He hardly even looks up any more when she enters the room. Today, he doesn’t notice she’s there until she picks up her keys; they jingle when she plucks them from a nail jutting out of the cracked plaster by their front door.
‘Pick me up a sack of those lil’ white donuts while you’re at the store,’ he drawls. ‘And I used the last of the coffee.’ His voice cracks from disuse. Could be because they woke up not too long ago, but then it’s been days since he said more than two words to her.
‘Not going by the store today,’ she says. ‘You can get the bus if you want groceries, or walk down to the corner store if all you’re needing is coffee and a snack.’
He folds his newspaper up with a rustle, and the top half flops over to trail in his cereal bowl, staining his milk and absorbing a good bit of it before, cursing, he tosses the paper down onto the table. ‘You know I hate carrying groceries on the bus. Where are you taking my car?’
‘Our car,’ she says. She clutches the keys, feeling the metal dig into her palm like a fishing hook, reeling her toward the door. ‘Our car. We’ve been married almost twenty years; your stuff is definitely half mine by now.’ His expression doesn’t flicker. He’ll neither confirm nor deny. ‘Becky asked me to ride out to her parents’ old place. She’s got a new horse she wants me to take a look at.’
He picks up his paper again, rattling it into his lap. It’s incredible how quickly he gets bored of her when she’s not giving him food or sex, and nothing else can kill his interest quite like a mention of her hobbies. ‘Have fun,’ he mutters from behind the black and white curtain.
She will.
The Mazda beeps when she punches the button to unlock it, a school bell ringing out to signal the end of a long day. First thing she does after she revs the engine is change the radio station, spinning the dial from that modern country shit he likes to smooth, classic blues. She hits the road like she can see her life stretched out before her. The only problem is it looks an awful lot like what she left behind. Thirty-nine years old, twenty years married, and the days blend together in her wake, stretching into each other until they meet her mother’s days, and her grandmother’s, and each of them indistinguishable from the last.
The only difference is she doesn’t have kids of her own to press and cut into this same mold. Even young, even as madly in love as she’d been with John, she always knew better than to bring kids into this.
But there’s a fork in the road up ahead, and it leads over a hill. She can see where it starts, inches away; one quick twist of the wheel in her hands and she’d be on it, headed down a brand new path to an unknowable future.
She isn’t ready yet. She cranks the radio and sings along with B.B. King as she rumbles down the usual road, until her sorrows wash away in the tide of sound.
By the time she gets out to the ranch, her smile stretches across her face so wide that her wrinkles have fled. Her reflection in the rearview couldn’t pass for nineteen ever again, but it’s a good bit further from forty.
Becky doesn’t live out here anymore. Like any smart girl would, she packed up years ago—bought a one-way train ticket and left with whatever she could stuff in two paisley, avocado green bags.
She thinks about the nature of escape as she climbs out of the Mazda – this kind and the better, permanent sort too. She thinks about horses and about riding bareback over the hills, back to that fork in the road.
Gravel crunches under her feet until it fades into the wisp of grass. At the paddock gate, she calls his name, loud and joyful as any bird. Soon she can see him in silhouette coming up over the hill, brown skin gleaming in the sun, damp from exertion already, and when he spots her, he breaks into a gallop.
When she gets home, it’ll be dark already, and she knows she’ll be smelling like straw and sweat, humming an old song she heard on the transistor radio they hung in the barn months ago, but there’ll be no lies to tell, no excuses to make. She’s heading down the road already, riding bareback toward that fork in the path.
By the time John wakes up in the morning to find the bed is cold, the coffee jar still empty, she’ll be halfway around the world. She’ll be unstoppable.
Louise Hoffman is a full-time data analyst and a part-time everything else. She’s worked as a video game sales clerk, a nanny, an internet technical support person, a music writer, and a crime analyst. From Texas originally, she migrated with her dog to New Hampshire in 2014 and picked up a husband and a cat along the way. All four of them now reside in Silver Spring, Maryland, which they find to be both too warm in summer and not warm enough in winter. Find Louise at @louciferish
