The Renegade Jack of Hearts

Oh it had been good at first. It had seemed like something out of
a story book, or a bad movie. They had met by singing together,
for Christ's sake. In their college dorm. He had brought his
guitar down into the laundry room because he felt awkward about
practicing in front of his roommate, and thought he would try his
luck in the laundry room at some middle-of-the-night hour when no
one else was supposed to be around. So there he was, sitting on a
little wobbly chair behind the table that was for folding clothes
on, when in she came.

He was trying so hard to be cool. He would admit that fully,
looking back afterwards. He didn't look up at her. It took every
ounce of maturity he could hope to grasp for at that age not to
immediately start into one of the two solos he had learned, but
instead to keep going with the simple little back-and-forth
strumming he was doing. Nice, and easy.

And she came in, and walked across to the other side of the little
room, and started loading her laundry into one of the machines.
And as she did, she started singing. And her voice was beautiful.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see

He looked up at her, and she wasn't facing him at all, she was
still loading in her laundry, one piece at a time, no rush,
swaying back and forth. She had bright orange frizzy hair that
hung down a little past her shoulders.

He didn't know the next verse of Amazing Grace. He could have
convinced himself then that there wasn't one, because he would
have heard about it, a song everyone knew like that. So, not
knowing quite what else to do, he sang the very first verse again
in his own voice, which was unpracticed, not good sounding, no
sir. But midway through the very first line, she started singing
it with him, and so the both of them sang it, and it felt unreal
to him that it was happening.

She started her washing machine, and came over, and sat down
across from him. She had a mask of freckles, and in addition to
that, she had a scar on her face, a real noticeable one kind of to
the side of her nose, going to her cheek bone, and the scar was
raised very prominently in that moment with her big dimples, from
how hard she was smiling. He didn't mention her scar to her. Once
he had seen it, he tried very very hard not to stare at it at all,
and so he looked into her eyes. It would turn out, her scar was
from when she was little, her friend had actually stabbed her but
not to kill her, they were playing a pretend game where they
threatened each other to see who could make the other the most
scared, and the friend had meant to just make her flinch with a
big knife from the kitchen but had actually made contact. And in
genuine, it wasn't anything more nefarious than that, she and the
other person were still on friendly terms and the other person
hadn't gone on to be a serial killer or anything, it had just been
a really dumb, unfortunate mistake.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Oh um," he said, and stopped playing, and kind of hung his arms
over the guitar. Nice and cool, he thought. And it was, but not
because it looked all casual. It was because he looked like a
dork, and chicks were starting to dig that, some of them. For him,
it did him the favor of showing, more than he knew it did, that he
was trying, which wasn't something to be ashamed of like he'd have
thought if someone had pointed it out to him.

Anyways, she had asked him a question, "What's your name?" And he
stammered and actually forgot for a sec, but then it came to him
in a rush, and he answered, "Lory. How about you?"

"Sandra," she said.

And they got to talking. Really got to talking, a lot more than he
had talked with anyone at all yet since coming here, even his
roommate, even the couple of people here who had come from his
same high school, Lory and Sandra really hit it off. So long after
the fact, Lory wouldn't have been able to say word for word what
all of the conversation that night had been, Sandra probably could
have, but he chiefly remembered how damn nice it was just to TALK.
He remembered complaining about some of his classes, and her
listening, and saying she could relate, there was some BS she had
to put up with in her own classes too, and she told him about it.
They talked clear through until her laundry was done in the
washer, and then clear through until it was done in the drier, and
by that point the both of them really ought to have been getting
to bed, there were classes the next day for the both of them, not
early, but, it was an ungodly hour in the middle of the night,
almost morning really, by then.

As she was leaving, he called to her, and asked her, hey. Do you
wanna play pool tomorrow, after your classes? He had never been,
but it was something that had come up in the conversation, as
something they'd both like to do sometime here. And she smiled,
and said yes, and they agreed to a time. And that was the
beginning of it.

