Excerpt from In Love by Amy Bloom, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In our Swissair pods, Brian and I toast each other, and we say, Here's to you, a little hesitantly, instead of what we usually say, Cent'anni ("May we have a hundred years," a very Italian toast). There is no Cent'anni for us; we won't make it to our thirteenth wedding anniversary.

We lean closer to each other and then we pull back, each of us fussing with our shoes and carry-ons, each of us opening our little gift bags from the airline and pulling out the socks (yes) and the eye masks (never) and the tiny toothpastes and tiny toothbrushes, which we persist in believing will delight the grandchildren, which they never do.

It is all nearly normal, like so much that we've done these last few years, like the flight itself and everything that precedes it—the trip to the airport, the TSA (our petty but deep pleasure at having TSA PreCheck, noting the much longer, shoes-off lines to the left of us), the pretty good meal at JFK. It all seems normal, except that I still remember how different it was to be together, to be with Brian, three years ago, when I didn't hold my breath from the time he went off to the newsstand until he came back. From the outside, or some kind of inside (the one where I too have no memory of how we used to live our actual life), it is nearly normal.

For the trip to JFK, we didn't use Arnold, the guy who always drives our car to the airport and returns it to our driveway. Arnold's been driving us, and our kids and grandkids, for six years, and he has shared with us all about his love of motorcycles, his sobriety, and his wife's health issues, to balance, I think, all the information he has about us, whether he's wanted it or not. I could not bear to lie to Arnold about where we are going and I cannot bear to tell him the truth and I could not come up with a half-truth (the favorite technique of serious liars) about why we are going to Zurich in late January. For the skiing? For the ice fishing? For the Chagall windows in Fraumünster Church? I was afraid that Arnold would watch us sympathetically in the rearview mirror, and I could not bear it, for Brian's pride and my general soft-boiledness, and just as I could not bear any harshness at all, I didn't think I could take kindness, either. I wanted absolutely nothing, a blanket of indifference, and that was exactly what we got from the driver of our local limo service. He spoke once in the two-and-a-half-hour drive. Perfect.

At JFK, we stood mid–Terminal 4 and agreed on the restaurant, nicer than Shake Shack (which I love and Brian does not) but not as nice as the Palm steakhouse, which seems insanely high-priced, but as I'm writing this, I remember that we did go to the Palm, after all, because ... obviously.

Brian ordered everything he wanted—and, it seemed to me, everything that anyone can imagine ordering—at the Palm steakhouse at JFK, except vodka on the rocks, which he had been mentioning wanting from time to time for the last year or so.

At the Palm, Brian ordered onion rings and a rare rib eye with a side of hash browns and a Caesar salad and garlic toast and he would have ordered a shrimp cocktail, except that I whispered, like the circa-1953 stage Jewish wife I seem to have become, missing only my home perm and rickrack-trimmed apron: Really? Shrimp in a steak place, in an airport? Brian shrugged, to say: I'm not that excited about airport shrimp anyway and, also, what's the worst that could happen? I could have a bite, and it's meh, and then I wouldn't eat it. Waste of money, so what? I could die from bad shrimp, and wouldn't that save us all a lot of trouble? Or I could get food poisoning and have to miss the flight. At this, he folded the menu and looked at me the way he often did now, with resigned understanding, fatigue, a little worn humor.

Excerpted from In Love by Amy Bloom. Copyright © 2022 by Amy Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.