By Alex Rost
Chuck misses three days of work then comes in with swollen eyes and through choked words tells me his wife is gone, that after seven years of marriage and two daughters, he found pictures on her phone, iPhone live photos with devastatingly fellatious clarity.
“Two guys,” he says. “Same time.”
She’d been coming home later than usual from her bartending job and Chuck found a sandwich bag in her purse an inch deep with Adderall she claimed the cook gave her.
“Yeah, she said she didn’t pay or nothin. He just gave it to her.”
She’d said the cook was ‘really cool.’
“I should’ve known then,” he says, then sulks back to his car and drives away.
***
Chuck finds out his wife has been coaching his kids to say, “Daddy’s a piece of shit.” They were reluctant at first but came around when she cheered, like they’d scored a goal in a game they didn’t know they were playing.
***
Numbers he doesn’t recognize keep sending Chuck photos of naked men. He blocks the first few but eventually engages.
“The guy tells me he got my number online, sends me this.” He hands me his phone.
It’s a picture of his face on Grindr, his number spelled out. It describes him as a power bottom. Ready now, is the tagline. Bigger IS better, written underneath.
No,” he says when I point out his wife might’ve made it. “She wouldn’t do that.”
***
Which of course, he finds out she did. Her and the cook. Who ends up, she’s been fucking regularly.
***
There’s pep in Chuck’s step, and he’s all smiles while telling me that he and his wife are going to try to work things out, that she came over while the kids were at his mom’s and cried while he held her.
Using words like—
“Miss you,”
and
“Just need time,”
and
“Of course I still love you.”
He’s so full of hope that I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’d just now seen her on a dating website wearing a tiny skirt and low-cut shirt.
Using words like—
“Divorced,”
and
“Single mom,”
and
“Looking for love.”
***
Chuck isn’t doing too well. He’s blasting screamcore again.
The boss comes out of his office and says, “I don’t know about you, but this music makes me want to murder a baby.”
I start to agree with him, then I’m like, “Wait. Murder a baby?”
***
Chuck explains his hazy state of mind through an episode where he started to cut a zucchini only to realize he meant to buy a cucumber.
I try to relate, say about my ex—
“There’s still cans she bought in the cupboard—artichoke hearts, black beans—and sometimes I pick one up, think about the food inside sitting in its juices. The dates on the cans, they’ll last longer than our relationship did. I’d eat it, but I don’t like artichokes, the black beans were for a recipe she made. I thought about tossing them, but when I look at them, there’s like, this moment. I don’t know. I figure when the cans are about to go bad I’ll say fuck it, make a casserole or some shit.”
I look at Chuck’s glossed over expression and think about how most of the words we use are wasted.
And just like him, I long to be more than a memory.
***
Chuck’s press is already running when I come in through the back and give him a passing, “What’s up, Chuck?”
“Living the dream,” he says.
And what he really means is—
This is just another day. Today is yesterday, yesterday is tomorrow, and I regret nearly every choice I’ve made.
“Living a dream,” I say back, smiling.
And what I really mean is—
I feel exactly the same way.
***
I go to leave at the end of the day and see Chuck sitting at the picnic table despite the muddy cold, staring off across the lawn at nothing.
I sit next to him, neither of us speaking for like three, four minutes, until I finally ask how he’s doing.
And in this long winded way, he explains how there is nothing left to say when the words from our hearts have lost their meaning.
“She told me that she’d tried to make me happy when I was unhappy,” he says. “But when I finally wanted to make her happy, she was done trying to be happy with me.”
And I think of my ex, telling me she just wanted to be happy without shedding all her pride.
After a moment, Chuck smiles, says, “Ahh, who cares about women anyway?”
“We do,” I say. “We don’t have anything else to care about.”
Alex Rost runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo, NY.