Dirty Blonde
Lynn-Marie Stolk didn’t want to go to her favorite dumpster in Granby, Colorado, but the navigational circumstances of her day allowed her no other option. She didn’t want to meet Lee Chorney there—Crazy Lee, practically living in that dumpster on weekends, feeding and clothing himself on the junk other people threw away. Calling people Sir and Ma’am on his good days and hurling all sorts of filth at them on his bad ones. Crazy Lee, always with that greasy, burnt orange glow on his face like he’d been staring at a fire at the bottom of an oil drum.
But Lynn had three boxes of her dead second husband Isaac’s stuff in her car, and she wanted to get rid of them before she packed up all her things and moved back to Denver to play her new role in life: the still young-ish widow who already had children from an early first marriage, and therefore posed no risk to men who didn’t want any more. She barely counted Isaac as a husband. He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a week before they were due to marry—on April Fool’s Day, in a meadow just off their favorite cross-country ski trail—and he’d barely lived to see the trees bloom in May.
People engaged to someone who’s dying of cancer don’t cut and run, Lynn-Marie had told herself before the wedding. They stick it out, showing the world they have some guts, and they love their partners to the end. She’d done that, she reminded herself as she pulled up in front of the dumpster, even though she’d only had to do it for two months, not ten years like some people had to. She’d played that role to near-perfection, and now she wanted to move on. When she cut the engine—mistake number one—Crazy Lee came out of his hiding place and pointed a bony, char-blackened finger at her.
“You!” he shouted, following her around to her trunk but maintaining a safe, non-threatening distance. “Sticking it where it doesn’t belong. Three weeks! You couldn’t even wait that long?”
“I’ve got nothing to stick anywhere, Lee.” Lynn-Marie picked up the heaviest box of Isaac’s stuff, which contained some non-essential papers that his sons had left behind and six flood-damaged hardcover James Michener books that he kept for no discernible reason. She held it between herself and Lee, and her hand scraped against his as she handed it over.
“You expect me to take this stuff from you? After what you did to him?”
“Whatever I did, I did it to myself. Keep your slimy nose out of it.”
While Lee pawed through the first box, Lynn-Marie pulled out the second: leftover kitchen gadgets, junk she’d bought Isaac for his office, pictures of his flirty second wife. Just as Lynn-Marie hoisted it up, Lee threw a Michener book at her belly with an enormous, hostile hurl. She stepped back from it, losing her grip on the box, and let the junk tumble to the ground.
“Look what you did, Lee.” Lynn-Marie squatted down with him, intending to help as he tossed the junk back into its box. But Lee snarled at her, and for the first time she saw his meth teeth, with their gums receded all around.
“Don’t talk to me. You’re filthy, hear me? No dignity. I know what you did.”
“I did it to myself. I told you that.” She stood up.
“You did it to him.” Lee stood up too, grabbing her arm for support, then jabbed his finger at the junk. He kicked an alarm clock shaped like a hula dancer and said “Him!” again.
“You didn’t even know him, Lee. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“For damn sure I knew him. Good man, didn’t deserve what you did to him.”
“A good man?” Lynn-Marie walked back to her trunk and got the last box. “You couldn’t pick his face out of a police line-up. You don’t even know his name.”
“Gregory Nanzen. How’s that, dirty lady?”
“It’s Isaac!” she growled. Then she surprised herself by dumping the third box onto the ground. An AM clock radio from Isaac’s childhood that didn’t work. A pair of ratty driving gloves that smelled like mink oil. A rabbit’s foot dyed a hideous yellow, with bones poking through the fur. “If you love him so much, you go through his shit. Sell it if you want. Wear it.”
“I’ll remember this.” Lee immediately squatted down to inspect his treasure, a third of which would probably end up at Tracy Gowland’s secondhand store across from the post office. The other two thirds would find the dump eventually, after Lee wore them or tried to read them or gave them away as gifts on random people’s doorsteps.
“You can’t even remember his name, so fuck off and give me a little peace. My husband just died.”
“Gregory Isaacson!” he shouted from the ground as Lynn-Marie climbed into her Subaru.
“Closer!” She slammed the door and started up, not even checking in her rearview mirror to see where Lee was. A nut job like that might throw himself under her wheels just to get attention, just to prove that the person who ran him over was evil. When she got in gear, she saw his face in her rearview mirror.
“Three weeks!” he shouted. “Couldn’t wait that long, could you? Had to stick it where it didn’t belong.”
“Shut up, Lee. I never asked for this shit, did I?”
