Silver Wedding

Anna Anna knew that he was doing his best to be interested. She could read his face so well. This was the same look she saw on his face when older actors would come up and join them in the club and tell old tales about people long gone. Joe tried to be interested then, too, it was a welcoming, courteous, earnest look. Hoping that it passed as genuine interest, hoping that the conversation wouldn't last too long. "I'm sorry, I'm going on a bit," she apologized. She pulled a funny face at him as she sat at the other end of the bed dressed only in one of his shirts, the Sunday papers and a breakfast tray between them. Joe smiled back, a real smile this time. "No, it's nice that you're so worked up about it, it's good to care about families." He meant it, she knew, in his heart he thought it was a Good Thing to care about families, like rescuing kittens from trees and beautiful sunsets and big collie dogs. In principle Joe was in favor of caring about families. But he didn't care at all about his own. He wouldn't have known how many years his parents were married. He probably didn't know how long he had been married himself. Something like a silver anniversary would not trouble Joe Ashe. Anna looked at him with the familiar feeling of tenderness and fear. Tender and protectivehe looked so lovely lying there against the big pillows, his fair hair falling over his face, his thin brown shoulders so relaxed and easy. Fearful in case she would lose him, in case he would move on gently, effortlessly, out of her life, as he had moved into it. Joe Ashe never fought with people, he told Anna with his big boyish smile, life was much too short for fights. And it was true. When he was passed over for a part, when he got a bad review, there was the shrug: "Well, so it could have been different but let's not make a production out of it." Like his marriage to Janet. It was over, so why go on pretending? He just packed a small bag and left. Anna feared that one day in this very room he would pack a small bag and leave again. She would rail and plead as Janet had done and it would be no use. Janet had even come around and offered Anna money to go away. She wept about how happy she had been with Joe. She showed pictures of the two small sons. It would all be fine again if only Anna would go away. "But he didn't leave you to come to me, he had been in a flat by himself for a year before he even met me," Anna had explained. "Yes, and all that time I thought he would come back." Anna hated to remember Janet's tearstained face, and how she had made tea for her, and hated even more to think that her own face would be stained with tears like this one day, and as unexpectedly as it had all happened to Janet. She gave a little shiver as she looked at the handsome easy boy in her bed. Because even if he was twenty-eight years of age, he was still a boy. A gentle cruel boy. "What are you thinking?" he asked. She didn't tell him. She never told him how much she thought about him and dreaded the day he would leave. "I was thinking it's about time they did another film version of Romeo and Juliet. You're so handsome it would be unfair to the world not to get a chance to look at you," she said laughingly. He reached out and put the breakfast tray on the floor. The Sunday papers slid after it. "Come here to me," said Joe. "My mind was running on the same lines entirely, entirely at all, "at all' as you Irish say." "What a superb imitation," Anna said dryly, but snuggling up to him all the same. "It's no wonder that you're the best actor in the whole wide world and renowned all over the globe for your great command of accents." She lay in his arms and didn't tell him about how worried she wasBinchy, Maeve is the author of 'Silver Wedding' with ISBN 9780440207771 and ISBN 0440207770.