11. Corey
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Corey
Six Days Since She Walked Out
I haven’t been to the office since it happened. The company can run itself, or it can burn. I don’t care. I sit in this house that has stopped being a home, and I drink, and I wait for the sound of a key in the lock that never comes.
I haven’t let the cleaning service touch the study.
The glass is still on the floor where it shattered, the whiskey stain gone dark on the hardwood.
Some part of me thinks that if I clean it up, the night becomes real.
Finished. As long as the glass is there, we’re still mid-argument. She’s still coming back to finish it.
I’ve called her more times than I can count.
She hasn’t answered once. Straight to voicemail, that bright recorded voice from a different lifetime telling me to leave a message, and I hang up every time because what message is there.
Come home. Explain it away. Tell me I’m wrong and make me believe it this time.
I should eat, sleep, shower, do any of the things a functioning person does.
Instead I wander the house cataloging what she took and what she left.
The reading chair by the window, empty. Her side of the closet, gutted.
Her shampoo gone from the shower, and the bathroom smells like nothing now, like a hotel, and I stood in there this morning with the water running cold realizing I don’t know how to be in rooms she’s not coming back to.
The house is silent, a museum of her absence.
I keep replaying that night in the study. The glass, the flinch, the drunk vicious part of me that was glad she was scared, and how fast the gladness curdled once the guest room lock clicked and I was alone with it. I sat on that floor until dawn, guarding a room nobody was trying to enter.
Today I went into her closet. I don’t know why. To hurt myself, probably, the way you press a bruise. Her dresses are gone but the hangers are still there, and her winter coats, and on the shelf above the rod, shoved back behind a stack of sweaters, a small wrapped box.
Silver paper. A white ribbon, hand-tied. A gift tag with nothing written on it yet.
I sit down on the floor of my wife’s empty closet and open it with shaking hands.
A watch. Platinum, understated, expensive but not showy, exactly the thing I would have chosen for myself and never bothered to. I turn it over.
There’s an engraving. Always yours. W.
The date of our anniversary is under it, the anniversary I spent on a call while she sat at a table set for two, and I sit there on the closet floor holding five words in my hands and I can’t breathe around them.
She bought this before. Before the dinner campaign, before the candles, weeks before, because engraving takes time, custom orders take time. She was planning this while I was falling asleep in chairs and missing every meal she cooked.
Or.
The thought crawls in the way they all do now, oily and patient.
Or it’s exactly what the warmth was. Guilt gifts.
Cover stories. A watch that says always yours from a woman who spends her evenings holding another man’s hands.
That’s what my mother would do. Sweetness with a receipt attached, affection deployed to blind you to the knife coming in low.
Part of me wanted to be wrong. Part of me still does.
I’m still on the closet floor when my phone rings, and for one stupid airborne second my whole body believes it’s her.
DENA.
I stare at the name. Six days into the worst week of my life, and the universe sends me my mother. I should decline. I always decline.
I answer. I don’t know why. Maybe because any voice is better than this house.
“Baby.” The rasp of her, forty years of cigarettes in one syllable. “There you are.”
“What do you want, Dena? Your money came through.”
“My money’s fine. This is a social call.” A drag, an exhale, and I can see her kitchen without wanting to, the overflowing ashtray, the scratch tickets. “The princess finally left you? Told you, baby. Our kind doesn’t get to keep their kind.”
The floor of the closet gets very cold underneath me.
“How did you even hear about…”
“I have my ways. People talk.” She laughs, and it turns into a smoker’s cough, long and wet.
“Don’t take it so hard. It was always going to happen.
Girls like that, they slum it for a while, they feel good about themselves, and then they go home to their own.
You were a phase, baby. Twelve years is a long phase, I’ll give her that. ”
“Don’t.”
“What’d she do? Find herself a nice clean rich boy? Someone whose mama she can take to brunch?” Another drag. “You can send the money to the same account, by the way. Whatever happens with the divorce, you and me, we keep our arrangement. Family’s family.”
Family’s family. I look at the watch in my other hand. Always yours.
“Goodbye, Dena.”
“Aw, don’t be like that, baby. I’m the only one who never lied to you. Everybody else tells you you’re special. I’m the one who told you the truth.”
I hang up on her laughter.
The silence after is worse than her voice.
Because here’s the thing about poison from your mother: it works even when you can see her pouring it.
It finds the crack that’s already there and it settles in, and I sit on the floor of my wife’s closet with her gift in my hand and my mother’s words in my head and the two of them fight it out.
Always yours.
Our kind doesn’t get to keep their kind.
Six days of calling a woman who won’t pick up.
Six days of being a ghost in my own house while she plays house with Glenn Skair across town.
Everyone gets to have the truth except me.
Everyone gets to know what my marriage was except the idiot who was in it.
Glenn knows. Her friends probably know. The whole nonprofit probably knows, all of them watching me at the Christmas party, the clueless husband writing the checks.
The anger feels better than the grief. That’s the honest truth of it. Grief just lies there and bleeds. Anger moves.
I get up off the closet floor. I put the watch in my pocket, and I couldn’t tell you why, and I take the stairs down two at a time with my pulse banging in my ears.
I grab my keys.
Everyone in that building is going to know exactly what Glenn Skair is.