As Min pulled the cart to a halt at her own doorway, he mentioned it.
“Yup,” she said with a lightness that seemed forced. “Ghost world.”
Somewhere in the years he’d been gone, Talissa had moved. The old rooms they’d had together were in Ballard, tucked in between the naval station and the old water processing plant. According to the local directories, she was in Galveston Shallow now. It wasn’t the neighborhood he’d imagined for her, but things changed. Maybe she’d come into money. He hoped so. Anything that had made her life better, he was in favor of.
The corridors of Galveston Shallow were wide. Half the light came down shafts from the surface, the actual light of the sun strung through a series of transparent shielding to keep the radiation to a minimum. The wide, sloping ceilings gave the place a sense of being natural, almost organic, and the smell of the mechanical air recyclers was nearly hidden by the rich, loamy scents of growing plants. Wide swaths of greenery filled the common areas with devil’s ivy and snake plant. The sorts of things that cranked out a lot of oxygen. The moisture in the air was strange and soothing. This, Alex realized, was the dream of Mars made real, if small. The terraforming project would make the whole planet like this someday, if it worked. Flora and fauna and air and water. Someday, centuries after he was gone, people might walk on the surface of Mars, surrounded by plants like these. Might feel the real sun against their skins.
He was distracting himself. He checked his position on his hand terminal against Tali’s new address. His heart was going faster than usual and he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands. He wondered what she’d say, how she’d look at him. Anger or joy would both be justified. Still, he hoped for joy.
His plan—find the place, gather himself, and ring the bell—failed because as soon as he turned the last curve to her rooms, he saw her. She was kneeling in among the plants in the common space, a trowel in one hand. She wore thick canvas work pants smeared with soil and a pale brown shirt with a wealth of pockets and loops for gardener’s tools, most of them empty. Her hair was a rich brown, so free of gray it had to be dyed. Her face was wider, thicker at the cheeks. Time had been kind to her. She wasn’t beautiful. Maybe she’d never been beautiful, but she was handsome and she was Talissa.
Alex felt a smile twitch at his lips, born more from anxiety than pleasure. He pushed his hands into his pockets and ambled over, trying to seem casual. Tali looked up from her work, then down. Her shoulders tensed and she looked up again, staring in his direction. He lifted a hand, palm out.
“Alex?” she said as he reached the edge of the garden space.
“Hey, Tali,” he said.
When she spoke, the only thing in her voice was a flat disbelief. “What are you doing here?”
“I had some downtime while my ship’s getting fixed up. Thought I’d come back to the old stompin’ ground. Touch base with folks. You know.”
Talissa nodded, her mouth taking the uneven curl that meant she was thinking hard. Maybe he should have reached out with a message before he came. Only it had seemed to him this was a meeting that should be face-to-face.
“Well,” she said. “All right.”
“I don’t want to interrupt. But, maybe when you’re done, I could buy you a cup of tea?”
Tali rolled back onto her heels and tilted her head. “Alex, stop it. What are you doing here?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“No. Something. You’re here for something.”
“Really, I’m not. I just—”
“Don’t,” she said, conversationally. “Don’t bullshit me. No one just shows up at their ex-wife’s house out of the blue because they thought a cup of tea sounded nice.”
“Well, all right,” Alex said. “But I thought…”
Tali shook her head and turned back to digging through the black soil. “Thought what? That we’d get a drink together, talk about old times, get a little maudlin? Maybe fall into bed for nostalgia’s sake?”
“What? No. I’m not—”
“Please don’t make me be the bad guy here. I have a rich, full, complex life that you chose not to be a part of. I have a lot on my plate just now that I don’t actually want to share with you, and comforting the guy who walked out on me umpteen years ago because he’s… I don’t know, having his midlife crisis? It’s not my priority, and it’s not something that’s fair to expect of me.”
“Oh,” Alex said. His belly felt like he’d swallowed a tungsten slug. His face felt flushed. She sighed, looking up at him. Her expression wasn’t cruel. Wasn’t even unkind. Tired, maybe.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re a couple people who used to know each other. At this point, we’re maybe even a little less than that.”
“I understand. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t put you in this position. You put me in it. I was just working with my plants.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to discomfort you. Not now, and not before.”
“Not before? Before, when you walked out on me?”
“It wasn’t what I meant to have happen, and it wasn’t about you or—”
She shook her head sharply, grimacing as she did.
“No. Not going to do this. Alex? We’re talking about the past. That’s the conversation I just said I don’t want to have. All right?”
“All right.”
“Okay.”
“Sorry if things are… rough.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
He lifted his hand again, the same gesture he’d made walking up to her, but with a different meaning now. He turned. He walked away. The humiliation was like a weight on his chest. The urge to turn back, to have one last look in case maybe she was looking at him was almost too much to resist.
He resisted it.
She was right. It was why he’d appeared on her doorstep without warning. Because he’d known that if she said no, he had to respect that, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d thought that if they were there, breathing the same air, it would be harder for her to turn him away. And maybe it had been. Maybe what he’d done was actually make it worse for her.
The first bar he came to was named Los Compadres, and the air inside it smelled of hops and overheated cheese. The man behind the bar looked barely old enough to drink, his sallow skin set off by ruddy hair and a mustache that could generously be called aspirational. Alex took a high stool and ordered a whiskey.
“Little early in the day for celebration,” the barkeep said as he poured. “What’s the occasion?”
“It turns out,” Alex said, exaggerating his Mariner Valley drawl just a little for the effect, “that sometimes I’m an asshole.”
“Hard truth.”
“It is.”
“You expect drinking alone to improve that?”
“Nope. Just observing the traditions of alienated masculine pain.”
“Fair enough,” the barkeep said. “Want some food with it?”
“I’d look at a menu.”
Half an hour later, he was only halfway through the drink. The bar was starting to fill up, which meant maybe twenty people in a space that would have taken seventy. Ranchero music played from hidden speakers. The thought of going back to his cousin’s and pretending to be cheerful was only a half a degree worse than continuing to sit in the bar, waiting for his self-pity to fade. He kept trying to think about what he could have said or done differently that would have made any difference. So far the best he’d come up with was Don’t walk out on your wife, which was about the same as saying Be someone else.