Lory stayed up all that night elated, but anxious that he was
getting away with something. He had a sordid past. Not really, but
that was what he thought he had at the time. He had seen in the
woods a dying bird once, really dying, bloody and not able to get
off its side and swarmed with flies and flapping its wings feebly,
and Lory had tried to pet it to comfort it, he was just a little
kid at the time, and the bird cried out in pain and flapped around
and he pulled his hand back and ran away, and he thought
afterwards he should have killed it, put it out of its misery with
a big rock, he could have found one, but instead he'd let it go on
having the worst last moments of life you could imagine, and he
had pained it even more. It was stuff like that that haunted him
in the nights. Stuff that he had made worse because he was a
bumbling, cruel idiot.

That was what he thought. In truth he got As and Bs all throughout
high school, and he didn't have a mean bone in his body. He had
entirely healthy interests, maybe aside from the fact they were
all just rather personal in a way, solitary: he kept his nose down
in books; he liked to go outside and find bugs, turn up rocks and
see what scuttled or pulsated underneath, stare at moths, handle
grasshoppers and wasps, catch snakes just to look at them close.
He'd never had a girlfriend until junior year in high school, and
she had broken up with him, he was not "boyfriend material." She
got bored by him. Summer. Her name was Summer, and he'd had a
crush on her for her name alone since he was eight, he always
thought it was the prettiest name a girl could ever have, and she
gave him a real chance, two months, before she broke it off, and
that made his dating resume pretty rough. Besides that, all he had
to speak of in the sex and dating department wasn't really
something he did speak about, to anyone: he made out a lot with
the family's Border Collie, Casidy, and did, well, other stuff
with her, too. Some boys looked at porno. Others got straight into
getting their classmates pregnant before they were eighteen.
Others had alone time with dogs. His kick was dogs. He'd been with
his own, mostly, but had taken it where he could get it when left
alone with friends' dogs too, if the dog clearly liked him. He
figured that if anyone knew he had done stuff like that, and since
he didn't have anything else going for him that made that stuff
with Casidy just a drop in the bucket, and since he actually liked
it, if a chick could read his mind and see everything in it before
agreeing to go on a date, he'd never see a date as long as he
lived. So after that fate-guided meeting in the laundry room, as
he tried to get to sleep, awaiting his date for the next day, he
couldn't believe how lucky he was to have pulled something so
slick.

Lory and Sandra. Their first date, playing pool, was fun. They
laughed at themselves. They laughed every time Lory whiffed it,
wasn't even in the ballpark of making a shot that would improve
his standing on the board. They laughed every time Sandra mixed up
what the goal was: "Sandra! Stripes!" "What? Oh come ON." He had
walked away from that date with his sides aching, from all of the
laughing. It was sealed. They were an item. And there was no
shortage of things for them to attend on or around a college
campus, oh no, there were dances and sporting events and house
parties, even a lot of creative events put on, arts and crafts or
painting things they could attend as a couple, they could pack a
date into every hour of the day and night if they wanted to, and
they more or less did exactly that, so that by the time a couple
of weeks had passed, they felt like they ought to have been
celebrating their one year anniversary already.

It so happened that Sandra hadn't been stuck with a roommate, odd
number of female students in the dorms, fate, and so she wasn't
beholden to anyone about having guests over, and there was no one
to complain that her boyfriend started hanging around every day
and night. He practically lived there, and he was a swell enough
guy, the other women on the floor liked him, they thought he was
gay because he was usually soft spoken and never hit on anyone,
didn't even seem particularly flirtatious with his own so-called
girlfriend. And it was true enough that he wasn't trying to rush
things with her as far as sex went. He didn't want to ruin a good
thing. In mind of all the things that usually haunted him, all his
mistakes, he didn't want to be the one to push and ruin it. But
one night she had gotten to reaching down inside of his jeans and
touching him, and that was that, and they started having sex most
nights too. Even their idle time spent in her dorm room was filled
with little happy moments, things to laugh at. Her freaking out
big time over a daddy long legs, and him not even having to get a
jar, he just goaded the little critter to walk onto his hand and
then walked it outside, and let it go out there. Neither of them
being able to open a jar of pickles if heaven and hell depended on
it. Him practicing on guitar, her sometimes singing along, and he
was actually getting better faster than he had been before by her
pointers, not that she played, herself, but she had more of an ear
for music overall. One day Lory had been making a sandwich, peanut
butter and jelly, butter on the jelly side before the jelly went
on, and one of the slices of bread out of the bag was way thicker
than it should have been, almost like they had missed making a
slice, but it wasn't quite twice as thick as a normal slice
either, just shy of that. "Check it out, Sandra," he said, and
showed it to her, compared to the other slices, and she said, "Oh
that's so weird, how do you think that happened?" and the two of
them guessed on it for maybe an hour on and off, as they played
games of checkers, and Lory ate the sandwich, sharing a lot of it
with Sandra.