Lynn-Marie drove back to Isaac’s house, grabbed the two overstuffed bags of personal items that she’d left by the door, then put them in the still-running car. She cut the engine, strode back into the kitchen, and took the box of fancy Calphalon copper pots and pans that she’d promised to leave behind for a woman named Nina, the wife of a man who occasionally helped Isaac plow his driveway.
She stepped outside, opened her trunk again, and took a look around to make sure that nobody could see her take something that her dead husband had pledged to another.
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
Moving in with Isaac and living off the grid for two years had seemed like the right thing for an environmental activist lawyer to do, and it was. Lynn-Marie amped up her credibility in Denver, where she kept a small condo and her practice, by putting her money where her mouth was and doing the right thing for the earth. She made new friends, became aware of new problems in municipalities she’d never heard of before, and wrote the introduction to a book on how to strong-arm local governments into sounder environmental policies. Her college-aged sons got along with Isaac’s, though two of the combined foursome had medical marijuana cards and made the basement reek like a frat house. When she and Isaac got married she put her foot down on the smoking, coming down especially hard on Isaac’s older son Bryan. Her firm management of the situation earned her kudos all around, despite the fact that Isaac knew he was dying by then and did his own share of stinking up the basement.
“Does this mean I have to call you mom now?” asked a cowed Bryan, who vowed to only smoke outside in the future. “Now that you’ve emotionally kicked my ass?”
Lynn-Marie only smiled and walked away, trying to remain as sphinx-like and efficient as possible to deal with Isaac’s studied distance, which had come to him only as he approached death. She made sure that all his family legal papers were in order, pointed him to a new and better financial adviser who specialized in family trusts, pointed him to an oncologist who researched alternative treatments for pancreatic cancer. She maintained her composure throughout his death process so that his sons could grieve more freely. Everyone involved noticed this arrangement and thanked her for it.
The oncologist, however, led her into trouble. Lynn-Marie had known Benjamin Nalontia for most of her first marriage, and even dated him briefly, without sex, during her six month trial separation. Ben became the only person in Isaac’s orbit who could talk with her about the downside to his death process. The times, for instance, when he got delirious from all the drugs in his system and called her a stupid cunt, or mocked her lopsided breasts, or accused her of staying with him only to get his money—which made her laugh when she wasn’t crying about it, because she had plenty of her own. The times when he kept her in the bedroom with him, insisting that she sit eight feet away on his yellow Swiss ball by the door. It was too big for her, and her back and hips got out of whack from it. Isaac insisted on watching her but not letting her within reach, because he didn’t want to leave the stench of death on her.
“You’re so alive,” he told her once, barely a week after the wedding. “I want to know that this life is going on after me. This life I touched.”
“Then let that life touch you back,” Lynn-Marie replied. “Please. It wants to.”
“It shouldn’t. It’d be making a bad decision.”
“I don’t want to talk about my body like it doesn’t belong to anybody.”
“Who does it belong to?” Isaac asked. “Us? There’s no more us.”
“Does that mean I can’t touch you? I can’t lie next to you?”
“You’ve got life. Let life find new life. Please.”
“All I am is a nursemaid,” she said. “Is that all you want from me?”
Isaac answered only with a long look out the bedroom window. The conversation seemed to Lynn-Marie, both that night and in retrospect, to be a setting free, a form of permission to look for what might sustain her after Isaac’s dying process wrapped itself up. The next morning he berated her for ten minutes for not bringing him the right spoon with his too-mushy oatmeal, and when she finished crying she called Ben.
“What if I am all those things he says?” she asked him. “I feel like a horrible person, just waiting around for him to die. Not caring if it’s today or tomorrow. Am I unusual?”
“For a woman, yes,” Ben said. “For a cancer widow, not so much.”
“I’m not a widow to anything yet.”
“Haven’t you ever heard a woman say she’s a football widow, or a fishing widow? You’re a widow to his cancer first, then you’re a widow to him.”
“Will you please stop saying that word so much?”
“Let it hurt, Lynnie. Don’t pretend.”
“What if I’m all those things he says I am?”
“Please don’t ask me questions like that,” Ben said. “He was in delirium.”
“He could still be right, even if he’s in delirium.”
“Are you outside?”
“Do I sound like I am?” Lynn-Marie said.
“No. Please go outside now.”
“To get away from the stink of death, is that what you mean?” She went out on the front deck and leaned toward the tall pines. “Ben, did you hang up on me?”
“I probably should, now that I’ve got you outside.”
