After Hours is a romance column: sensual, non-explicit fiction for grown-up readers. All characters are invented adults; any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
Vera and Thomas, part eight.
Thomas’s parents lived in Rockaway Park, in a narrow shingled house two blocks from the ocean, which was where they had lived for forty-one years and where, Thomas warned her on the train, they intended to die, preferably on the same afternoon so that neither of them would have to learn how to work the other’s remote control.
The A train crossed Jamaica Bay a little after two on Christmas Day, out over the flat gray water on its long low trestle, with the marsh grass bent and silver on either side and a single heron standing in the shallows like a man who had missed his stop. Vera had a lingonberry cake on her lap in a tin, because she had been raised to believe one did not arrive empty-handed, and because it was the only Swedish thing she could make without consulting anyone.
“Tell me again what I’m not supposed to mention,” she said.
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