Ashley Kirkland

Liz considered herself a relatively honest person until the St. Patrick’s Day before she left her husband.  It was cool in the car as she drove to work, almost cold, but she could sense the winter’s frost slowly starting to pull back from the Lexington landscape, receding to the north.  The sun was up earlier and the air had that muddy, earth smell like spring.  Liz imagined worms beginning to churn up the dirt beneath the lawn in front of the house, which was covered in dew.  The closer Liz got to work, the more opposed she became to the idea of sitting at her desk all day working on spreadsheets for the Firm.  Her body felt less rigid than it had all winter and she felt a strange energy in her muscles.  She felt social, not in any mood to deal with data pertaining to the number of domestic disputes the Law Firm she worked for had encountered in the past year, and as she approached Peter Gregory’s Village Tavern where Market Street crosses Church Street, she slowed the car and turned into the lot. 

Everyone knew the younger employees at the office would try to skip, despite strong warnings weeks in advance against it, so they could go get drunk and bloated on green beer.  On account of her age, however, fifty-four, Liz figured she’d be safe from such assumptions, that her co-workers would just think she was sick with whatever bug had been going around the office.  And she was right.  In the days and weeks following her day-long absence, no one questioned Liz’s reason for being out.  Everyone considered her honest.  Because, for the most part, she was.

As Liz entered Peter Gregory’s, her eyes slowly adjusted to the bar’s poor lighting.  She saw the outlines of people in the crowded room, but she couldn’t yet make out the faces of anyone she might know.  The sound of whooping and clinking glass rose up through an old Crosby, Stills & Nash song, one of Liz’s favorites, crooning sweetly on the jukebox.  The place was buzzing.  Liz made her way to the bar and sat on one of the only vacant seats.  To her right was a thin, studious looking man.  A couple of girls in their twenties were to her left.  She stared at the man on her right for a second.  He didn’t seem to notice Liz as he stared up at the basketball highlights on the TV and occasionally cracked a peanut and threw the shell on the floor.  He was handsome in a strange, striking way and it looked like he was there alone.  Liz heard the bartender’s familiar voice say her name and she quickly turned forward. 

“Hey, Jason,” she said, smiling at him.  Jason smiled as if he’d just seen something he shouldn’t have and looked at the handsome man.  Liz glared at Jason and shook her head. 

“What can I get you?” Jason said, still smiling. 

“Nothing green.”  Liz looked to her left.  The twenty-something girls were taking turns sticking their tongues out and asking if they were green.  They were.  Jason walked away and came back with a bottle of Bud Light.

“Bottle’s your safest bet today,” he said.  Liz handed him her credit card to open a tab.  Jason took it and tended to the other patrons. 

As Liz sat at the bar, she looked around and realized she didn’t know anyone else.  The bar was filled with kids in their twenties most likely from the university down the road.  Liz figured she and the man to her right were the oldest people in the bar.  She looked over at him again.  He stood up as he finished his beer and headed in the direction of the restroom.  Liz turned and watched him until she could no longer see him.  He was intriguing.  She turned back around and Jason was standing behind the bar in front of her. 

“What?” she said, hoping he hadn’t noticed her staring, figuring he had.

“Cleveland Porter.”

“Excuse me?” 

“That guy you keep staring at.  His name is Cleveland Porter.”  Jason nodded towards where the man had been sitting. 

“Thanks,” Liz said, trying to sound like she didn’t care.  She wanted to know more.  “What’s his deal?”  She tried to sound annoyed.

“Just moved here,” Jason said, drying a glass.  “Apparently there’s a woman and a love-child involved.  I guess he’s not living with the woman.  I don’t know.”  Jason set the glass next to a row of others and looked at Liz without smiling.  “You be careful though.”

“Careful with what?  That’s ridiculous.”  She fumbled with the label on the bottle, started peeling it with her thumbnail.

“I’m not trying to suggest anything,” Jason said.  “I’m just saying I’ve heard he’s trouble.”  Liz shook her head and laughed.

“Sure,” she said, “trouble.” 

Jason’s tone had lightened a little, but he continued, “And don’t act like everybody thinks things are fine between you and Hank,” he paused like he was unsure as to whether or not he should continue.  “It’s just… I know everything’s not perfect.”  Jason smiled at Liz like he wanted her to know he understood before he turned and yelled at a group of guys who were starting a fight near the Space Invaders game.  Liz knew what Jason was talking about, everyone who came to Peter Gregory’s on a Friday or Saturday knew because one or both nights ended with Liz and Hank getting into yet another blowout fight over seemingly nothing at the bar.  They fought over money, one of them forgetting to deposit his check that week.  They fought over how to deal with their boys, Cody and Adam, now that they were off at college.  They fought over whether or not they should put Liz’s mother into a nursing home before they finally did.