“What am I supposed to see here? Big epiphanies?”
“No,” Ben told her. “Little ones will do.”
“Are you like this with every cancer widow you know?”
“Only the cute ones. I’m hanging up now, though.”
“That’s fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s fine,” Lynn-Marie said, and she heard Ben breathe in one more time before she tapped the END button herself.
If Isaac were on life support, she thought, she could end everything with a little tap of the finger like that. But he wasn’t, and she had to wait for things to sever themselves.
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
The fling with Ben felt perfectly logical and perfectly rebellious, satisfying the two aspects of her personality that she held most dear. In all her sexual and romantic dealings with men, she’d noticed a decade ago, she needed to satisfy both aspects in equal measure, if not simultaneously. Over the years she had variously called this habit a cop-out on commitment, an escape hatch from bad relationships, a game she could always win, and a curse that she deserved for being too profligate with her love in college. She didn’t know what to call this habit now that she was watching a husband die—a drag-it-out death, like a hysterical girl in a high school play who refuses to get off the stage long after her bit part ends.
A lot like herself, Lynn-Marie admitted. She didn’t like enjoy such realizations, but she indulged in them whenever she allowed herself the luxury of leaving Isaac’s house and plugging back into the grid. When a neighbor promised to take care of Isaac for a while, she spent a weekend in Denver and slept on her own bed again. The condo felt smaller than she’d remembered, less busy and alive. She called Ben to ask him out for lunch and then asked him to pick her up because she didn’t feel like driving. When he rang her buzzer, she told him that she still needed a few minutes to get herself together. Could he come up to number 8C?
Ben, a man of the world, stepped back from her door as she opened it. Lynn-Marie, barefoot and wearing only a lime green sundress that Ben had picked out for her when they quasi-dated years ago, stepped back equally far to let him in. He surveyed the condo without stepping inside, his eyes lingering on the piles of paperwork on the floor by the largest window, then entered and closed the door silently behind him. Lynn-Marie bent slightly forward with her fingers clasped behind her back, not sure if she was teasing him with her cleavage or performing some atavistic primate gesture of supplication. She breathed shallowly and watched Ben’s eyes, then his chest.
“Is this what I think it is?” he asked.
“He won’t touch me anymore. I want him to touch me.”
“Have you said this to him?”
“Forty times. Every way I know how. Please don’t make this a doctor moment.”
Ben stood in front of her and put his hands to her face, and she blubbered as she wrapped her arms around him. Their bodies let the rest of it happen, though Lynn-Marie needed affection so direly that she could barely allow herself sexual pleasure. Their parts all functioned properly, their sensitive patches of skin. They slept on bedsheets that hadn’t been changed for a month, and Ben’s phone chirped every three minutes from his hip pocket.
“Could be an emergency,” Lynn-Marie said as she un-nestled herself from him.
“It’s a creep from Denver General I stood up for golf. Nothing important.”
She straddled him, wishing she’d done that while he was hard, and brushed her loosened blonde hair against his chest and belly.
“Is that still real?” Ben asked, “or bottle?”
“Still real.” Lynn-Marie sat down beside him and leaned over to show him the patch of hair where she had, just a few days before Isaac’s diagnosis, found a few gray hairs. “So, what do you think?”
“About what we just did?” asked Ben.
“Sure. Lingering guilt? A new path in life?”
“I don’t think I can get anywhere near words for it.”
“Not even to say it was a mistake?”
“No,” Ben said, sitting up next to her. “It wasn’t a mistake, only circumstance.”
“Would it be a mistake if you stayed here tonight?”
“Only if we talk about Isaac.”
“We won’t.” Lynn-Marie took Ben’s nearest hand at set it on her thigh—not on one of its sexy spots near her hip, but on a utilitarian part just above her knee.
It was a weekend, she told herself. Just a weekend, like the ones she spent before with men back when she felt profligate and threw her love at anybody who looked capable of catching it. Now the man she’d promised her love to wouldn’t take it from her, wouldn’t even give her the illusion of taking it. So what else could she do, other than sail her love into a willing, welcoming port where it could harbor for a moment?
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
On the way back from cheating on Isaac, she started hating him for having more important things than her to deal with as he died. When his sons came up—Bryan from Colorado Springs and Chad from Grand Junction—he had plenty of time to laugh with them, touch their arms casually, embrace them from his bed until they complained that their backs couldn’t take the leaning anymore. Lynn-Marie saw this only in passing, as she walked around fetching things for the man of the house, for the two overgrown boys who would inherit it. For the friends who drove up, or flew out, or even materialized on Isaac’s laptop screen to Skype. She felt like an au pair girl he’d lost interest in screwing or even ogling, and now subtly commanded to do her job and otherwise stay out of his way.