Over Thanksgiving, when a lot of students were going home to visit
family for the holiday, Lory and Sandra and a couple of their
friends all drove out to a cabin on a lake. There was beer and
swimming and bug bites and poker and the raunchiest jokes Lory or
Sandra had ever heard in their lives, yes indeed. One night they
were all sitting around the dining room table playing a card game,
not poker, something without betting, just a game to pass the
time. Lory and Sandra had each had a couple but the others were
drunk, real drunk, and he and she were in their own corner of the
table secretly giggling to themselves at the others, like secret
agents spying together on a party they were attending undercover.
A loud woman, friend of a friend, started telling all about how
men didn't know how to please a woman, how to get in there and do
what a body needed, and she was not shy to speak about it from
experience. Piercing laughs filled the room as people's facades
broke over how right she was, even the guys were wiping their eyes
as their fists pounded on the table, doubled over laughing. And
Lory and Sandra tried to stay unseen, but it wasn't going to
happen, there was comedy to be mined out of them by the others. In
a lull in the shouting and laughing, a guy across the table said
to Lory, so everyone could hear it loud and clear, "So what's your
technique?" And Lory reached for his beer and had a long, slow
drink, hoping everyone would move on to something else before he
was done, but it had the wrong effect completely, everyone quieted
down, you could hear a pin drop, and they waited for him to say.
And when there wasn't any beer left he quietly set it down, and
leaned on his elbows on the table, looked down at his hand of
cards, and said, "So whose turn is it?" And there was booing and
thumbs-downs, someone said, "You got nothing, damn." And then the
eyes all turned to Sandra. And she laughed, broke the ice for
herself a little by it, and she put a hand over Lory's hand and
said, "He's fine, everyone. He's not a Kryptonian sex idol like
you all think you are, but he gets it done. Jake it's your turn."
Lory felt like he had probably never blushed harder in his life as
Sandra was talking, but the ravens were satisfied with that
answer, they had picked all the meat off that topic they were
clearly going to get, and they moved on, laughing and ribbing
about other things.

A few more rounds of the card game were played, and by then it was
getting to be time for bed, Lory and Sandra both were yawning. The
others were still planning to be up for a while, one guy came in
and said he'd gotten a fire started outside, and as everyone else
started making their way outside, or went to use the bathroom or
refresh their drink, Lory and Sandra held hands, and made their
way off to their room. They undressed down to their underwear and
climbed into bed together, and shared a blanket, and both of them
were pretty ready to get to sleep, but there was something Lory
wanted to bring up, before that.

"Babe," he said, "I'm not as boring as you think, when it comes to
being kinky, I just didn't think you wanted to know."

"I'm not worried about that babe," she said back, and nestled in
in the bed even more. "I just wanted them to shut up."

He gave a quiet little under-his-breath laugh, in agreement. And
then he told her, thinking he was cool as can be, "You weren't my
first time."

"Hold on, what?" she said, in an angry tone, quicker anger than he
had ever seen in her before. But he didn't know better yet how to
handle that, because as of then, things had been good. Their
conversations weren't yet careful bomb diffusals, wartime
negotiations. He just thought she was a little surprised, maybe
embarrassed that she hadn't given him enough credit at dinner and
would have to apologize to him. He really thought that's where it
stood.

So he went on, and said, "Yeah, I never brought it up, but I've
been into more than you'd guess. I didn't think you'd want to
know."

"You said you and Summer never did anything but kiss. You said you
and her BARELY EVEN kissed."

Now he heard the anger, now it was unmistakable, but he still
thought it was savable. So easily savable that he said the next
thing like he was revealing the answer to a joke. "I never did
anything with Summer. That was true, we barely even kissed,
promise. It wasn't her I was talking about. You didn't know this,
but I've always been into animals."

"Like DOGS?" she asked.

