August was the month of lasts. Last dinner at the Vietnamese restaurant. Last walk to the river. Last morning in the faculty lounge, which was empty in the summer but which they visited anyway, as if checking in on a place that had been important, paying their respects. They sat at the table where they had first talked, in the gold light of late afternoon, and drank coffee from the machine that Mara had long since figured out how to coax into producing something acceptable.
'It's better than I thought it would be,' she said, looking around the empty room. 'Coming back here.'
'What did you think it would feel like?'
'Sad,' she said. 'It does feel sad. But it also feels — grateful. Which I didn't expect.'
He looked around the room too. The institutional carpet, the bulletin boards with their outdated announcements, the view from the window of the quad where the frisbee students had been, on the afternoon of the gold light, the afternoon he had found himself not wanting to leave a doorway.
'I'm grateful too,' he said.
They sat in the empty faculty lounge for almost an hour, not talking much, just being in the room that had started it. It was, he thought, the thing people did at significant places — stayed in them a little longer than necessary, as if presence could be stored, returned to later.
✦ ✦ ✦
He watched her pack. Not obsessively, not dramatically — she asked him to sit with her while she did it, and so he sat on her floor among the stacks of books and the flat boxes and the folded clothes, and he handed her things she asked for and held others while she decided.
She kept his copy of Neruda. He watched her wrap it in a shirt and pack it near the top of the box marked ESSENTIAL, and said nothing, because there was nothing that needed to be said about that.
He packed things for her too, sometimes, when she left him to it: her music scores, carefully, in document boxes she had labeled in her precise handwriting. He handled them as carefully as he could, aware of what they contained, of the years they represented.
'You're very careful with those,' she said, returning once to find him transferring the last of the scores.
'They're important,' he said.
She looked at him. 'Yes,' she said. 'A lot of things are.'
On the last evening before the movers came, she stood in the mostly-empty apartment and turned slowly, looking at the bare shelves and the blank walls where her things had been, doing what people do in empty rooms — taking stock of what had happened in them.
'I hate moving,' she said.
'I know.'
'I've done it so many times and I still hate it. Every time a place is emptied it looks like it's accusing you of something.'
'Of leaving,' he said.
'Yes.' She turned to face him. 'I'm sorry I'm leaving.'
'Don't be sorry,' he said. 'It's the right thing.'
'I know it is,' she said. 'I'm sorry anyway.'