What Hope Is There

My husband took it hard, learning our marriage counselors divorced. Five years ago we sat meekly on their worn couch, enamored they were a married couple, both ministers. Yesterday I lit on one of their posts bemoaning a 5-2 custody schedule. I sat up rapt. Couldn’t believe. One was quoting Yung Pueblo, the other decorating new rooms. When one had the kids, the other took a soul-searching vacation to the same place the ex went the previous month—Sedona or the Grand Canyon. I gape at chasms, rippling sunset caverns. I watch them trod the same red ground on separate weeks. The world contracts. Their ink is on our marriage contract. In one's backyard a chimenea casts its glow on an unstirred swimming pool. It's surreal. The kids smile with their parents’ mingled faces. One keeps the house. One keeps the church. When my husband learned this news, he lurched in his seat, pressed me for my take, for updates. “What hope is there for the rest of us?” he said. It had been a blessing, driving in fog, to follow the brake lights ahead. We shelter in statistics—the 50-50— wonder if we’ll stick. I was surprised to be the unsurprised one. I am my husband’s second wife; wouldn’t he know the fault lines no one finds ahead of time? Here is what I learn—this stout candle in our abyss—we’re desperate for the light of it. I can't remember nearly five years back, the ceremony words the ministers fed us. Though I see the moment we lit two tapering ends and bent them together. I would do it again.