Fancy Cars and Footsteps
by Dave Newman
I always stop at McDonald’s because they have cheap coffee. I’m leaving, not coming home. When I see him, he throws both middle fingers like his hands are billboards.
You marry someone. You divorce someone. You learn love is not romance but pain and elation. Then other things kick in. I want to help, to keep helping, but marriage explained helping in the worst way. I roll my window down.
“There’s the boss,” he says, but awful.
I park in the McDonald’s lot and climb out. I always climb out. Otherwise, I’m too small, too trapped. I need to feel my size, to stretch. My voice is a mouse I’ve been trying to pull into an elephant since puberty. I spoke louder when we were married. I shouted.
I say, “I’ll meet you around 5:30. It doesn’t matter if we’re late.”
I don’t say anything about help or drugs.
We’re just two people with plans to meet at an abandoned strip mall.
I have no idea if he remembers conversations anymore.
I’ve been single for almost a year.
We’ve been single for almost a year.
Randall looks wrinkly.
He stands under the awning, mostly dry.
He says, “I’m tired of you showing up when I’m struggling.”
I say, “Quit walking past my apartment.”
He says, “That’s what I expected.”
I pretend he’s sober or at least coming down. That’s the wife in me. High is his agenda, morning to night. Sometimes his highs are so low he talks without moving his lips. I barely drink anymore, thinking of addiction, thinking of slurs and hard drops to the pavement.
One time, when he was hammered, and I was drinking, and we were in Ocean City, and a beautiful woman in a bikini walked by, and I said, “Holy shit, did you see her ass?” which was the kind of ass to stop a wave, he said, “There is no one I’d rather make love to in the world than you.” Then he stopped and kissed me and said, “The universe. No one in the universe.”
Now he says, “It doesn’t reflect well on you.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Everything,” he says. “The sun barely shines when you’re around. It’s like you make pollution. It was sunny then you swerved over here and turned the rain into a waterfall.”
He plays it all backwards.
I point to the sky.
The sun shines bright.
Before this, pouring rain.
He says, “I’m not meeting you anywhere.”
I tell him he looks like a dry-cleaning disaster.
He says, “Some of us can’t afford cars.”
I’ve never called off, not even in high school when I worked at the ice cream place, when I thought I was a lesbian and my boss fingered me in the freezer. It was weird. I’m not judging. I worked the summer and had fun and made money and eventually had to ask my boss to quit pushing her adult lips at me. She stopped. Then I found boys.
He says, “Some of us are still on the shoe leather express.”
“Some of us have jobs.”
“Some of us are applying,” he says, and lifts his tie.
I say, “Some of us act like we want to work when we apply for jobs.”
Bodies look less like bodies when they’re full of excuses.
I know that sounds cruel.
My ex-husband once interviewed shirtless.
The clouds come back.
The sun dims itself like an embarrassed lightbulb.
“You’re too old to be getting pimples,” I say.
I never said these things at the beginning.
But now the caring makes me sound less caring, makes me sound cruel.
Randall touches his mouth like his skin is braille.
Once, when I found him dead on my porch and dragged him into my bathtub, which almost broke my finger, and after I turned on the cold water and stuffed two ice cubes up his butt and heard breathing, shallow and raspy but still breathing, I put some of my A/rrive soap on a washcloth and scrubbed his face, knocking the white heads off the skin around his mouth. Suddenly he gasped and woke and sat up and said, “Who washes a dead man’s face?” like he’d never lost sight, no matter how blue his cheeks and hands. He grabbed the washcloth and washed again, making circles around his mouth, until he passed out. I should have called an ambulance.
I should have called myself and gave directions.
If he doesn’t want to meet me then I don’t want to meet him.
I say, “Just go home. Go to sleep.”
He bends then stumbles.
He bends again and takes off his shoes and asks me to hold them.
I say, “I don’t want these.”
The shoes smell like roadkill.
I have never been less in love.
I drop the shoes.
His eyes turn to black leather, furious.
“You can’t even respect my fucking shoes,” he says.
I pull off my boots, fumbling with the laces, knowing I’ll shrink. I always need inches. I’d bought the boots at Designer Shoe Warehouse because I loved the hand-painted flowers that covered the leather. I own another pair but in yellow.
I say, “Here, you hold these.”
The rain comes back but as mist.
“Do I look like a closet?” he says.
He slaps his own face.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say.
I slap my own face but gentle as falling paper to show him how fake.
Husband. Wife.
Ex-husband. Ex-wife.
I can’t imagine the next pair, the next set of words.
He says, “I thought you knew me better.”
I take off my socks. I bend and make a production. The socks are damp and prickled with tiny stones. I think about hitting him but the opposite of paper falling. More like a meteor. More like a wrecking ball. The rain cools my face or my face drips sweat to cool itself off. I think about picking up shoes. I stand here in my socks.
Dave Newman is the author of seven books, including the novel East Pittsburgh Downlow (J.New Books, 2019) and The Same Dead Songs: a memoir of working class addictions (December, 2022). He lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley.