Cape Cod Morning

Flash fiction based on a painting by Edward Hopper

Cape Cod Morning, 1950

Though Bill had often been out late, he’d never not come home.

Ellen panicked at first when she woke up and found his side of the bed unslept in. Had he had an accident on the road? A heart attack? She imagined him lying on the road, badly injured, dead. But no…surely someone, the police, the hospital, would have called by now. She thought of phoning the police herself, but her limbs refused to move.

As time passed, she had a sense of something having shifted. She lay there for a while, trying to locate the shift. She listened to the silence, to the thump of her heart. Yesterday, he’d driven down to Providence for a business meeting, as he often did. But he must have had other business in town, a meeting with a woman no doubt. A motel room, an afternoon tryst. A scene that had become part of Ellen’s imaginings long ago.

She’d always been accepting of his liaisons, usually brief affairs with women he met at work, women who, she guessed, were escaping from their own lives. Younger women. Following discovery, there was usually a confession, an apology, a promise about the future. It was something of a ritual, with her playing the role of forgiving wife, a role she’d copied from her mother. But she sensed something different in this, something that was entering her heart, tearing at her forbearance.

Ellen got out of bed, washed, got dressed. She made coffee, strolled around the house a while. Sitting down in ‘his’ armchair, she took up a book, read a page, and closed it.

She walked to the window, stared out of it at the ominous sky, the swelling sea. The storm was coming now; she could see that, and she was glad of it.