Liz noticed Cleveland walking back to the bar and looked him over as he approached, noting his height and slender frame that was almost awkward.  He moved, however, with such authority and liquidity that she would never call him gangly.  He wore nice jeans, a blazer over his button-down, and a Rolex that hung off his wrist a little.  Cleveland’s glasses were thin-framed, silver and uncomplicated, and he styled his hair, which was peppered with gray, so that it looked disheveled in the most controlled way.  According to rumors, the ones Liz would later hear around town—from Jason at the bar, acquaintances who also frequented the bar— he was born in Cleveland on one of the nights the Cuyahoga burned in either ’52 or ’69—he looked different ages in different light settings, which was also part of his myth and draw.  His mother apparently wanted to name him something wild, which, also according to the rumors, was what he was.  But Liz couldn’t tell any of this by simply looking at Cleveland that day in the bar as he walked toward her.  She could only look at him and think one word:  sexy. 

And then another, charging through her brain like a freight train through silk:  trouble.

Liz continued to stare in the direction of the restrooms until Cleveland sat down so he would think she was staring at the hooligans gathered around the vintage video game, not him.  He was ordering another drink when she turned back around.  Liz told Jason she’d take another one, too.  He brought both beers at the same time.  Picking up his beer, Cleveland looked over at Liz for what she figured was the first time and tipped his bottle toward hers.  “Cheers,” he said, tilting his head down slightly.

“Cheers,” she said and smiled at him.  The smile he returned was slightly crooked.

“It appears as though you’re skipping work too,” he said, nodding at Liz’s skirt and blazer.  Liz wanted him to look at her and she felt guilty for it.

“I even wore my heels,” she said, pointing at her feet. She clicked her heels like Dorothy and immediately regretted it.  “I was ready to go.  And then, I wasn’t.”  She raised her beer and nodded toward it.  Cleveland looked down and laughed. 

“I hear that.”  He made another gesture toward her clothes or her body, Liz couldn’t tell, and said, “You look beautiful, though, so I won’t complain.”  Liz was never good at accepting compliments and the only thanks she could offer was a laugh. 

The next couple of hours passed that morning in a similar manner as the two joked politely and exchanged stories, Liz’s almost too frequently and purposefully involving Hank.  She never flirted.  She didn’t know what she was doing.  She was married.  Maybe being married didn’t quite count after so many years of neither party sleeping in the same room, let alone the same bed.  Liz knew this was crazy.  If they didn’t live like she’d always imagined married folks did, together and happy, she knew at least the state of Kentucky said that’s what they were.  Yoked.  Married.  Hitched.

But as noon approached, the bar filled like the pitchers Jason was pouring behind the counter as stumbling patrons spilled out the door and into the street.  Within Peter Gregory’s the crowd was shoulder to shoulder, shoving and shouting.  Liz and Cleveland had been forced closer together so that the sides of their legs were touching and their elbows rubbed as they drank.  The only way the two could continue to converse, as they did, was to speak so closely to the other that Liz could feel Cleveland’s breath on her ear.  She liked the way it felt, the warmth of someone else’s body so close to hers.  It was almost foreign.  Liz couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that closeness with someone.  I’m not wrong, Liz thought, to want this, to want companionship in some form.  Maybe it was the booze and the haze of the bar. Maybe it was the antidote to years of loneliness personified in the form of one Cleveland Porter. Maybe it was a combination of the two that drove Liz to ask Cleveland to leave the bar with her. Liz couldn’t quite tell, but she did it anyway. 

At first Cleveland didn’t respond.  He laughed and looked at the ceiling as he tipped his head up finishing his beer.  He looked at Liz again as he set the empty bottle on the counter and, all of a sudden, very seriously, he said, “Let’s go.”

Liz followed Cleveland to his apartment over on South Mill Street and up the stairs to the door once they arrived.  She also followed him straight into the kitchen off the living room of the small one bedroom where Cleveland pulled two glasses out of the cupboard over the counter.  He walked over to the freezer for some ice.  “You drink bourbon?” he asked as three cubes clanked into each glass.

“Every now and then,” she said.  Cleveland pulled a bottle of cheap-looking bourbon from the top of the refrigerator and set the bottle and the glasses on the kitchen table.  It was a small round table with collapsible edges much like the one Liz and Hank had in their first apartment.  Cleveland had poured some bourbon into one of the glasses and handed it to Liz, who accepted it with her left hand.

“That,” Cleveland said, “I’ve been staring at that all morning.  You’re married.”

