The Mrs. suggested a walk on Thursday. We walk a lot, in most weather. I walk most days on my own too, an hour usually, three or four when an hour won't do it. That's my kind of walk. This one was hers: proposed midweek, no occasion. Her kind is never just a walk, and I knew it before we'd found our coats.
There's a castle near us, the Flemish kind: long straight lanes of oaks, farmland on both sides, a moat with more ducks than water. A baron owned it once. Now it's where the village walks.
Halfway out there's a small cross from the war, just off the lane. The baron did not die well. Our old neighbour saw it happen when he was eight, hiding in the ditch, and he told us about it on this walk more than once. Now he's gone too.
We've been together for over two decades, so she doesn't read my moods anymore; moods are weather. She reads the season underneath. The screen still lit at midnight. Me talking with my hands at dinner, like a man selling a used car. The way a week suddenly has no dead minutes left in it. (I thought I was hiding that last one well. I was not.)
Halfway down the long lane she said it: "I can see you've got the appetite again." Only she didn't say appetite. The word she used is goesting, and appetite is the nearest English gets to it, and it isn't very near. It's the word for whatever a man has when he's still committing code at 23:40.
My ears went hot, like a kid caught at the cookie jar.
It wasn't an accusation. Accusations you can argue with, and I'm good at those - ask anyone who's sat in a meeting with me.
Anyway. I did the careful thing. She has seen this a gazillion times. Somewhere along the way she stopped being curious about the fire and started checking where the exits are. I can't blame her, and I said none of that. I stayed on the surface and told her the plan: the machine I've been building that runs my paperwork and collects what I'm owed, the rules I wrote for it, what I think it could become. The version with round edges.
She disagreed with about half of it. You learn to spot that in a nod that stops halfway. Then she committed anyway. Disagree and commit: somewhere a manager invented that phrase for meetings. She's been doing it as long as I've known her, and not one invoice to show for it.
I could point you to the exact tree we were passing when she said the word.
We walked back past the moat, mostly quiet. Not the bad quiet. Somewhere around the ducks my shoulders came down. I hadn't noticed they'd been up for weeks.
That evening the laptop stayed shut until ten. Half past, tops…
Because you're mine, I walk the line.
— Johnny Cash