You step out for a pre-work smoke on the sagging gray porch while your boyfriend snores on, because he was fired (again) from his chef job at the last restaurant in a fifty-mile radius that hadn’t already choked on his authority-bucking bullshit. Today, you’ve decided, is the day. You’ll call on your lunch break and tell him to get the fuck out, or else your cousins Bobby and Jimbo will come help him get out. It’s got to be done. You promised yourself—and your mother—you wouldn’t waste your golden years carting a decade-older man to-and-from dialysis. He may still drink fifty-year-old you under the table. But those Irish genes of his, while sturdy, are fraying.
As you smoke, you remember the deep COVID months, bunkered in here like two bears, one fat (you) and one thin (him). How he fussed and cooked for you, massaged your feet through game shows and Dr. Phil. Everything seemed great while the stimulus checks came. You almost fell back in love with him. When this is over, babe, let’s do it, he said. Wanna watch your big brown ass jiggle up the aisle in white satin, lay a wet one on you in front of your kids, grandkids, and the whole fam-damn-ily! Then the checks stopped, and the price of whiskey soared. You got behind on bills. And your mother, last time you called to borrow money, announced she was cutting you off. Your mind’s your trump card, and high time you played it, she said. As if you both didn’t know the carefree happy drunks—your father, brother, and every man you’ve ever dated—were holding all the aces in this life.
After your last breakup, you got clean for six months. Changed your phone so Heather and Krystal couldn’t call. Went to AA. Won an efficiency award at the office. Restarted your abandoned master’s in public administration, and spent every weekend on writing and research. Then come one morning, you walked into the Alpine Café for fried egg on a bagel and there he was, holding court in the two-foot gap between the open grill and a counter-full of hikers and construction workers. And you—because he bantered in front of everyone, declaring he liked a big woman with a big brain to match—let him into your bed, though you smelled the smoke of a thousand crash-and-burn decisions on his neck. But fuck romance already. Fuck the white wedding you never got, and never will, having already slept with practically every man in twelve counties willing to shack up with a woman of your size and IQ.
You go cautiously down the warped gray steps to the truck, making no sound. You reach under the seat to make sure you’ve still got that pack of good Marlboros there, the ones you hide from him, when up he pops up like a goddamn leprechaun at the passenger door, trilling Mornin’, Babe! and launches into the cab, sort of half-ass kissing your ear. And now you have to drive away with him instead of without him. You used to think it was sweet how he wanted to ride to work with you. But he just likes having wheels while you’re out so he can cruise up to the Snowdrift, where he schmoozes for his drinks with that limber, lying tongue of his that never stops.
Can’t get enough of this view, he says, gazing at the scenery through a windshield bug-spackle he always says he’ll clean. Part of you—the part that still cares for him, thinks Me, neither. Up that rise, the blue sky so wide it seems to bend beneath the horizon; the pure, endless gold of the prairie that makes you feel, every time, like you can start over. Any of them Moose Drools left in the back? he asks.
You didn’t want to tell him like this, doing eighty-five on a road where, every other mile, there’s a white metal cross or two or six in the ditch marking the body-count. But he’s here, and you’re here, and you need to get the shit over with.
This isn’t working. We have to break up.
What are you talking about, he says, tender, pleading.
Your foot sinks harder on the gas. We want different things, you say, training your eyes on the asphalt streak you’ve driven so many times. Just four miles more and you’ll slam it in park, run to your office, and lock this man out of your life for good. You’ll sober up, start saving, finish your degree, get promoted, and move into a real house, where you’ll live—as you always meant to—alone, and peacefully.
Don’t do this, he says, sidling a hand up your inner thigh, the way you like.
No! you shout, shoving him across the truck and into the door, way harder than you wanted. The sweetness slides off him like burnt flesh, and there it is—what you always knew, and feared, was there because, like your mother said, even the happiest drunk sits on a sleeping volcano.
The fuck you do that for?
Baby, I’m sorry, you say.
But you know, before it happens, that he’ll hit you. That you’ll lose control. That you lost control a long time ago.