Liz’s cheeks became hot. She spun the diamond around her finger before pulling it off and shoving it into the depths of her purse.  “I have been.  I mean, I am.  It’s complicated.”

“I don’t know what that even means,” Cleveland said.

“I guess, just that things are bad.  You know?  Over the years, things, they’ve just gotten—,” Liz poked at the ice cubes in her glass with her pinky and considered Cleveland’s face.  She wanted to be honest.  “Things have just gotten bad.” 

            Liz thought she should have felt foolish that afternoon drinking bourbon in Cleveland’s apartment.  After all, she was a married woman.  She would rationalize her actions, however, thinking, yes she was married, but unhappily so, and that wasn’t worth her energy.  Liz found that especially true that afternoon in Cleveland’s kitchen as he took her face in his hands, despite her acknowledgment of being married, and kissed her forehead and then her mouth.  It wasn’t worth being unhappy with Hank when she could have someone like Cleveland who would have sex with her, the way they did, in his kitchen, in his living room, in his bed.  

Later that afternoon, as Liz wrapped her arms around Cleveland in his apartment, she had no desire to go back to Hank.  But she went anyway.  She felt obliged.  As March ended and turned into April, Liz continued to see Cleveland, to sneak away from work on her lunch breaks, to go in late or leave early so that she and Cleveland could have an hour or two together.  For the first time in a long time, Liz was happy.  She felt a certain pull towards Cleveland that she hadn’t felt since she’d started seeing Hank over twenty years earlier.          

Liz left Hank in April. She quietly packed her things in her large, white suitcase, the one her parents had given her as a gift years before she’d married Hank.  For your travels, wherever they may lead.  With love-Mom and Dad, is what her mother had neatly written on the card she’d taped on the inside.  The suitcase was heavy and cracking and had suffered its share of abuse by the time Liz was folding as many pieces of clothing as would fit into it that day, leaving her husband as their grown sons already had, but she loved the dilapidated thing.  She loved what each scuff, what each crack meant.  She loved the places she had been—she’d never really traveled with it the way she always imagined she would, only used it to move from place to place, between Ohio and Kentucky, from college into an apartment with Hank, to the small house before their first son, Adam, was born, and then a slightly larger one before Cody.  Even more, Liz loved that her parents had given it to her, that, even though her father was gone and her mother hardly remembered her, she had this suitcase and the note she’d taped and re-taped on the inside.

After she’d packed, Liz wrote a letter to Hank.  She sat at the kitchen table and tried to put into words why she was leaving him.   She put her teeth lightly on the end of her pen before putting it to the piece of notebook paper she’d taken from Cody’s room.  “Hank,” she wrote.  She did not want to call him “dear” because she didn’t think of him as that anymore.  “As you may or may not have noticed by now, I am not here.  But here’s the thing, I haven’t left for work.  I’m not sure exactly where I’m going either, but I know I’m leaving Lexington.  You know how people always say ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ when they break up?  Well, it is you.  And, it is me, too.  It’s both of us.  We just don’t work anymore, you know?  You have to see it too, don’t you?  I can’t remember the last time I felt wanted by a man, by you.  I can’t remember the last time I felt sexy.  And I want that: to be wanted.  I want to feel loved again.  I want to be in love.  I can’t even argue anymore—I don’t know who’s wrong or right.  I’m tired and I’m lonely.  I wish I could go back and warn us when things first started getting hard, when we both started taking on more hours at work, when the boys left, that if we weren’t careful, we’d lose it all.  I can still remember how happy we were when we got married, how much love, how much warmth I felt.  Where does all of that go when we grow apart from people?  You know?  How can this happen?   -Liz.” 

Liz folded the paper into thirds and tucked it into an envelope.  She ran her tongue along the edge of the flap and pressed it closed.  On the front, in large curly letters, she wrote his name.  She felt guilty because of the way her writing made the letter look like a love letter.  It was a letter about love, she thought, trying to make herself feel better.  But it didn’t help.  Most of the letter was a lie and she knew it.  Yes, she’d fallen out of love with Hank, but she’d also been seeing Cleveland regularly since St. Patrick’s Day.  She picked up the pen and stuffed it into her pocket so that Hank wouldn’t see it and imagine what she must’ve looked like writing the note, scrawling out the letters of his name.  She felt like a liar.

With both hands still resting in her pockets, Liz quietly stepped through the kitchen.  She remembered many of the times she’d shared in it with Hank.  She remembered those Sunday mornings, when the boys were young and still asleep, when she and Hank sat in the kitchen and read the paper, listened to “Breakfast with the Beatles” on the radio.  Hank made blueberry pancakes and Liz sat on the counter and watched him.  They both sang along as the sun poured in through the windows and drenched everything like honey.  Liz loved when the station played “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” because Hank would always spin around and sing into the spatula as if it were a microphone, “You make me dizzy, Miss Lizzy,” before setting it down and sliding Liz off the counter.  He’d shake his mop of brown hair and look like a Beatle himself.  They’d twist around the kitchen and Hank would spin Liz and sing, with his body pressed to hers, “You make me dizzy, Miss Lizzy.  Girl, I want to marry you.”  And they would laugh and feel lucky and happy that he had.   

