The woman is far more elegant than our typical fare, in a dress that looks like it came from Paris or some fancy city like that. She’s beautiful in an almost untouchable way, as though she sauntered off the pages of Photoplay or one of those other Hollywood magazines, her hair an inky black, a slash of red across her lips, her skin flawless. The dark-haired man beside her strides in like he owns the place, while she appears as though she’s skimming through the water, gliding through life.

Railroad folk for sure. I’ve never seen a dress like hers in all my life.

They sit at one of the empty tables in my section, and I head over to my next customers, but not before the daydream sneaks up on me again, and I envision Tom out there in his boat on the sea, the wind whipping around him, the waves growing stronger, a storm brewing in the distance, lightning cracking through the sky, thunder booming, the heavens unleashing their righteous fury.

I close my eyes for an instant and offer the prayer that has run through my head for much of my nine years of marriage.

I pray the sea will keep my husband and he will not return to me.

Two

Mirta

“Milk?”

I glance up at the blond waitress, struggling to form a response to her question.

What kind of wife doesn’t know how her husband takes his coffee?

From the moment Anthony led me into Ruby’s Café, all eyes have been on us. My dress is too formal for such a simple place, my jewelry ostentatious, my features darker than those of the other customers.

I have never felt more out of place in my life.

“I’m not sure,” I reply, stumbling over the unfamiliar English, my stomach churning, the breakfast I ate hours earlier on the ferry from Havana to Key West leaving a metallic taste in my mouth. The entire journey, I feared I would lose my battle with the nausea and upend my eggs and fruit on Anthony’s flashy black leather shoes. I hardly slept during the ferry ride, the question of whether my husband would choose that moment to consummate our marriage weighing heavily upon me. In the end, though, my worries were for naught. However Anthony chose to spend the journey, it wasn’t in my bed.

The waitress’s brow rises at my response, the milk jug hovering in midair. Her eyes widen as her gaze sets on my ring finger, her reaction to the diamond not far off my own when Anthony presented it to me weeks ago.

“Milk, please,” I decide, taking a wild guess while Anthony is outside making a phone call.

The waitress leans forward to pour the milk in Anthony’s waiting coffee cup, a wisp of her nearly white blond hair escaping the bun atop her head. She’s pregnant, her stomach jutting out of her petite body with an aggressive force that suggests the baby could be due at any moment, the coffeepot seemingly too heavy for her slender wrists and hands to bear. Her skin is chapped and red, nearly raw in places.

She appears to be about my age—in her early twenties, perhaps, or a few years older. Far too young for the tired set of her eyes, the hunch of her shoulders.

And still—she’s quite lovely.

She reminds me of one of the watercolors that used to hang on a wall in my parents’ house in Havana—muted, faded colors giving the distinct impression of loveliness, an ephemeral quality to her beauty. There’s a nervousness to her movements, though, a jittery frenzy of limbs at odds with her serene countenance.

Belatedly, I flip the diamond on my ring finger around so it’s no longer visible, a hint of shame pricking me at the ostentatiousness of the stone, the clothes he paid for. If fate had turned out differently, would I have ended up like this woman: my clothes worn and threadbare at the seams, eyes tired and filled with desperation?

“We’re newlyweds,” I offer as an explanation for my milk faux pas, even though it explains so little. Even newlyweds have some prior relationship history, a shared affection and understanding.

The waitress’s mouth opens as though she has something to say, but she closes it almost immediately, her attention no longer on me, but on Anthony, striding through the door, all long-limbed confidence and brawn.

He is a handsome man, my new husband, as glitzy as the diamond on my finger, the sort women can’t help but admire, the type men gravitate toward in smoke-filled clubs where less reputable dealings and questionable stock tips—the little to be had these days—are passed between glasses of rum. His reappearance in the restaurant earns him a fair number of stares, his natty suit as out of place as my dress.

He is a handsome man, and—most importantly, to my parents, at least—he is a wealthy and well-connected man, though rumors of the sources of his amassed fortune run the gamut from the decadent to the truly criminal. These days, it hardly matters. Money bought him a wife whose family had run on desperate times. I never learned what he and my father settled on—whether it was gold, or property, or some other manner of valuing his only daughter—but my thoughts on the situation hardly mattered.

“Did you order lunch?” Anthony asks me, our language another barrier between us.

I am most comfortable in Spanish, he prefers Italian, and so we must do with English, the only language we have in common.

How are we to build a life with so many differences between us?

“No, I didn’t order yet. I wasn’t sure what you’d like. Your coffee is here.” I gesture toward the cup, waiting to see how he reacts to the drink. I know so little about him: his likes, his personality, his temper.

The waitress walks away during this exchange, hips swaying as she manages the tray in her hands.

“I talked to my friend on the phone,” Anthony says. “We’ll drive up on the highway and catch a ferry that will take us the rest of the way to Islamorada. The staff has readied everything for us.”

I twist the ring around my finger once more, unused to the weight of it, the sharp prongs holding the diamond in place that occasionally dig into my skin. What sort of man buys his wife a ring like this in times like these?

Anthony’s dark brows knit together, his gaze on my hands. “Is it too large?”

“Pardon me?”

“The ring.”

I stop fidgeting.

“Is it too large on your finger?” he clarifies. “We can take it to my jeweler when we get to New York if you’d like to have it resized.”

New York is to be our final destination, by way of the Florida East Coast Railway in a week or so after we’ve honeymooned at Anthony’s friend’s house in Islamorada. I’ve never been to New York, know not a soul, yet somehow it is to be my home, where I am to bear his children, live out the remainder of my days. No matter how many times I tell myself this is to be my future, I can’t quite reconcile how my life has changed so suddenly and with such finality. I can’t picture what our days will entail or how I will learn to be this man’s wife.