The way she said that one was what finally made him realize this
wasn't about to be a simple miscommunication that got patched up
once they were on the same page, caught up to the same point in
each other's scripts. They disagreed about this. They disagreed
completely, by the sound of it. She said "dogs" as though he had
said he'd like to go jump down into an outhouse to take a bath. He
knew fooling around with dogs was a little risque of a thing to
admit to, maybe, but he thought they were past the point of that
being a problem to talk about, in their relationship. Apparently
not.

"Well," he said, "yeah. All of this started before WE met, but
yeah. Casidy."

He had told her about Casidy. She had seen pictures of Casidy, and
some other pictures from home, tacked up on his dorm wall.
Although, she certainly had not known that he had masturbated to
one of the pictures of the Border Collie a few times, actually,
both before and after he and Sandra had started going out. It was
one of her holding a stick in the front yard, proud as could be,
sunlight in her long hair. It may not have been known to Sandra
how much he was fond of that picture, or how much he had
considered going back home over the Thanksgiving break to see
Sandra specifically, and get up to some of their old routines, as
it were. He hadn't shown his hand on every last detail of that.
But, he had shown enough. He had told her about the dog, Casidy,
and she had seen the picture even if she didn't know the details,
and so she knew, when he said he had been with Casidy, exactly who
he meant he had been with.

She said crossly, "Well that had better be something that stops
now that WE'RE together."

"Yeah," he agreed, before he thought about it.

As soon as the word had left his mouth, he was imagining how was
he going to bring the idea back up again and convince her back
into letting him, with Casidy still, or another dog, at some
point. Because he wasn't going to stay away from dogs forever. He
had come to realize, in the time he and Sandra had been going at
it, that humans weren't all that exciting to him. He really
preferred a well-placed Border Collie tongue to putting it in a
woman. He wouldn't have guessed he would have felt that way,
beforehand, but it was true. And the sooner he could try to bring
it up again, the better it would be for her, for both of them, he
thought. But there it was, he had already flown the white flag on
the topic, and that, it turned out, was going to be an impossible
thing to retract, because they were fighting now. He didn't know
it completely. He didn't know that things had changed. But he got
the idea pretty quick. The next morning, she came back to the
cabin from a grocery run and was unpacking while he happened to be
making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with butter on
the jelly side before the jelly. The others were all outside on a
floating dock, drinking tequila, complete college alcoholics with
nobody at the cabin present to be the voice of temperance. And as
Lory was taking out the bread for the sandwich, one of the slices
was a thick slice again. And he pointed it out to Sandra, "Hey,
look babe. Another thick slice." And she turned and looked for a
second, and then turned back to stacking cans in the cupboard, and
she said, "Who cares." Wowza. "Not you, I guess," he said, and
started spreading the peanut butter. "What was that?" she asked
him, and stopped stacking cans and turned to him. He kept
spreading the peanut butter. "You said who cares, so, I assumed
you don't care, and I said so." "But was does that MEAN?" she
asked. He set the knife down, where it clattered on the
countertop, and he folded the two sides of his sandwich together.
"It doesn't mean anything," he said. She made a doubtful
hmmmmmmmm, and turned back to stacking the cans, slamming them
onto the cupboard so hard that Lory halfway wanted to tell her to
be careful she didn't break something, but, he didn't. He put his
knife in the sink and left the kitchen with his sandwich, and ate
it in the living room. Sandra walked from the kitchen to the front
door and stepped outside, walking past him without saying
anything. He finished his sandwich, went to the fridge, poured
himself a glass of lemonade from a pitcher, and sat back down in
the living room with the glass, sipping on it, and thinking. It
was pretty clear to him what it was about. It wouldn't be about
anything else.

The door opened, and Sandra leaned inside, sunlight haloing her
figure, making her frizzy orange hair seem like some kind of
exotic luminescent jellyfish. She said to him, as though nothing
in the world had happened, "Doofuses are playing volleyball, wanna
come?"

It was her way of apologizing, he thought, because he didn't know
better yet. So he said, "Yeah," and stood up, finished off his
lemonade, and went outside with Sandra, and they played volleyball
with everyone and laughed with each other about how much of an
edge they had, being the only ones sober.

