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It’s Friday afternoon, the sky is clear blue, the sun that certain bright margarine that precedes the golden burst of sunset. Traffic is light; most of the cars darting about in this predominately commercial section of office parks and strip malls are white-collar employees returning from extended lunches. He stands at the driver’s side door of his small gray sedan and surveys the main road some 50 yards away: a passing truck advertising Dorito’s, a wiry black man on a bicycle pedaling furiously towards Chapel Hill, blurs of minivans and compact cars. He removes his jacket and places it in the backseat.

This is the routine now, every three weeks. He worked out an arrangement with his boss. Dwight Hurley was a tall, slender man of about 50 with a ubiquitous grin and a soft way of addressing even the most pressing of issues. He had played baseball in college and whenever talk of the Braves or even the minor league Bulls came up, a certain dancing in his eyes took forth, noticeable to any and all. He had settled down in a tidy McMansion off Falls of the Neuse with his wife, pert and blonde and always eager to host company. They had adopted a Chinese boy three years ago. He was four now and obsessed with Vikings. Dwight appreciated the life he had been given, and so when one of his employees had come to ask for a special arrangement every few weeks to leave early and drive north to see his girlfriend, he had without hesitation given his approval. Love was an important element of existence to him, and he believed strongly that certain rules could be bent or discarded altogether in its service.

With each Monday that followed such a weekend, Dwight would ask his employee how his trip up north had been, how his girlfriend was doing. With each affirmative response, he would feel his own love for his wife, feel its security and its weathered strength. It was a little reassurance every three weeks, his own unspoken part of the bargain.

The deal went so: every three weeks the employee would work an extra hour Monday through Wednesday. On Friday he would leave at 2pm to make the five hour drive to suburban Washington, D.C. He had become used to this routine, staying up late on Thursdays to pack his clothes. The office was barely impacted by his early leave; he had a tendency to complete his work before deadline, and none of the clients had so much as uttered a complaint before.

And so the employee left the company parking lot that afternoon, sun beating down into a blinding reflection from the car’s hood. He was serene. He couldn’t wait to see her.

They had been dating for a year and four months. Only the first six months of their relationship had been in the same town, until she had completed her internship at the university’s hospital. From then it was a matter of trial and error, seeing how often he could make the drive to Maryland or she could take the Greyhound or Amtrak south (she didn’t own a car). The latter proved exorbitantly expensive and so, with his $40,000 per annum salary he felt it his obligation to make the trip. He had always been a wandering spirit of sorts, and the trips north helped him balance his solitary life in North Carolina, saved him from the tedium he might otherwise sink into.

This is not to say the distance hadn’t worn into the fabric of their togetherness. Their biggest fight to date had come not from a single catalyst but rather the stress of so constantly being apart. Little jealousies from both parties spilled forth in caustic comments borne from exasperation and left unanswered they piled up silently, the bits of dust here and there swept into the corner until one night the ugly pile of dirt was too much to ignore.

They were doing the dishes at her sink, one side piled high with reddish tinted plates from the pasta they’d cooked together hours earlier. The long fluorescent bulb above them flickered spastically, wavering the flat porcelain light shining down on them. He stood drying a large blue plate with a dishtowel.

“So DorkBoy was in my office again today,” she began. DorkBoy was a coworker of hers at the NIEHS who frequently paid her unannounced visits and usually overstayed his welcome. He knew nothing about the man save what she chose to tell him; not a thing about his appearance or way of speaking, or even his background. He could walk past DorkBoy on the street and be none the wiser. But there was something in the way she spoke of him, something that always bothered him. It was the tone of her voice, how she described his constant intrusions and annoyances. It was as if secretly she cherished them.

“Oh yeah?” He replied, feigning struggle with a stubborn bit of dried pasta sauce. “What was it this time?”

She took her time, rearranging the dishes in the drying rack carefully.

“The same old stuff, he just wanted to talk.”

Silence. The sink was turned on and off, the light above buzzed quietly. Outside the kitchen window the adjacent buildings of the apartment complex sat squat, bathed in orange streetlight.

“What did he want to talk about?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what he wanted to talk about? This was today, right?”

