Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

She’d been gone for a year and a half and I had not heard word one. I knew where she had alighted and with whom, but had no street address, no lover's last name. Just major metropolitan area with this Rick she met at a conference. Work-related: how I hate having first scoured the want ads that brought us here to this town.

“You could just as easily hate the conference where she met him,” said my sister when I complained about having helped Fran find the job. That was when I was still fool enough to commiserate with family members and worlds-at-large. Back before, one by one, they all turned on me. Went from suggesting acupuncture to signing me up for some extended-stay hospital. People have no sympathy for the brokenhearted because it's what they fear the most. They pretend it's as minor and obligatory as having your wisdom teeth pulled, getting your heart ripped from your chest, having feral mutts tug-a-war the bloody organ in your kitchen while you lean white-veined against the rusty refrigerator, drowning in schmaltzy string arrangements.

So I had no one-only the Mexican migrants who offered cucumbers and water from the bossman's cooler and must have recognized in my desperate stride a fellow alien. The only person I got around to trading words with was the laconic, chain-smoking Deb-or so her name tag read-who worked at the market where I purchased my few provisions. It was a sticky-floored, dirty-ceilinged store which Fran had favored over the chain grocery because after the dogwoods bloomed Deb and her coworkers would take out the magazines in aisle seven and stock it with chilis and tortillas and even Spanish videos for the migrants.

One night I drove over to pick up my stock groceries: Band-Aids, ginger ale, Saltines, bulk raisins, chicken broth, and white rice. I could live off this list for weeks at a time. And had been doing so, and the pounds sweated away in the eighteen-mile runs, and there weren’t that many to leave puddling the road in the first place and so many times in the days after she left I would not have been able to tell you the correct use for, never even mind the name of, a fork.

“Give me one of those Pick Ten tickets,” I said when I had my groceries all lined up on the belt. Deb wasn’t there that night. In her place was a high-school boy. His head was chubby and dripping with red-blond lanks. Used to be, in a town like this you got beat up for wearing your hair long. Now the ones doing the beating are the only ones with their ears covered.

“You don’t want one of them,” said the boy.

So maybe he said want when he meant need -a mistake so many make. I had never been expert at figuring out what I needed until Fran left. Then I knew: I needed her. I needed her groaning first thing in the morning when I set the alarm to the local gospel station and our day began with a mass choir filling even the shoe-strewn closet bottoms with sonic interpretations of the word Jesus. Her tireless interest in the narrative of how we happened to find each other-that miracle recounted, with much attention paid to the extraordinary odds of it happening in this maddeningly flat world-how could I not need that? Each time she asked for it I felt as if I were narrating Genesis. How humans came sweet and innocent up from the earth. I believed I breathed and ate and performed reasonably well at one activity or the other before we met, but in telling that story over and again, in having it received with such lusty anticipation, I came to believe that my life started the moment I met her, the moment we laid waste to those insurmountable odds.

Odds are terrifying if you let yourself obsess over them. In the case of the Pick Ten lottery, I was not interested in the odds. It was a spontaneous thing, asking the cashier for a ticket. I had never once wasted money on such. But I did not care for being refused. I especially disliked being rejected by this boy whose sullen mannerisms implied that the wonder I had known with Fran was nothing more than some sappy song he’d scowl at while scanning radio stations. I believe I did nothing more than push his doughy chest with my fingers. I remember still the squishiness I encountered where I was expecting breastbone. Surely I was as shocked as he was.

“Hole up,” he said. Then: “Dude, what the hell?”

I held out a bill-a twenty, for which he made loud change. He was talking all the while, nervous jumble of words, “What the hell man I was just trying to help…”

Out in the parking lot I was afflicted by my own nervous jumble of words. “Oh, help, right, you were trying to help.” Now I am squatting beside my car in a dark, rain-steamy parking lot, tapping my forehead against the front quarter panel of the old rusty Nissan we bought together, repeating with the zeal of the clock-radio choir these words: I cannot do this can’t do it don’t want to do this without you.

I don’t know for how long: until my nose smashed against the metal and my face went funny-bone numb and I was dropped in a dusty dodge-ball field back of my grade school, lying in the infield inhaling the rubber of the ball that hit me and repeating that strange-to-me-then word I remembered seeing printed across the ball. Voit. Voit.

“What’d he say?” The voice was nasally but curious. Another voice answered, lower but seemingly female and black.

“Boat? Damn if I know.”

“He can’t do it without his boat,” said the nasal-voiced man. “Now what do you think he can’t accomplish without his boat?”

“Voit,” I said-indignantly-and was answered this time with a rib kick. I hit the pavement then. To feign what? Fear? Death? There was nothing left for me to fake. I knew then that since she left I’d faked everything. Or maybe the opposite was true; maybe I did not know emotion until it up and crawled in bed with me right along the same time she up and crawled in bed with her Rick.

I only know I felt more alive, stretched out on the oil-slick pavement, grimacing against the rib-kicks, than I had since she left. When the kicks would slow or cease I would scream, “Voit!” and soon every bone was numb. My arms and legs stung with pavement scrapes. I smelled that smell-you know the one-the smell of earliest physical pain. Hot rain laced with rust.

“Ain’t he about paid?” asked the black woman. Her low, hacking voice concealed a note of sympathy. I wanted to love her for it, but my ribs cried out for more kicks, as if someone had pulled the plug on a song to which I was dancing.

“Not from the sound of him,” said the leader. Obviously he knew need from want. But suddenly a new voice spoke up-“Y’all leave off him.” The cashier? Strange as it sounds, until then I had not made the connection. I wasn’t at all sure this was not something I wasn’t doing to myself, or that the weight of my desire had not provoked some miracle posse to torture me.

I opened my eyes-blinked up at the buggy aureole surrounding the yellow streetlight. The cashier stood above me smoking, but he seemed the least of my problems. The nasal-voiced man was dressed in coat and tie, a terrifying outfit for a man choreographing a beating. The black woman was neither: just a skinny shave-headed boy dressed, like me and the cashier, in shorts and T-shirt.

There was talk among them, profane and incomprehensible. I wasn’t listening. Fran kneeling beside me, ripping leeches from my skin. I protested hysterically. Fran swathing me in bandages, bedding down beside me in the grocery-store parking lot so slick with squashed lettuce leaves and spilt milk.

And then I passed into very familiar territory: boredom. I was exhausted, as I had often been in those days, by my inability to get over the hurt. I knew what I was going to feel before I felt it and it was stifling, sad, for what is death, finally, but not being able to even bring yourself to anticipate a surprise?