Chad had taken her favorite spot in the driveway, so Lynn-Marie parked behind Isaac’s pond scum green Range Rover—an ecologically disastrous ostentation that she asked him to hide once when they hosted another environmental lawyer from Memphis. Chad and Bryan mock-battled about inheriting the Range Rover in front of their father, who joined in the fun and threatened to give it to several of their most hated high school classmates. Lynn-Marie never once heard Isaac threaten to give it to her, which shouldn’t have bothered her because she hated setting foot in it. As she parked behind it, she resented everything the vehicle represented. The rich, dying husband, who’d slaved away for twenty years on Wall Street as a junk bond analyst before commanding his own destiny and working remotely from his mountain hideaway. The assumptions she feared people would make whenever she drove it, on blizzardy days when her trusty Subaru wasn’t quite safe enough.
And the whole class thing, which she felt with Isaac but barely talked about. The particular species of snobbery that a Range Rover offered its owner, different from Mercedes snobbery or Jaguar snobbery. Mercedes and Jaguar drivers don’t proclaim themselves to be do-ers, people of action. They’ve stepped back from the rat race victoriously, while Range Rover drivers proclaim exactly the opposite: that they have enough money to step back from the rat race, but still revel in it for the sheer thrill of beating other people. She stared at the mud splatters until they looked like fire-and-brimstone drawings by William Blake, then heard a tap on her window. She turned to see Chad, with his long tawny hair and his black T-shirt that said GURU and nothing else. She rolled down her window, smiled, and said nothing.
“You know you’ve still got your engine on,” Chad said.
“I know. Not sure if I should be here right now.”
“What do I mean? You live here, of course you’re welcome.”
“People aren’t always welcome where they live, you know.”
“I know.” Chad shoved his hands in his pockets. “I grew up with him.”
Lynn-Marie cut her engine, figuring that she and Chad would dig their way into a deeper conversation. But he only said, “Well, see you,” and ambled, with a grim half-smile, to his beat-up Audi.
She didn’t take her eyes off her rearview mirror until Chad had safely backed out of the driveway, then she stared again at the mud splatters on the Range Rover. They no longer looked like Blake drawings to her, but like the blurry rain clouds she occasionally saw over Grand Lake, which she would stop seeing once Isaac died and she moved back to Denver. With some kind of settlement, of course, from the will—though she hated that word, settlement—which they hadn’t discussed to even a polite degree of specificity. “I’ll take care of you,” Isaac had said during one of the last times he embraced her, back before there were more important things in his evaporating life than the morale of a new wife.
Lynn-Marie turned the key in her ignition halfway, thinking that she should park in her customary spot, but decided not to when the radio blared out a frantic, hysterical strain from a Berlioz symphony. She rolled her windows down even though it looked like an afternoon shower might come, then walked into Isaac’s house trying not to feel dirty, or deceitful, or treacherous. Cheating on a dying man! Heartless! She tiptoed upstairs to find him asleep with a crossword puzzle in one hand and a leaky blue pen in the other. She tiptoed out of the bedroom they once shared as if the moment hadn’t happened at all.
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
She didn’t confess her affair with Ben to Isaac, but she made the mistake of telling her third-best friend in the mountains—the top two being gone for the summer—all about it. Vicki Beaulaire, a refugee from ultra-liberal Boulder, lived in Granby but ran a health food store/trinket shop in Grand Lake that barely kept alive. One night at Vicki’s house, over the second batch of extra-strong margaritas, she spilled the beans.
“I don’t think it’s horrible,” Vicki said after a studiously appropriate silence. “It’s not a tit for tat thing. I mean, if your man doesn’t touch you, it doesn’t give you the right to go out and screw somebody else. But it sounds like he’ll never touch you again.”
Lynn-Marie nodded and drank, planning to get blitzed so she’d have an excuse to sleep on Vicki’s couch instead of Isaac’s. It had been a particularly tough day with him, full of shouted demands and Can’t you see I’m in pain, dammit? kind of statements that left her feeling small as a wife, a woman, a human being. Confessing to Vicki turned out to be a terrible move because within three days of Isaac’s death, everybody knew about her fling. Even Crazy Lee, apparently. By the time of their encounter at the dumpster, everybody had taken what they wanted from Isaac’s house and the kids had brought in a realtor, hoping to sell it and buy a smaller place closer to their favorite skiing haunts.
