pairs of jeans, half a dozen T-shirts, and everything in my underwear drawer. Very methodical, I opened the drawer in my nightstand where I keep my prescriptions, took the bottle of Tylenol in which I hid my sleeping pills. Carlo didn’t follow me into the bedroom. I didn’t expect him to.
I came back out and grabbed my car keys and my tote bag, making this as fast as I could for both our sakes. He was collapsed in the recliner where he usually reads, still begging me for something I couldn’t give, a woman I couldn’t be.
“Please. Tell me,” he said.
“You know what?” I said, as harshly as I could while my heart got another painful little crick that took some of the harshness out by making me gasp at the same time I spoke. “This isn’t working out for me.”
I turned away despite the pitiful sound of his whisper that may have been “please don’t leave.”
And I left. I left.
Thirty-four
I should have realized it would happen sooner or later, but I was still surprised that relationships end so fast. You spend more than a year getting to know each other, building trust, and in three minutes it’s over. In my defense, I might have been thinking more clearly if Zach hadn’t just died in my arms. Standing in the laundry room I had been like a boxer still reeling from a jab to the gut, being decked with a sharp right to the jaw immediately after; that one-two punch got me. My mind seemed to slip out repeatedly, have a look at whatever I was doing with a detached interest, and slip back in when it was good and ready. That sensation of draining out of myself.
I didn’t fully realize my state until I was out of the house and driving south on Oracle, in the left lane, about ten miles under the speed limit. A Chevy flatbed, red and tricked out with all the extras, tailgated me, maybe had been tailgating me for a while without my noticing. When that didn’t make him feel any better, he expressed his concern with his horn. I glanced at my tote bag beside me and considered putting a bullet in his front tire, but decided on restraint instead—besides, there were witnesses. When I got to the stoplight at Tangerine Road I put my car in park, got out, and went to the driver’s window of the truck. It was closed; in this heat windows would always be closed and the AC on full tilt. I hit the tinted window once with the palm of my hand.
It slid down slowly to reveal a neatly dressed man who should know better than to honk his horn indiscriminately in traffic. He stared at me with apparent alarm.
I thought it was because he’d never had a woman respond to his honking in quite this way. “Okay, you got my attention. Now what the fuck do you want from me?”
He looked at my chest, involuntarily raising his hands as if to protect himself. In that moment I saw in his eyes what he saw, a crazed woman wearing a blouse with blood on it. Without saying more he raised his window, backed up, and drove around me. He did not squeal his tires.
As I watched him pull away, I could feel my heart pumping in my ears and my breath rasping. Road rage that, motherfucker.
I got back into my car; pulled it off the road to let the rest of the traffic go by; and, taking a whimsical shirt with dancing javelinas from the plastic bag, did a quick change with the top I was wearing. I wadded up the bloody one and shoved it under my seat. Then I pulled into the traffic again and, without being fully aware of where I was going or how I got there, ended up at the Sheraton downtown. Maybe I was flying in the direction of my last simple encounter with someone who knew the real me and wanted that place to run to ground. Upon my arrival at the reception desk I asked if Zach’s room, room 174, was still free.
Eyeing the garbage bag I held, the girl at the reception desk told me it was. Glad I had had the presence of mind to at least change my shirt, I gave the girl my credit card, got my little plastic swipe key, and scuttled my bag into room 174 before anyone could spot me. I had