And a stale refrigerator fell from the top story of the apartment building but I only looked once, only for a second, because I was thinking about that time in November after midnight.
“Pass me the matchbox.” She was trying hard not to look at him. Her eyes were dark and warm like spoonfuls of grape jelly. She wore sandals and she studied her toes. She liked to read travel books. There was one open on the coffee table next to the remote. She pretended to be looking at it.
I thought the cigarette would go up in flames and I thought that’s what she wanted to happen. I thought I knew her.
The girl ran one of her fingertips over each knuckle. She took turns with the knuckles, to be fair. She smoked and he stood by the fireplace, watching her. His eyes seemed to rush to no place. In her hand she held the porcelain urn. She held it like it was any object in the room. Inside the ashes made the sound of a child playing in a sandbox. She liked that sound and she liked to read about different kinds of sand in her travel books.
“You’re rushing me. You’ve got your own ideas of how things should be. The heartache comes and you take a Tylenol, you call your mother, you move on. But the kind of heartache this is…” Her voice trailed into the kitchen. The tile was outdated but she liked the colors. The little geometric red and yellow squares reminded her of college.
Jealousy and guilt seemed to go hand and hand ever since Junior High. Spending all night thinking about a girl. Going to school the next day. Seeing her stare at Johnny Turner. Staring at Johnny Turner with a pencil in her mouth. I raise my hand and say I have to go to the bathroom. When I come back the war has already started. The television is on and the whole world gathers around it and forgets everything else. Melissa McBrady tells me three people died while I was peeing. My eyes landed on Johnny Turner on the way to the television. It’s the same thing now, with your dead ex-boyfriend.
She couldn’t read his expression. She didn’t want to try. She wanted to think about the dark purple constellation of plants on the mother’s tablecloth. They were plants that did not exist, they were mysteries. She thought about the woman and her too-tight shoes. Crying on the tablecloth. Then she was lost in it, the web of memories. He cut his arm with the broken wine glass but she didn’t look once because she was thinking about that afternoon in July and her ex-boyfriend’s gray-black pick-up.
She knew it was love. She knew it wouldn’t last.
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