To this she looked at him. He could see her gaze in his periphery, see her stone-blue eyes searching his cheekbones.

“What difference does it make?”

From there things had escalated. She had accused him of being far too insecure, a weakness she knew caused him great embarrassment. She had pulled out the heavy weaponry early and it shocked him, alarmed him into thinking that perhaps there was something to this whole DorkBoy thing, of course, it was puppy love in textbook form, the faux animosity, how could he have not seen it from the beginning?

They stood in opposite rooms, her turning on the living room stereo and popping in the Broadway score to Sweeny Todd, just one of the many CDs she cherished and he despised and yet another small weapon in her arsenal of passive aggression. He remained in the kitchen, staring at the empty sink, wishing for alcohol, for a six pack of a good beer and a place to drink it, somewhere in this unfamiliar state where he could sit back and just get three sheets without having to think about her or DorkBoy or anyone.

She finally entered the kitchen, eyes moist but defiant. Her arms were crossed and her hair had come undone from its casual ponytail, strands hanging now in wisps before her ears and brow.

“If you want me to fuck off, just say so,” she muttered.

He took a second to consider this before turning to face her.

“Fuck off,” he said, walking briskly to the dining table and retrieving his keys before exiting the apartment and shutting the door quietly behind him.

He had driven into the District, parked the car in the lot of a large shopping center and ridden the Metro to Adams-Morgan. In a loud bar packed with Hill interns and GW students he had sat and downed pint after pint of Hoegaarden until a bubble wrap-like warmth and invincibility had surrounded him. His cell phone sat silently in his pocket, switched off, and despite his repeated attempts to chat up single-looking girls whom he thought had made eyes, his mind always continued to wander to her and whether she had called. He ended up sleeping in his car until early the next morning, when the sound of Saturday shoppers and the frenzy of passing traffic had woken him. Within an hour he was at her house, in her arms, reconciliation. They spent the remainder of the weekend having sex and eating delivered pizza, and come Monday when Dwight asked for his regular update on the happenings up north, he had been relieved to be able to honestly reply with contentment.

Things had been calm in the months since. They had had a long and open talk about jealousy and realized that one of the strengths in their relationship was the ability to candidly discuss their shortcomings. This epiphany bolstered them, and by the end of their discussion they approached giddiness with the newfound solidity of their situation. The recent months had brought a new intensity to their appreciation of each other, with more “I Love You” and longer, tighter embraces at every opportunity. She had felt secure for the first time in her life, a tremendous accomplishment that she hesitated explaining to him for fear of suffocating his love. He finally felt calm in the thought that things were finally stable, a long distance love could work and would now free his time in North Carolina to more artistic pursuits such as painting or sculpture, hobbies he’d always harbored an interest in.

The interstate was half a mile from his office park, and it was common that he would forgo returning to his apartment and simply merge into the northbound entrance ramp, settling in for the long drive. This morning he had run out of bread, however, and instead of packing a small lunch he opted to stop at Wendy’s for a cheap and greasy combo meal.

Sitting in the fast food restaurant’s parking lot eating his chicken sandwich, he found himself devoid of any particular thought. The first leg of the drive was always the most tedious, a narrow chute of blacktop between the walls of pine trees straight north to Petersburg. At that sleepy and scarred industrial town he would merge onto 95 and continue through the patched-together tidiness of Richmond and from there it was almost always a slow crawl north until the HOV lanes of 395 and the full semblance of Northern Virginia suburbia. Barring especially horrid traffic, he would continue onto the Beltway, looping around the western side of the District and into Maryland before swooping down onto Connecticut Avenue and coasting a mile south to her offices. She would always be waiting at her desk, surfing the internet listlessly when he arrived. Her glance up and that familiar smile would fill him with warmth and almost instantly it was as if the previous five hours spent sitting in place and shifting were mere minutes.

He smiled, thinking about this now, chicken sandwich finished and the last sips of soda reluctantly trickling between the ice cubes. Removing his tie he found a strand of her amber hair and this too made him beam, for it was one of life’s little pleasures, to be 250 miles away from her yet to have a physical reminder with him even weeks after they’d last embraced. All in all, he was in a particularly good mood, and with a sense of calm and contentment he looked forward to the familiar escape that the weekend would bring. He felt that quite possibly, he could do this for years.

