Dan read this and said, “Next week, write a happy one.” FINE. More depressing fiction for this week.
After weeks of gray that felt as if the sun had abandoned the sky altogether, that day it was impossibly blue. It was Valentine’s Day, which on a good year was a consumerist farce; she smiled remembering joking with him about how lame it was. This year was different; this was the year he left her with three young kids and a nearly empty checking account to fly halfway across the country. To her.
She trudged toward the grocery store, coupons neatly sorted in a zippered pouch, knowing she had exactly $78.52 to her name. He’d moved his direct deposit paychecks elsewhere last week, the day he moved out, promising to send her a check every other week. She’d believe that when she saw it.
She walked past a display table crammed with red, pink, and white cupcakes and cookies and noticed a man in an expensive overcoat clutching a sorry looking bouquet of red roses and hurrying toward the checkout area. She walked slowly through the aisles, gazing at the name brand items she’d have tossed into the cart without thinking just a month ago.
It felt like she was walking through pancake syrup. She’d just about trained herself not to say, “This isn’t happening,” because of course, it was. A few weeks ago, she’d been happily married and actually in love, a stay at home mother to three beautiful kids who wore her out daily while her resume atrophied in a metal file cabinet somewhere in their unfinished basement.
Now that reality was sinking in, the “what if’s” were starting. “What if I’d been more exciting in bed?” “What if I hadn’t gained so much weight with each pregnancy?” “What if I’d worn nicer clothes, maybe some make-up?” “What if I’d been more interesting/funnier/a better cook?”
“What’s the use?” she said aloud without realizing it. “He’s not coming back.” She spied a two teenagers ahead of her in the cereal aisle, talking quietly, their heads tilted toward each other. They laughed at some inside joke as she slowly passed them, resisting the urge to tell the girl to run while she could, he’d only rip her heart open.
She’d never been more acutely aware of how everyone around her seemed to be paired off and happily in love. Of course, she knew they all probably fought and felt bored and ambivalent at times, too, but she still felt like a stranger in the world, nose pressed to the glass of a never-ending party whose invite would never arrive.
And that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was that even though he’d so clearly moved on, emotionally and physically, her heart was stuck in last month. Slow, lazy days helping the kids dress and the endless parade of snacks and toy pick-ups, maybe a little vacuuming thrown in for good measure. Family dinners, then helping the kids bathe and ready for bed while he worked on the computer (shopping for a girlfriend, apparently). It was a simple life, but a happy, contented life. It was her life, and it was gone, all of it, out the front door with a man everyone said was a shallow cad for abandoning his family, a man she knew in her head was those things, but her heart didn’t seem to want to listen.
She grabbed four boxes of generic macaroni and cheese and tossed them into her cart, pushing onward into the next chapter of her life, one she hadn’t asked to be written but, unlike her life a month before, was now more her own than ever.
1 Comment
February 20, 2009 at 3:26 am
“…while her resume atrophied in a metal file cabinet somewhere in their unfinished basement.”
I’m a sucker for a good phrase. And that’s a damn fine one.
Nothing depressing about this story… but then I’m a cubicle lemming working in an industry that could well be on it’s last gasping breaths… so how would I know?
Perhaps it is “a downer” but it’s also a very satisfying read.