Even Isaac’s ashes were denied her. Bryan and Chad let her come to a tiny sunrise ceremony in front of the house, but didn’t invite her to the airport in Kremmling where they would jump out of an airplane with two urns full of ashes, scatter them during free-fall, and simultaneously drop those urns to the earth below as they pulled their respective rip cords.
She’d heard Isaac and the boys hatching the plan, laughing about it. I’m his wife, dammit she wanted to tell them. I belong in this. But she didn’t insist, didn’t pretend to overhear them and try to horn her way in. She would have been extraneous on the plane, an interloper who’d never even jumped before, and who didn’t believe in sport jumping because of all the fossil fuels it wasted. Within four days of his death she’d been cut out of everything but Isaac’s will, which left her seventy-five thousand dollars in cash and one of his retirement accounts, valued at $1.2 million. A simple note with the bequest, written shakily on faux parchment, read simply. You were the last love of my life, and the sweetest. Please do what you love and be who you love.
What the hell did that mean? wondered Lynn-Marie as she put her own condo in Denver up for sale and prepared to look for a bigger one. The where of it mattered as little to her as the why. But before she moved, she had to deal with the one remaining bone of contention attached to Isaac’s otherwise neat death and dispersal to the winds: the box of Calphalon cookware that Lynn-Marie had stolen—yes, people used that word—from his kitchen, and from its rightful next owner, Nina. The intended recipient, who had been away during Isaac’s dying process to help her own mother return to the earth, told everyone she knew about the set’s absence. Just the day before he died, Isaac had promised her over Skype that she would find it sitting on the big island in his kitchen. When she walked to the spot and found nothing, she sounded the alert in Isaac’s circle of friends.
“Just tell me,” Vicki asked Lynn-Marie over the phone, right after the house sold to a software whiz who needed a fresh, private getaway. “You took it, didn’t you?”
“I cooked with those for two years. Isaac barely touched them. You give me one good reason why they aren’t mine.”
“Because they were his, and he promised them to somebody else.”
“Somebody I never met the whole time I lived with him,” Lynn-Marie said. “I got cheated out of every other part of my husband’s death.”
“Except for what you got in the will.”
“Oh, you know about that too? Any other mysteries you want to elucidate for me?”
“He promised them to Nina. I think you’re being unreasonable.”
“I don’t care, Vicki. What he gave me, he gave like we were getting divorced. ‘Here, I’ll throw a little money your way.’ But I was his wife. You think I enjoy being treated like this?”
Vicki said goodbye and thanked Lynn-Marie for her friendship. Her two best friends, Petra and Elsie, didn’t even bother with thanks. They simply said that the pots and pans had to go to Nina, or it was adios. Even Ben, who had only called Lynn-Marie once since their weekend fling, got into the squabble. He insisted on meeting in a public place, so as not to be charmed by the power of her sex, and greeted her with visible chilliness at his favorite coffeehouse/newsstand in Denver.
“I expected you to stand me up,” he said, not even moving from his seat. They’d been friends for nine years, dated, and had sex, but she apparently didn’t even merit a hug because of the damn pots. Not even a Hello.
“I’m a very present person, so I’m told.” Lynn-Marie sat down. “If Isaac had let me, I would’ve been very present while he was dying.”
“But he didn’t. You can resent him for it forever, or you can move on.”
“Doctor Phil, are we?” She reached for his bowl of cappuccino and took a big swig of it, then swirled its foam around and took another. “What is it I’m supposed to move on to? Now that you’re dispensing free advice.”
“Not me, obviously. You’ve sort of burned that bridge.”
“Nine years, Ben? Nine years and one weekend of good screws, and you tell me I burned my bridge over a box of pots?”
“Give it back.” He talked to her like she was a dog who wouldn’t let go of a frisbee. “Or go buy your own coffee.”
“Why so belligerent? How many times did I cook for Isaac on those pots? How many times has Nina what’s-her-name done it?”
“You got over a million from him.” Ben shook his head, picked up his cappuccino for another sip, then thought twice when he remembered that Lynn-Marie’s lips had touched it. “Tell you what, I’ll buy you a new set of pots. How about that?”
“Why don’t you buy Nina a new set, if you want to be the hero?”
“Those damn things are getting way too symbolic. I’m done.”