For one reason or another, finding the strand in his tie stirred memories that had been buried for some time, and soon he was sitting there in the car, meal finished, recalling the first weeks she had returned to Maryland, her anxiety at their being apart, their nightly phone calls that would last deep into the morning hours, sometimes with no words said for entire stretches where they simply listened to each other’s light breaths. There had been the night when a drunk frat boy had scaled the flagpole of her apartment complex, fallen the 20 feet to the concrete plaza and cracked his skull open. He had listened to her amazed play by play of the situation as the medevac helicopter whirred in the background.

And then there was one Saturday, in the depths of summer, July, he thought. They were speaking thrice daily now on the telephone, but it would be another two weeks before he could make the drive up to see her. In the morning she had explained that some girls from her old dormitory had invited her to a backyard barbecue in Bethesda, something of a celebratory party for one of the girls’ acceptance into Wharton. She had expressed anxiety about the whole affair, yet he had reassured her that she’d have fun. Socializing was not her strongpoint; she had had only a couple of friends in high school—one an immigrant girl from Colombia who shared her bookish ways and the other a boy two years her junior, thin and bespectacled from what he’d seen of the photos she’d shared. They had spent their late teenage years much like any bored suburban youth: driving around aimlessly, hours passed in finished basements, Friday nights driving into the city to see a foreign film or a rock concert. He admired her solemnity, it was attractive to him and he felt a tinge of sexual arousal at it as well—that she was his, that she needed him to open her—that caused him the slightest amount of shame.

He had spent the Saturday with friends, drinking cold cans of cheap beer and playing NHL ’98 on the Sega. By nightfall he had driven drunk back to his apartment and come midnight he was wondering why she hadn’t called. He debated calling her but ultimately chose against it, deciding in an alcoholic glaze that he didn’t want to come off as the controlling type, that this would be a demonstration of his ability to trust.

Around one she finally rang him. The vibration of his cell phone on his chest woke him as he napped on the sofa in soft lamplight. The rest of the apartment sat in darkness.

“Hey,” he slurred.

She sounded sad as she explained she’d just returned home.

“What’s wrong, why was it bad?” he asked.

“Oh, it was terrible. All these girls and they’re just so awful. So—I’m not a bad person for saying this right?”

“Of course not.”

“So… stupid! They’re so stupid. So shallow. All I got were questions about where I planned to go to grad school and have I seen such and such show and who do I think will win The Bachelorette. I mean, really…”

“That sounds terrible, for sure.”

“Oh, it was miserable. I just stood there with a drink for hours, in that backyard. The house was fantastic, that was the only thing I was impressed by. You know, those old money type of homes in Bethesda, off Bradley?”

He nodded before realizing the futility of this.

“Yeah, those are nice.”

“It was gorgeous. But what a waste. I couldn’t even get drunk to dull the pain because I had to drive home.”

“You could have called a cab,” he offered, with immediate regret.

“No, you don’t see…” She replied. “It wouldn’t have been worth it. It was just a terrible Saturday. Awful.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Gosh… Just awful. How was your day?”

And that had been that. She became far more reluctant to venture forth socially afterwards. He noticed this as the months went on, and deep in a corner of his mind it worried him, her new dependence on him for a social life. If it weren’t for me, he reasoned, she’d be a shut-in.

He bunched the foil wrapper of the sandwich up and stuffed it into the grease-stained paper bag. Five hours to go, he thought, with a slight shake of his head as he put the car into reverse. Backing out of the parking spot the sun glinted in his rearview and for a moment light the color of her hair shimmered in his gaze as he tapped lightly on the accelerator.

I am lucky, he thought. Things are just fine. She is my girlfriend, we have a connection. We are working with what we have towards a longevity of some sorts. I want to share her life. How could they be so mean, the rest of them? How could they leave her there, standing in her dress in a sunlit corner of a green backyard in Maryland one Saturday afternoon. Don’t they see her youth? Don’t they see her beauty and her love to give? She has so much love to give. I will try and accept it all. He smiled.

The breeze shifted, blowing through the cracked driver's side window. The light changed to green.