Before and After This was before I met my husband. I fell in love with a man who was five feet, four inches tall—just an inch or so shorter than me, not a difference you'd have noticed, necessarily, if you'd seen us standing beside one another. Some years before I met him, this man told me, he'd spent all his free afternoons at a gym downtown and worked as a bouncer in various bars. In the photographs he showed me, the muscles of his shoulders bloomed beneath the fabric of his shirts like bread dough rising under a kitchen towel. "I like you this way," I said, touching his now slender arm, meaning his arms and other things. Those muscles had required a certain quality of attention he now gave to other endeavors. Sometimes I stopped by his house in the late afternoons and he made me dinner—Rock Cornish game hens rubbed with lemon and flecked with rosemary, spinach salad, chocolate mousse in a rosy puddle of raspberry sauce. I sat in a chair at his kitchen table, drinking tea from a china cup that had once belonged to his grandmother; I watched his fingers slip a clove of garlic under the skin of a bird no larger than my clasped hands, or pry apart the two halves of a blood orange. A fine, sour mist settled over the backs of his hands, sparkled briefly in the dim kitchen light and evaporated on his skin. It was our habit to sit on the living room floor after these dinners and read aloud to each other, but one night he proposed that we go for a drive instead. We drove with the windows down, and we followed the highway for some distance before he turned off on a gravel road. We stopped when we came to a chain stretched across it, anchored to poles on either side. He got out of the truck, and I followed him. "This is my favorite place," he said, stepping over the chain before he offered his hand to help me across, though of course that chain posed no greater problem for either of us. He didn't let go of my hand as we walked to where the road finally ended, near the west shore of a lake outside of town. We picked our way through long grass and marshy land until we had come to the water's edge. "I come here whenever I need to think," he said. "What do you think about?" I asked, knowing he wouldn't say what I hoped. He shrugged. "I think about all the people I used to know, where they are, what they're doing. I think about all the people I know right now, and I think about how I'm going to wind up losing touch with all of them, too." We sat near the water until the falling darkness made it impossible to distinguish the lake from its opposite bank. We made a careful trip back to the gravel road and his truck. Closer to town, cresting the final rise that would drop us back into the valley where we lived, the full moon appeared directly in front of us: if the road had continued its upward climb, we would have had to wait until it rose higher and left a space for our safe passage underneath. Or so it seemed. “There should be a word for this,” he said, taking his foot off the gas, slowing down. “A French word, I think.” In French, the word for love can be used to signify passion as well as affection. One word embodies the uncertainty that is, I understand now, unavoidable in even the most sincere of human interactions. One week later I went to visit friends in a nearby city. When I got home Sunday night, the man I loved baked a bread pudding in a blue bowl he meant for me to keep. He brought it to my house, still warm, along with a small jar of whiskey sauce. This was, at the time, my favorite dessert. We sat at my dining room table, and he told me about a woman he’d met at a party the night before. What he said was this: "She's very pretty. And incredibly smart. And really funny. She reminds me a lot of you, actually." When I saw them on the street together, some months after this, I noticed the top of her head at a level with his chin. I ducked into a store and watched from behind a sale rack of winter coats as he helped her climb into his truck. Both hands around her waist, even his slender arms were enough to keep her from falling. I don't think of him often now, but recently it happened that my husband and I were driving together at night and I noticed the moon, rising just at the end of the road we were traveling. Our daughter is four years old; that night, she'd fallen asleep in the back seat and the moon looked like nothing more than a circle of yellow construction paper she would have cut out and pasted against an expanse of dark paper meant to represent the sky. It seemed entirely possible that I could just roll down my window and, with one finger, nudge the moon before the glue behind it dried—position it somewhere other than where it was now, precisely in our way. But of course, that wasn't necessary. In the morning, the three of us stopped at a diner and ate a ridiculous breakfast. The waitress filled our thermos with fresh coffee. Before noon, we were home.