Maureen McHugh - After the Apocalypse

“What happened?” I said.

“I lost the money,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

No honeymoon. He was hoping to put the Hampton Inn on his credit card, but he didn’t know if he’d be able to, because it was kind of close to maxed out. He’d meant to get it paid down, maybe put the whole honeymoon on it, but the alternator went on the truck, and he needed it to get to work.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t really believe him. I just couldn’t think about it. It kept squirming around in my head like I understood it, but I didn’t at the same time.

“I didn’t want to ruin the wedding,” he said.

I had worked really hard on the wedding, but I guess I hadn’t thought a whole lot about Chris. I was looking at him, and it occurred to me that the reason Chris was with a girl like me was because he was a fuck-up. I’d just never admitted it to myself.

“Stop the truck,” I said.

I knew I couldn’t walk all the way back to Lancaster, so I finally called Sarah, my best friend and maid of honor. Then I sat down on the berm and waited. Chris pulled the truck off the road and stood, looking awkward. He started to sit down next to me, but I said, “Don’t sit down. That tux is rented and I’m not paying extra if you get it dirty.”

While I was waiting for her, I told Chris I was going to get the marriage annulled.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It’s like a divorce, only it’s like the wedding never happened,” I said.

“But it did happen,” he said.

“It was never consummated,” I said. I don’t even know where I had heard about that.

He didn’t understand what I meant by that, either.

“We didn’t have sex on our wedding night,” I said.

“We’ve been having sex for two years,” he said.

We had, ever since I was seventeen and in my junior year at high school and he was thinking he would go into the army when he graduated. I figured if I had sex with him, he’d stay. “But we didn’t do it tonight,” I said. “So it doesn’t count.”

I moved to Cleveland, because my cousin Donna lives there. Donna is the opposite of me, physically. She’s short and skinny and has dark brown hair. She has the family boobs, though. She weighs 105 pounds and the joke is that fifty pounds of it is in her chest. She’s in nursing school, and she said I could get a job at the hospital. I never wanted to be a nurse, but she said there were lots of jobs in a hospital, and I could stay with her. I got a job in the kitchen which was fine. The hospital is the Cleveland Clinic, which is probably the world’s biggest hospital. It’s a lot bigger than Lancaster. Not in square miles, but I’d bet more people work at Cleveland Clinic than live in Lancaster, Ohio. It’s really modern. Lots of buildings with green glass. Rich foreigners like Sheiks come there when they’re sick. The kitchens have to make all sorts of food. Diabetic food, low-protein food, low-fat food, Muslim food, Jewish food. It was a lot more interesting than McDonald’s.

I’d never worked with so many black people before. There are black people in Lancaster, but not so many of them. The black people at the Cleveland Clinic, a lot of them were real ghetto. Sometimes if they were talking to each other I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I’d always liked country, for one thing. I didn’t like hip-hop.

Donna was great about me living there, but it was a pain. I thought about going back to Lancaster. In a lot of ways, living in Cleveland wasn’t a whole lot different than living in Lancaster, except it took a lot longer to get to work. My marriage had been annulled. It turned out sex didn’t have anything to do with it.

Chris kept calling me and asking me to come home. I asked if he could take me out on a date. He showed up at Donna’s with a dozen roses and got down on one knee. Then he called collect when he was drunk and cried.

I was talking to my dad one night—I called him every

Tuesday—and complaining about Chris, and my dad said, “Well, Kayla, what did you expect?”

“I expect him to act like a man,” I said.

My dad chuckled and I knew he was thinking that was too much to expect of Chris. It occurred to me that maybe my dad had figured out what Chris was like a long time ago. “Do you like Chris?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” my dad said. I could just picture him, sitting in the recliner. My dad lives in Chauncy. He used to work for Diamond, before they closed the mill, then he worked at Lancaster Correctional. So I grew up in Lancaster. But when he had to stop working on account of his back, he moved back to Chauncy with my grandmother. Chauncy is about the size of one floor of one building of the Cleveland Clinic. When he said that, I knew he hadn’t ever really thought much of Chris. Although he was always nice enough to him, and they joked around.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

He sighed. I thought he was going to say that he didn’t want to interfere. “I thought you wanted to wear the pants,” he said.

I’ve always wanted a strong man. Or I thought I did. Maybe I thought a pickup truck and talking about the army meant Chris was a strong guy. Or maybe my dad was right. Maybe I wanted to wear the pants.

Maybe I hadn’t really been fair to Chris. But when he called, I would say to myself, Be fair, Kayla. And the sound of his voice would make this feeling rise up in me, like the feeling of teeth scraping together, or like the weird rubbing noise that my car was making. Kind of a clicking noise. It was kind of hard to hear, and so I found myself listening to it and getting more and more tense as I drove to work. That was what talking to Chris was like. I got tenser and tenser while he talked.

My car was sounding like my relationship with Chris, so of course, one day it stopped working altogether. It was the timing belt. It cost me seventy-four dollars to get it towed. Then they told me that it would cost over six hundred to get it fixed, and that I was lucky I was on Euclid and not the highway because if it had been on the highway it might have thrown a rod, and then I might as well just get a new car.

I don’t even know what “throwing a rod” is, but I sort of picture pieces of metal flying through the hood or something. The next time Chris called I told him about it, and for the first time in a long time he perked up. “Yeah, yeah, you could have been in big trouble.”

“I am in big trouble,” I said. “I’m taking the bus to work. The bus is creepy, and it takes forever. It’s going to cost six hundred dollars to get it fixed.” I was trying to save money to get a place of my own and let poor Donna have her apartment back. But I didn’t have six hundred dollars and I was going to have to put it on my credit card. My credit card still had stuff on it from the wedding. Donna was paying for nursing school and only working two days a week at the hospital.

“So are you going to come home?” he asked.

“I’d rather die,” I said.

Donna’s dad, my Uncle Jim, loaned me the money to get my car fixed, and I promised to pay him back, a hundred dollars a month.

One of the girls in the kitchen told me about medical studies. How she got paid a hundred dollars to take cough medicine every day for two weeks. She told me where to check out the list of studies, and during my dinner break I went about six blocks to the building where she told me. I got lost once—I know how to get to where I park and then to where I work, but the rest of the place is still a maze.

There was a list of stuff, but nothing like the cough medicine study. It was all weird stuff—studies on depression, on taking estrogen. I looked over the whole list and couldn’t find a thing I could qualify for. While I was looking, a guy came up to look, too. He looked healthy. He was a couple of years older than me. Short. Built like he wrestled, if you know what I mean.