Million Dollar Road by Amy Connor

out the window at her twenty-acre farm, paid for with the divorce settlement. The herb parterre bounded by flower beds, the grassy alleys stretching under the sun-spotted shade of the pecan tree grove, the iris-ringed pond where a great blue heron waded—it was an ordered, beautiful place, but at moments like these, Emma felt the emptiness of every solitary acre. Beauty could be lonely, too. She sighed.
    So what to do now with the rest of her afternoon? Emma wondered. She’d cleaned the house yesterday, her laundry was done, and she wasn’t hungry. Emma glanced hopefully at the cell phone charging on the kitchen counter beside her hand, although hardly anyone called her anymore except for Sarah Fortune.
    When the old woman had come by over a year ago to welcome Emma to the neighborhood, Sarah arrived with housewarming gifts: a loaf of homemade bread and a bottle of discount vodka. Oblivious to Emma’s nearly mute shyness, she’d made herself at home in the kitchen and stayed for two hours. Now possessed of an unlooked-for friend, over the months Emma had come to appreciate Sarah’s blunt company. The acquaintances she’d made in Covington before the divorce had done a slow fade since she’d been single, as though divorce were catching and she, having contracted the disease, was a carrier. Consequently, more often than not, checking the phone was a waste of time.
    But then time was something Emma had more than enough of, miles of it.
    Still, she picked up the phone anyway and for once this Saturday morning there’d been an unusual two missed calls and a voice mail, besides. Emma noted Sarah’s regular morning call, reminding herself to ring her neighbor back, but then she recognized the rare second number and it set her heart to banging like an unlatched screen door in a high wind.
    Con .
    Her knees going abruptly slack, Emma had to sit at the scrubbed cypress table. She was breathless at the approach of her old enemy—a panic attack. Instinctively, she began Margot’s breathing exercise, frantic to head off the sudden, unreasoning terror stalking her before panic brought her down once again and tore her to pieces.
    But Con had called. God help her, Con had called and panic was winning.
    â€œBreathe!” Emma grabbed at the air in gasps, struggling to find a rhythm. Gradually, her racing heart slowed. After long minutes, her breaths deepened. As if sensing something amiss, Sheba trotted down the hall into the kitchen, toenails clicking on the pine floor, and heaped herself like a load of laundry at Emma’s feet under the table.
    â€œI can . . . do this.” Although calmer, Emma still panted. Her hand went down to Sheba’s dark head and found the long, silky ears. She stroked them. “I’m okay . . . I’ll be okay, Sheba. It’s just . . . a voice mail.”
    A voice mail from Con .
    Still, Emma knew she’d retrieve it. She always did. She was going to listen to his voice again. She had to, it was a compulsion, as inexplicable as phantom pain from a lost limb, but now Emma was fighting to turn back the unbidden memory of her ex-husband’s once-beloved face, his mouth, so dear to her, saying those terrible, terrible words.
    I want a divorce .
    Â 
    They’d been together since the start of her sophomore year at Tulane, meeting outside the library when Emma had discovered a flat tire on her bicycle and Con had stopped to help.
    He’d fixed the leak, asked her out for a coffee, and from that afternoon they were inseparable. A handsome, popular twenty-one years old to her solemn, quiet nineteen, he’d pursued her with a bewildering ardor and she was helpless to resist him, even if she’d wanted to. When Emma contracted mono that fall, Con came to her dorm room every day with newspapers, magazines he knew she’d enjoy, class assignments, and silly haikus he’d written for her. Until she recovered, he weekly brought her