe.”
“Mom. It’s forty years. That’s huge.”
I looked at Robert across the kitchen table. He was reading the paper. He didn’t look up.
“Let’s go back to Maine,” he said.
I almost dropped my coffee. Robert is not a man who plans trips. Robert is a man who goes to the same hardware store every Saturday and orders the same sandwich at the same diner every Tuesday. In forty years, every single vacation we ever took was because I planned it.
“Really?” I said.
“Really.” He turned a page. “I already called. They have the room.”
“What room?”
“Our room.”
At the time, I thought it was the most romantic thing he’d ever said.
“You’ve been here without me?”
I waited until we got to the room. I waited until the door clicked shut behind us. Then I turned around and said it.
Robert put the suitcases on the luggage rack. He took his time about it. He straightened them so they were lined up just right.
“No,” he said.
“She recognized you.”
“She’s mistaken.”
“She said you usually request the same room. Usually, Robert.”
“Maggie.” He turned around and put his hands on my shoulders. “She’s confused. She sees a thousand people a year. She saw my name and got mixed up. That’s all.”
I looked at his face. I knew every line in it. I knew the scar on his chin from when he fell off a ladder in 1991. I knew the way his left eye squinted a little more than his right when he smiled. Forty years of looking at that face.
I wanted to believe him.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay.” He kissed my forehead. “Let’s go look at the water.”
The room had changed, of course. New carpet. A flat-screen TV where the old wooden radio used to be. But the window was the same. The big window that looked straight out over the ocean, with the little window seat underneath it.
I sat down on it. The cushion was new, but the wood creaked in exactly the same way.
Forty years ago, I’d sat right here on our first night and cried until three in the morning.
Robert didn’t remember that, I thought. He couldn’t. It was such a long time ago.
He came and sat down next to me. He looked out at the water.
“Same view,” he said.
“Same view,” I said.
He reached over and took my hand. His palm was sweaty.
Robert’s hands never sweat.
At dinner, Robert went to the restroom, and a young waiter came over to refill my water. He looked about thirty, with a neat beard and a name tag that said Luis.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course, ma’am.”
“The woman at the front desk. Dark hair, glasses. How long has she worked here?”
“Denise?” He thought about it. “Almost fifteen years, I think. She’s been here longer than anybody.”
“Fifteen years,” I repeated.
“Yes, ma’am. Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
He nodded and moved on to the next table.
My stomach tightened.
Fifteen years. Our honeymoon was forty years ago. So there was no way she remembered Robert from our honeymoon.
She remembered him from something else.
When Robert came back to the table, I was smiling. I asked him about the lobster. I told him the bread was good. I talked about the weather.
He ate his lobster and agreed that the bread was good.
He had no idea that I was sitting across from him counting backward through the last fifteen years, trying to remember every time he’d been away.
I didn’t sleep much that night.
Robert snored softly beside me, the way he always does, a little whistle at the end of each breath. I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and made a list in my head.
Robert retired from the power company three years ago. He was an engineer. Thirty-four years. Before that, he almost never traveled. A conference in Chicago once. A training thing in Pittsburgh.
But after he retired, there were the fishing trips.
Twice a year, sometimes three times, he’d go up north with his old friend Walt. Four or five days. He’d come home sunburned and quiet and smelling like the outdoors, and he’d bring me a bag of saltwater taffy.
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