ISSUE V

            The bar at Bittersweet is crowded. It’s Thirsty Thursday, and the parking lot is packed. I’ve been circling, looking for his maroon Mazda Miata convertible, which I eventually see at the far end of the lot parked at a weird angle on the grass as if he’d had to jump out in a hurry. His keys might still be dinging in the ignition, and I’m tempted to try the door to see if it actually is unlocked, which I doubt but seriously consider anyway. There’s a good chance that someone who rubs finger marks off the driver’s side door with a microfiber cloth would know that I’d been rooting around in the glove compartment and feeling under the seats. 

            But he’s been a no-show, hasn’t shown up at my house two nights running now, and I’m panicking.

            He doesn’t have a cell phone. Once, I left a message on the answering machine at his mother’s house, which, as far as I can tell, is the only actual address he has. Don’t ever do that again, he said.

            I’m on a stool, at the near end of the bar, where I have a clear shot at the entrance without being too obvious about it. I’m eating peanuts and sucking on the olives in my latest martini, staring at the silent basketball game and flashing Keno numbers overhead. I’m trying to look like I’ve just stopped in on my way home, my coat on the stool beside me because I’m saving it for someone who will be there any minute. I’m trying not to whip around whenever the door blasts open, then sucks closed. I go back to tracing the rim of my glass with a toothpick. 

            I’m pretty sure that if I wait long enough, he’ll appear and want to follow me home again. Or I could leave and lie on my ratty sofa where we first had sex, listening for the pop of his tires on the gravel rolling into my rocky driveway, engine cut, headlights out, incognito. All this sneaky late-night stuff, the never knowing, the if, the when. I tell him it’s thrilling. He says he doesn’t want anyone to see he’s parked at my house. 

            But when I come back out from my second or third trip to the bathroom, wiping my hands on the back of my pants because the paper towel thing is empty, I see him. He’s been there all along. His shaved head glistens under the ghoulish fluorescent lights, and he’s wearing the same shirt he wore that first night he sidled over to me and followed me home when I got up to leave. He’s perched by the swinging kitchen doors, hunched over and leaning forward on his elbows, talking to a waitress whose name I forget. She’s plopping maraschino cherries and lemon peels into the drinks on her tray. They laugh. Throwing his head back, he downs one shot, then another. 

            But then he sees me. He’s sitting up with one elbow on the bar, the other hand tapping his thigh, watching two guys set up their drums and an amp in the corner. It’s standing room only since the band arrived, and people are pressing, two deep, yelling drink orders as the music starts.  

            He’s doing his usual scan of the room, smiling and tapping his fingers on the bar. That is until he gets to me. He does a double-take, then sends a blank, barely perceptible chin nod in my direction. 

 

            Hours later, I let myself in through my back door and turn the handle a couple of times to be sure it’s not locked, even though he’s got the spare key, which I’m always afraid I’ll find waiting for me on the kitchen table. I know when he’s been here, let himself in to do laundry and, why not, have a couple of glasses of wine while he’s at it, on his way somewhere else. I touch the dryer, and it’s cold. The level in the jumbo wine bottle I keep in the fridge for him hasn’t changed either. I check to be sure the porch light is on, my nightly Open sign, and as the furnace kicks in and the old pipes begin to bang, I lie down on the couch to wait.

            If I had known all there was to know about this house before I bought it — mushrooms the size of elephant ears growing in a bedroom closet where a part of the roof is rotting away, the dead cat-sized rat I found behind the cast iron radiator in the kitchen, or the moldy fistfuls of wet plaster that disintegrated as I tried to strip the stained floral wallpaper in the hall, I might have seen it for what it really was. The single wooden support beam in the dirt cellar, the steep slant of the second floor where the house was sinking to one side, the knob and tube wiring that the building inspector warned me was a major fire hazard. There might as well have been police barricades blocking the driveway, but I would have ignored those, too, because I was sure that if I loved this house unconditionally, it would love me back. 

 

            I’m a player, he once said as he rolled off me, yawning and reaching for the wine glass under the bed. I had no idea what that was, but it sounded cool and might mean that by not asking where he said he had to go all those times, I would be cool, too. A woman who didn’t need a man to stay after sex or know when she would see him again. A woman who could fuck a guy who followed her home from a bar just for the hell of it without caring whether she liked him or not. A woman who knew the jerk she was sleeping with was sleeping with other women, too, but thought maybe, just maybe, she was the One. 

            After all, he’d made me eggs, hadn’t he? I can see him cracking the shells with only one hand. Slipping the yolks whole into the spattering pan. Whistling with his back to me. Twirling the spatula and waiting for the right moment when the whites were white enough to slide onto a plate, kept warm in the oven, and placed it in front of me with a dish towel over his arm and a tah-dah that almost made me cry.

            The moon is just a pinprick out the living room window now, but it’s enough to spook me. So does all the random furniture I’ve dragged around since my divorce and my father’s move to assisted living that I can’t bring myself to get rid of. It doesn’t help that a pack of coyotes, or what I’m guessing are coyotes, howl from somewhere deep in the stubby cornfield across the road. Long echoing atonal moans, punctuated with little staccato yips. 

            I want them to shut up. I want the moon to go away. I want to sleep, but I can’t. I don’t want to be drunk and queasy and sad.

 

            We’d left the pasta water boiling on the stove, the colander in the sink, the dryer thumping happily with a last load of his clothes. Lucinda Williams on repeat. His sneakers weren’t waiting by the back door, and his good shirt was in a heap on the floor. His keys were on my bureau. Emptied his pockets. Change, a matchbook, half roll of Certs.

 

            Had I really said I love you?  

 

            The coyotes start up again, more of them, closer this time. The braying reverberates in the dark as I shiver, still in my parka on the sofa, trying to get warm wrapped in an army green crocheted blanket my grandmother made me when I left for college.

            How many mistakes I have made with this house. In the dark, it looks OK, but I have to acknowledge that I didn’t prime the red front door before I slapped on a coat of white paint, and now it’s pink. I tell myself  I’ll do it right someday, but I know I won’t. I’ll have to live with the squirrels in the attic and a rotting foundation that is crumbling. The toilet will always run. 

            But still, I wait, wait for the crackle of his tires turning into the driveway, the chirp of his car door locking, the creak of the porch stairs, the catch and release of the kitchen door. 

            Headlights of a passing car sweep over me and are gone.