And that was how things went on with them. Plenty of fun,
especially when they were out and around friends, but in private
where no one was looking she was cruel to him. One day back at the
dorm she told him his guitar playing sounded like shit, actually
said the words, "That sounds like shit," and he stopped. Didn't
play much at all from then on. Any time he brought something up,
like an interesting turn of phrase in a book he was reading or
something funny that had happened that day in class, she was
sarcastic with him, said, "Wow, that's really interesting thanks
for sharing" with all the venom that could be imagined, and
sometimes she didn't even do that much, she just rolled her eyes
at what he said and then ignored him. If he spent time in his own
dorm, the phone always starting ringing pretty quick, and it was
her, asking why he didn't want to be over. And then sometimes
there would be the times when she wasn't like that. The times like
that time she had leaned inside through the doorway and asked if
he wanted to play volleyball. Sometimes she would say "Oh that's
so interesting" and still sound like she meant it. Sometimes she
would bring up to him something that had happened in one of her
classes, something ridiculous that some classmate had said in a
workshop, and they would laugh. But it wasn't good anymore. Even
when things looked like they were good, he always had a feeling
like he was on thin ice, and it was only a matter of time before
he made the wrong step, said the slightest thing that caught her
the wrong way, and it was back to her being cruel again, her
saying that whatever had just been fun was stupid, and that he was
stupid. Over winter break he wanted to go home and visit family,
give the relationship some space, but she said, "You're going to
get your dick wet with that fucking dog if you go back there,
aren't you?" And in all truth he did want to see Casidy, he missed
petting her and giving her food and going on walks out in the
woods with her, and in better circumstances sure he would have
liked to kiss her and do more with her too, but he had already
agreed, that night in the cabin, that he was done with dogs in
that way while he and Sandra were dating, and so he actually had
made up his mind that when he did see the Border Collie over
winter break, there would be no fooling around, not even any
kissing at all, she would be like an ex to him. But there was no
convincing Sandra of that. He tried, but she kept talking over him
before he could get a sentence out. It was pointless. So he agreed
to come with her to visit her family instead, for the entire three
weeks. Her parents were very polite, and he didn't have a bad word
to say about them, and Sandra was actually mostly really friendly
those three weeks.

When they got back to school, he started working at a gas station,
part time. They had each gone into college with savings from jobs
they'd had in high school, him working at a gas station then too,
her a fast food joint, and neither of them was near broke. but she
had been getting on him about money, saying how more of a buffer
never hurt, and he didn't disagree, he thought that was a fair
point. It wasn't long, of course, before she started getting on
him about his hours, saying he was working too much, asking why
his hours never seemed to overlap with her classes and if he was
trying to find an excuse to spend time away from her. Christ, he
wasn't, but he realized what a good idea that was, and he started
to arrange it that way as much as he could. No matter what they
still saw each other every night though. And still, there were
those times she was nice to him, that made him stay.

And then, the clincher. It was the spring, not long out before
spring break. She was nice to him all day, that day, which was
offputting enough by itself, and the two of them went out on a
walk through town, and they came to a bridge over a river, and
they stopped halfway over to stand at the railing and look over
together, out at the big river crashing along, and the cars going
over another busier bridge that was farther upstream. And as they
were standing there looking out at the river, side by side, she
said it, "I'm pregnant."

He thought about pushing her over the railing. Not seriously, but
it was the first idea that flashed across his mind when he heard
what she said.

He knew what he was supposed to say back. And, he did. Not
romantically though. He had been burned too much to really express
much of any genuine feeling to her, because it was easier if the
pleasant thing she turned and trampled on hadn't been real to him
anyways. But, he knew what he had to say some version of, and he
did. "I suppose we should get married then."

That did not land well, and he wasn't surprised. "I hate you," she
said flatly, and then turned and started marching away over the
bridge.

He called after her, "Well do you want to or not?"

She didn't answer him, kept marching away. He walked alongside her
back to campus, trying now and again to say something, but she
marched on, ignored him, wiped tears out of her eyes, and when
they got to her dorm room she went in without him and slammed the
door.

He didn't know what to do. He went back to his room, told his
roommate he might actually be spending the night for once, and
then the phone rang, and Lory answered it, and her voice came
through and said, "Yes."

"Okay," he said.

"I'm sorry," she said. She wasn't sorry. It was the same thing as
always. It was her way of not giving him enough steam to achieve
escape. Worked like a charm. Every, damn, time. She said to him,
"Come over."

And he came over. They got married the next day at city hall. They
both signed the papers. They booked a room at a restaurant for a
week from then, and had their families over, and Lory's parents
met their daughter in law for the first time, and hit it off well
enough.

