about getting lost in Lisbon on a work trip and accidentally joining a walking tour she'd mistaken for a client event. Everyone was laughing, including the waiter, who had stopped beside the table with a tray balanced on one hand. When I took the empty seat next to her, she turned and said, "You're the mysterious logistics guy. Are you the reason all my online orders arrive late?"
I told her I was usually the reason they arrived at all. She laughed, and I found myself laughing too, the first real laugh I'd had that week. At the end of the night she asked if I wanted to walk with her to where she'd parked, although her car turned out to be only half a block away. We stood by it talking for forty minutes because neither of us wanted to end the conversation. For months afterward she referred to that first evening as the night she'd met a man who could make broken supply chains sound romantic.
There were happy years. I want that understood because otherwise it's too easy to imagine that everything had been rotten from the beginning and I had simply been too foolish to notice. We took weekend trips when we could afford them, hosted friends for inexpensive dinners, and made plans over coffee on Saturday mornings. She watched terrible science fiction movies with me and complained about every plot hole while secretly enjoying them. I learned how to cook her mother's chicken recipe because it was the one meal she wanted when work went badly.
The second year we were together, we took a short trip to a town on the coast. There was a street market beside the harbor, a line of stalls selling soap, jewelry, fruit, old books, and pottery painted by local artists. Kate stopped at a table covered with uneven ceramic mugs, picked up the ugliest one there, and declared it perfect. It was pale orange with lopsided blue flowers and a handle too narrow for my fingers. I said it looked like something a child had made during a particularly difficult art lesson, and she laughed so hard she bought it immediately.
She insisted that I carry the mug all the way back to our hotel. Later she drank instant coffee from it while we sat by the open window listening to seagulls and people arguing pleasantly on the street. I never liked the thing, but when we moved into our house, I found a place for it beside the coffee maker. It stayed there through job changes, holidays, arguments, and repairs. In the last months of our marriage, it became the object my eyes kept finding when I didn't want to look at my wife.