Ben stood up, pushing his chair back loudly, then grabbed his Washington Post and left. Lynn-Marie acted like this was precisely the course of events that she’d planned, and when the barista looked at her she asked for a decaf cappuccino and a scone. She pulled her laptop out of her too-big purse—she’d trim things down once she had a new condo—and researched deals on Calphalon cooking sets. The one she’d used cost $700 now, which she could have afforded even without Isaac’s money. She considered ordering a set for Nina and including a note in the shipment: I need pieces of him more than you do. Simple as that. The barista came out with her cappuccino and scone.
“Are you going to pay?” the girl said. A post-college kid that her sons—who knew all about Isaac’s death and the Calphalon fiasco from Isaac’s sons—would have found immensely hot because she was free, surviving on her own, trying new things, and failing with style.
“Certainly,” Lynn-Marie said. She looked the barista up and down while she handed over a five and two singles, and didn’t envy her at all. The girl didn’t have a single quality that Lynn-Marie couldn’t find in herself, and in a riper, purer form. Every other dying man in the universe would have found her desirable. Why not Isaac Nanzen?
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
Back in her condo, Lynn-Marie kept watching Isaac’s house on a real estate site, where it would stay a pending sale until the money and title officially changed hands. It got harder and harder to picture herself there—especially in the kitchen—without seeing a shadowy character named Nina who sulked, like a petulant ghost, because some mean bitch had stolen the Calphalons that rightfully belonged to her. Lynn-Marie got sick of imagining that she could console this Nina person, who looked more childlike with each passing day and appeared to be dying over those damn pots and pans. So on the morning she found the listing for Isaac’s house gone, she headed up to Granby to bring the pots back before Nina decided to haunt her forever.
Lynn-Marie immediately packed the pots and pans, which she hadn’t used since Isaac’s death, into the passenger seat of her Subaru, then switched around an appointment for some pro bono work with a church falsely accused of illegal dumping. She drove up Interstate 70 with the sun rising in her rearview mirror, and the Calphalons kept her company without offering any advice or direction forward. Isaac’s front door would be unlocked, as would Nina’s—nobody locked their doors up there, and they feared bears in summer more than burglars. She half wanted to find Nina’s house and hand over the box in person, just to get the woman’s pouty ghost out of her head, but she didn’t feel like driving around the neighborhood in search of that house or talking to people who might hate her. The Subaru wound its way up the rising switchbacks, toward what used to be her home, until it pulled into Isaac’s driveway and found the Range Rover in its old spot. She parked behind it, going bumper-to-bumper so it couldn’t move without her moving first, and headed up the deck stairs with the Calphalons. The kitchen door was locked, but Bryan opened it after she knocked.
“About time,” he said, pointing at the box. “Did you get your money’s worth out of those?”
“Spare me,” Lynn-Marie shot back, nudging past him and putting the box right where Isaac had promised Nina she would find it.
“You might as well leave those outside. I’m locking up, the house is sold.”
“I know. I’ve been stalking it online.”
“I guess you have a right to.” Bryan leaned back against the island and poked a hand into the box, but didn’t take anything out.
“I have every right to,” she told him. “I lived here. But when he started dying, I didn’t even feel like part of his life. I felt like a rent-a-nurse.”
“You were part of his life. A huge part. He talked about you all the time.”
“About me, not to me. Not with me.”
“That’s why you took the pans? So everybody could hate you, and you could alienate yourself? Make his dying easier on you?”
“Is that what people think?” Lynn-Marie almost grabbed the box and dashed out. “If he’d just let me be part of—”
“Of his death, is that what you’re saying? Something like that?” Bryan slinked away from both Lynn-Marie and the offending cookware. “Listen, the guy who bought this place is coming in twenty minutes. I’m showing him how stuff works.”
“So you want me out?”
“Yes. It’s time to go.”
“Well thanks for being up front about it. More than I got from your father.”
“You were two years out of sixty-one,” Bryan told her, opening the door. “And you married him when he was already dying. Seriously, I don’t know what you expected.”
“I don’t know what I expected either.”
Lynn-Marie stepped onto the deck, put her hands together near her sternum, and bowed respectfully to Bryan in a Japanese way. Or was it in a Buddhist way, not merely national? She felt her eyelids flutter and then it was over, all over.
Bio:
Steven Wingate is a multi-genre author whose work ranges from print to interactive media. His print work include the short story collection Wifeshopping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) and the prose poem collection Thirty One Octets: Incantations and Meditations (WordTech/CW Books, 2014) His digital lyric memoir daddylabyrinth premiered in 2014 at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore. He teaches creative writing, film, and new media at South Dakota State University.