On their last day of vacation, the couple walks up Brånnervivagen in Sunderbyn, Sweden. Fredrik’s house is close by, five-minutes at most, past the birch tree hit by lightning, and the wooden hut for villagers who ride the bus into Luleå, and the convenience store that used to attract shoppers before it became easier to shop at the new mall. An arrow indicates the bike path to the hospital, four kilometers away. After the roundabout, the road runs straight to Margareta’s house. Blue and white lupins grow wild in the gully bordering a plowed field. On the left-hand side, a gardener shovels compost into a wheelbarrow. On the right, leggy lilac bushes hide a yellow house with dirty asbestos shingles, for sale according to a driveway sign. A cold north wind blows, odd for June, he says. She tightens the belt on her raincoat against whatever their excursion may bring. On they go, past another yellow house, this one tidy with manicured lawn and flower boxes of lobelia. He walks with a limp, stiffer than usual. It’s not due to age, he told her that morning, but she knows better.
           Her mind kaleidoscopes in on what he has shared of his ten years with Margareta. The purples are the bruises on their sons’ shins. The reds, her preference for Lap clothing. The yellows, the sunny summer days spent on rocky islands off the coast, where his in-laws maintained a cottage. The blues, the intense northern skies. Strange how the events of a life, once so stratified, shift like pieces of glass, evolving into a memory not of conflict but of harmony.
          He has told her Margareta left after he had an affair.
“It was stupid,” he admitted. “I should have known better.”
          She had been in a similar situation, having divorced her first husband because of a mistress. Margareta’s departure made perfect sense.
They continue on until the five metal flowerpots, evenly spaced by the side of the road, marking the western boundary of the family compound.
“Who do you suppose they belong to?” he asks.
“Margareta. Remember? We saw her in the yard yesterday, unpacking plants. When we went to Fredrik’s for dinner.”
They continue on.
“Let’s stop in and say goodbye,” he says at the pebble driveway.
She doesn’t think this is a good idea. His ex-wife probably doesn’t want to talk to him anymore. That winter, she disconnected her landline, so he would stop calling long distance from the United States.
She ticks off possibilities in her head as to why he is again seeking contact: curiosity at whether the mother of his grown children remains in good health, an urge to share impressions of their first great-grandchild, an odd desire to show off his American wife as if she were a Cadillac from the fifties, lovingly restored by Swedish greasers. Or, could the desire stem from some strange custom she isn’t familiar with, behavior examined in one of the early films of Ingmar Berman, who kept reentering Liv Ullmann’s life and even hired the actress for Scenes from a Marriage, three years after he disappeared from her bed?
He lays his gentle hands on her coat sleeve and raises his eyebrows. “We lived together ten years. Raised four kids together.”
A reason. Not the best but go figure. 
She pats his shoulder and offers up a little wave of acceptance, although the visit feels like trespassing.
Margareta lives in a log house, painted red the way it was in the sixteenth century. A riding lawn mower stands to one side of the entrance. The Swedish mailbox, red as well, is pristine with no sign of rust.
He rings the bell. She fiddles with a button on her raincoat. They can see Fredrik’s Victorian from the front porch, and, off to one side, the scaffolding where his younger brother will raise children now that he has at last chosen a wife. There’s movement behind the door. It swings open. At first no one speaks. Margareta’s second husband inspects them from the kitchen doorway and gives a curt nod that is not unfriendly. Gunnar wears a button-down shirt over plaid jockey shorts. His long bare legs are hairy. The house smells of pea soup and dried roses.
“We’re leaving tomorrow for Boston, so we stopped to say goodbye,” the man says simply.
There’s another awkward silence. Gunnar coughs. He seems ready to invite them in but looks to his wife first for guidance.
“Goodbye then,” Margareta responds.
A hint of long-ago tenderness flits across her face. Or, maybe it’s simply the sudden light from outside, brightening the dark entryway.
The two couples shake hands. 
Margareta doesn’t give him her new cell phone number. 

Alexandra Grabbe is a former green innkeeper and an activist against toxic chemicals in the environment. Her recent work has been published in The Washington Post, Better After 50, New World Writing, and is forthcoming from Unity Magazine. She is revising a novel.