Lory and his dad stood outside at one point as his dad smoked a
cigarette.

"She pregnant?" his dad had asked.

Lory nodded. "Yeah."

"Need any advice?"

"Got any?"

His dad smiled ruefully, and said, "Nope," and then sucked in
another drag.

Lory and Sandra got an apartment together. Lory picked up more
hours at the gas station, that buffer of savings now feeling a lot
more tangible than before, Sandra had been right about that one if
nothing else. Lory came home each day to a nice looking place.
Sandra had really taken to decorating. The baby's room,
especially, looked like something out of a magazine. She even
threw him a bone in the decorating, and put up some of his
pictures in frames on different shelves among her own family
pictures, although none of his pictures she had put up had a
certain Border Collie in them. She had seized those from him a
long while back. He kind of hoped she'd held onto them, and the
first time he came home to see framed pictures around, he went
from one to one, hoping one might be the one of Casidy, with the
stick in the front yard. But no. He never saw that one again. More
than likely she'd ripped it up. Casidy was an ex, anyways, a
bygone time, and she hadn't even come up in the context of
arguments in quite a while. Because all of Sandra's vitriol, it
didn't stem FROM the fact of Lory and Casidy's horny adolescent
deeds. That was just what had broken the honeymoon phase. Sandra
cared a lot that things were just-so. When he'd picked up one of
the framed pictures of her and her mother to hold it up and
compliment it, she scolded him and told him to put it back, and
then told him HOW to put it back for minutes on end of arguing,
and her making him do it since he'd been the one to ruin it and
now she wanted him to fix it, until eventually she did put it back
at just the right placement herself. And so when she had first
learned that she wasn't his first time, and that he'd been with a
dog of all things before he'd been with her, that was what had
made her realize that their relationship wasn't something
perfectly out of a story book or a bad movie. But she had already
been mean. It didn't have to have been knowledge of Casidy that
sent her back to it. If he had failed to compliment her haircut at
some point, or if he had said he wasn't up for going out some
night, it would have broken her spell just as much, brought them
to the exact same outcome. Nice as she was for as long as she was
at the start, she must have been chomping at the bit for something
to get set off by, so that she could get back to being her mean,
mean self.

The baby was stillborn. "Something's wrong," Sandra had said,
before the delivery had begun. She had stepped out of the baby's
room and into the living room where Lory was sitting watching TV,
and she looked really, really scared. She kept repeating,
"Something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong,
something's wrong," on and off all the way to the hospital.

When they were able to get home, Sandra trashed the baby's room,
ripping everything off the walls and knocking over furniture, and
at some point she took to all of it with a hammer. Lory slipped
out as it was escalating, went for a walk by himself, a few laps
around the block.

At some point in the middle of a lap she came marching up to him,
he saw her from a ways off, saw she was furious. She said to him,
"You hate me!"

"Sandra," he said, and really gently, because now of all times he
didn't want it to be an argument, he wanted to tell her it was
alright.

She shouted over him though, "You're going to leave me!"

He shrugged. "I'm not."

The idea had crossed his mind, no doubt about that at all. But a
day ago he had been prepared to spend eighteen years with her, if
that was the decent thing to do. And right then, she needed him to
tell her he wasn't leaving, even as she yelled at him for hours
that he was going to, and all he could do was quietly say that he
wasn't.

One day, later that week, when Sandra was out being consoled by
her mother, Lory took the opportunity to go into the baby's room,
and bring all of the debris out to the dumpsters. They lived on
the first floor, so there were no stairs to contend with. He took
the bag out of their kitchen garbage bin, and used the bin to move
out load after load. The room was completely bare when Sandra came
back. He left the door to that room open, wanting her to see it,
get it over with. Oh she yelled, and he thought she might actually
kill him that time, it was in her eyes like she was really
thinking about it. The police came and knocked on the door. There
was a noise complaint. Sandra became really quiet and apologetic.
The police had heard her through the door as they'd been
approaching, there was no doubt that the noise had been coming
from her. The police left with no citations issued and no
particularly well-done marriage counseling, but they didn't have
to come back. Sandra did stop yelling after that. She still
berated him, but she did it at a normal voice, like she'd used to.
It was back to the same old, same old.

