“Ophelia” (detail), oil on canvas, by Friedrich Wilhelm Theodor Heyser, before 1921.
You used to cook for four, now after the kids have gone to college, and the divorce is finalized, and you and your husband, you keep forgetting to put the ex in front of this yoking title, have downgraded to shared-walled duplexes, because the kids begged for a one-stop shopping experience of familial love, you cook only for yourself and only on the days that you have the energy, after sitting on dirty, and often rotting floors of trailers and modular homes, and apartments with subsidized rents, trying to coax developmentally-delayed children to roll over, to tolerate foods and sounds and touches that might be forever unfamiliar.
You and your husband (ex) used to watch TV for hours. Unsolved murders, half-cooked salmon, and the dating shows where no one was happy even as the Caribbean sunsets bronzed their skin and the wine flowed as they perched in the crystal blue waters of the ocean. Get me those chips, why don’t you, either of you would say, instead of what are we doing and did we ever love like that, and why don’t we go somewhere warm, and how long can we keep doing this, until you both agreed, somehow, through the labyrinth of legalese that there was nothing wrong, but boredom and a little contempt, but no more than you had for yourselves each time you looked in the mirror, and wondered where your youth had gone, and if you had only known how to spend it.
You host on the holidays, because your husband (ex) wouldn’t know where to start. He means well, but everything he does comes with a whiff of desperation, of waiting for you to save him, the outcome the same, the children nodding their heads, agreeing with a laugh, that of course dad forgot the cranberry sauce, that the gifts were still in the plastic shopping sacks, that the necklace was on back order, that maybe he could just give you this cash, a wad he unceremoniously took from his back pocket. Here, he’d say, and that was supposed to be I love you, that I care, but I can’t get the timing right. While you were expected a certain precision, a certain perfection, to remember clothing sizes, and preferred tastes, and that Sean needed to stay with his father, sleeping on the other side of that wall, because of his allergies, and why did you have to get a cat?, and never mind that you were lonely, that Sean only visited four times a year. Vanessa seems to understand, but she takes the men’s side, by only nodding her head, never echoing her mother’s concerns, your desires as unknown to her as they are to your husband (ex).
But you find yourself together, now, in the back of your square yards that abut the sprawl of a town you swore you’d leave when the kids graduated, when they finished college, when they got their jobs, and had their kids, and you were needed again to hold the babies while your daughter cried about her lack of sleep and while your son told you about his investments, and his wife took a nap, but you’ve allowed yourself to sprout here, to dig into the loamy structure of the suburb, of your clients, the babies with their disabilities and their parents without a clue, and so he finds you there in the yard that you’ve dug up, his and yours combined, tilled into neat rows for flowers, and never vegetables because you need something beautiful, alive only for its visual grandeur, and not to be harvested or ripped from the ground. So you fertilize, and water, and cut away the weeds, and scheme against rabbits who thieve from your sprouts in the night.
Until, late in the season, your husband (ex) comes with hands behind his back, a Dick Van Dyke to Mary Poppins, and your knees ache from being so old, the veins like highways through your calves to places you’ll never go. “I sold it,” he says. The house. And my half of the garden, I suppose.” And hasn’t he been supposing his entire life? “Where will you go,” you say, careful not to point the trowel in his direction. “To Sean’s. An in-law suite,” he says. “But what will you do? We’re too young for that, surely? A touch of the grass, the dirt between your feet. You could live for ages,” she says. “For you, I would try,” he says. So you sit at his feet and untie his laces, prod him to lift his legs, taking off each shoe and socks. His toes are bone-white, almost iridescent. He helps you up, the first touch between you in years, not since the divorce, the last time you made love, before signing the papers.
You link elbows, him wobbling over the soft ground, his feet too sensitive for the unmown grass. You position his feet between the flower stalks, their colors a wash of delight even against his intrusion. “Wiggle them toes. Really settle in,” you say. “It’s colder than I thought it would be. I don’t know how you can handle the squish?” With a quick cut, you snip off a rosebud, twirl it in front of his eyes, the vision of those umbrellas from one of Vanessa’s dance numbers, the way they had collided during the show, how Vanessa had cried, and vowed to never dance again, how it was another ending, how you were never prepared for when things would wilt, how you could never know how much to give, how much is luck and perseverance. You put the flower in his pocket, refrain from a gentle kiss on the cheek, the scruff of his face not yet forgotten, and walk toward your side of the house, and when he asks, where you’ll go, you won’t turn around, won’t stop walking, but you’ll point to the sky, and say, “I’m already there.”
Tommy Dean is an associate literary agent with Rosecliff Literary, the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He is the Editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. His writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He has taught writing workshops for the Gotham Writers Workshop, The Writers Center, and The Writers Workshop. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