Both of them had stopped going to school. Lory was working more
than full time, and Sandra stayed at home, or was out with her
mother. Mostly, he and her crossed paths as little as they could
arrange it, but they slept in the same apartment, same bed, so
there was only so much avoiding each other. And sometimes she was
nice to him. Usually not. But sometimes she was.

One day, in the spring, after they'd been married for a year and
some, Lory had decided to take a walk in a nearby woods, by
himself. It was a day off for him, Sandra was out with her mother,
he had nothing to explain to anybody if he decided to just go do
something. So, he walked. Passing by a picnic table that was
beside the trail at one point, he had an old impulse to look under
it, and there, hanging on the side of one of the crossed wooden
slats that held the table up, there was a daddy long legs. He felt
some flit of joy cross over him, unexpectedly. Brief, but, it was
something.

He made another decision on the way back. He stopped into a pet
store and he got a goldfish, with a big rectangular tank and a
filter and colorful pebbles and decorations and everything, and
when he got home he set it on the kitchen table. When Sandra got
home, he was sitting leaning back in a chair, hands behind his
head, looking at the goldfish that was still in its own bag
floating in the water, acclimating the one water's temp to the
other.

Oh there was no surprise what she thought of seeing that. Right
away, not even through the door, she froze, and asked, "How much
did that cost?"

"Hundred and thirty," he said.

"Did you even think to ASK if you could get that?"

He continued to face the fish, continued to wear a blissful smile,
and he closed his eyes as though he was relaxing on a beach towel
out in the sun, and he said, "Thought about it."

"So you just DECIDED to get this enormous fish tank that doesn't
go with anything in the apartment?"

"Yup."

She scoffed. "Unbelievable! Is the store still open?"

"Oughta be."

"You are getting up and returning that right now."

"Threw away the receipt."

They went on arguing about that the entire day, until eventually
Sandra went into the bedroom and locked Lory out. He slept on the
couch and was glad to do it.

The next morning he let the fish out of the bag into the tank's
water, gave it some food, and watched it as he ate his bowl of
cereal. It was another day off for him, a rare actual two-days-
off-in-a-row weekend, and he more or less intended to sit around
all day long and look at a goldfish and be happy. After he was
finished eating, he stood at the kitchen sink, rinsing his bowl,
and the smell of the garbage caught him, the bag was getting to be
full. He turned off the water, set the bowl down, and turned and
tied off the top of the garbage bag, and carried it out. When he
came back in, the fish tank was gone. He looked around. The door
to the bedroom was closed, and when he tried it it was locked. He
opened the door to the other room and looked in, and saw that it
was still as it had been when last he'd looked in, just some
packed up boxes, off-season clothes and the like, but no fish
tank. Then, wandering back into the living room, he saw the window
was open. Stepping up to it, and looking out, he saw the fish tank
glass smashed on the ground outside, and all that had been in it
spilled out onto the grass in a soaked run. The goldfish was there
atop the colorful pebbles, its scales brightly reflecting the
sunlight, its body severed almost completely in two by a shard of
glass. It didn't move. It was dead.

Lory turned away from the window, walked across the living room,
put on his shoes, grabbed his car keys, and left.

He called her from a motel that night.

"Hey Sandra," he said, and didn't even bother with more than that,
because he knew he'd get talked over if he tried, and he didn't
want to give her that.

"Where are you?" she asked, angry.

He waited for her to say more, and she didn't, so he then said one
of the things that he had called to tell her. "I bought a van."

Her yelling in response to that wasn't even understandable through
the phone, it came through all broken, garbled. At some point she
asked a question, he didn't catch it.

He said, "I traded in the car, so it didn't cost too much after
that."

Again, fury. And he actually thought that her feeling that way was
fair enough, because he hadn't told her yet that they were over.

He knew it himself. He was done. He was free again. He was going
to drive to Casidy, and borrow her, take her on the road trip of
her dreams, and she and him were going to make out all they
wanted, human and dog like he always liked better, snuggle naked,
take care of themselves, take care of each other, he was going to
feed her snacks and go on walks and play fetch again, and they
were going to love it. They were going to love it. For the time
being, though, he hung up the phone, went out to the van, and just
sat in the back, sipping on a margarita out of a water bottle, and
looking forward to it.