As Liz stood in the spot where she and Hank had once been so in love, she ran her hand through her hair and wondered what happened to those people, those happier, loving versions of Hank and herself.  She ran her hand along the counter.  She swore she could still feel in her muscles the way it felt to dance there with Hank, the way they swayed, and the way her body felt against his.  She remembered those two people, but she knew they’d disappeared years ago.  She was sick for them.  Liz picked up her suitcase and walked to the door. 

As she stood on her front porch, looking out on the cold, Kentucky morning, Liz thought that this certainly was not what her parents meant by “travels.”  Certainly they didn’t mean leaving Hank and the boys, running away because she didn’t love Hank anymore, because she thought she’d fallen in love with someone else.  She tried to think of what her father might say if he were still alive to get wind of the situation.  “Marriage ain’t easy, hon.  It takes work,” he might say.  “Marriage is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it sure is the sweetest, too.”  He might look at her mother and smile, take her wrist in his hand underneath the table the way men did in stories she’d read. 

But what happens, she thought, when one person doesn’t love the other person anymore?  What if I’m unhappy?  What if it’s not so sweet, Dad?  She almost asked the last question out loud.  Liz stood there on the porch for several seconds longer, like she was waiting for an answer.  She pulled her coat tight around her waist and noticed snow beginning to fall in the streetlight—the weather man had warned of this, a snow storm in mid-April.  She turned her face towards the sky and closed her eyes, felt the snowflakes fall on her skin and imagined them melting into different sized drops like glassy freckles on her cheeks.  The ground was too warm by now for the snow to actually stick, but there was something odd and refreshing about it falling this time of year.  She tried to figure out where she should— where she could—go.

Liz got in her ’89 Grand Prix and drove north to see her mother Caroline in Cincinnati.  Her mother lived in a place called The Cabin, a retirement home right off the highway, over the Ohio border.   The Cabin was a large facility, built to look like a cabin that overlooked the Ohio River.  The place was nice enough and her mother made a good amount of friends when she first moved in after Liz’s father Randy passed.  As the years progressed in the home, however, Caroline began to forget the people she’d met and would say to Liz when she came to visit that she met so many new people every day.  Liz heard from one of the nurses that Caroline would tell them that she used to be married to a man named Randy.  “That’s a nice name,” a nurse would say making small talk. 

Then Caroline would smile and, the nurses swore, with a strange, distant sparkle in her eye, say, so matter-of-factly that it had to be true, “Well, it’s what he was.”  Caroline’s stories about her husband, randy Randy, became infamous at The Cabin, a fact Liz wished she’d never known.

            Eventually, when Cody and Adam got older and stopped coming, she stopped asking about them and would ask who they were when Liz talked about them.  And, finally, on a freezing February afternoon the previous winter, Caroline didn’t recognize Liz.  At first, after her mother didn’t recognize her, Liz didn’t want to visit Caroline.  It was painful, having her own mother not recognize her.  Liz felt faceless, forgotten.  She soon began to fear that she would one day not be able to recognize Cody and Adam and made copies of a picture of them from when they’d come home for Christmas that year.  Liz cut out small pieces of paper and wrote each boy’s name neatly several times.  She taped the labels on the copies and put them up around the house, in the car, on her desk.  Everywhere she went she had them with her.  Every day, multiple times, she would say their names out loud. Adam.  Cody. Adam. Cody. Cody.  Adam. Cody.  Adam.   

            On the night this happened, Liz and Hank were sitting in the living room watching the evening news after Liz had gotten home from work.  Liz sat cross-legged on the opposite side of the couch from Hank and dangled her high-heel from her toe.  The newscaster was talking about an expected spike in oil prices over the following week while Liz held the picture in her hand and thought her sons’ names.  She wasn’t really paying attention to the TV, just the boys’ names and faces.  She thought them so many times that the words became almost foreign in her head.  She looked at the photograph so long that the boys began to look even more alike, as if their features were blending together to create one unrecognizable face.  Liz panicked.  This wasn’t happening.  She was preparing, being proactive.  She was 54, not 84.  She was supposed to have more time than this.  Liz blinked and looked away from the picture in the direction of the TV.  She looked back down at the picture.  Adam and Cody were two separate people with two different faces, which she recognized. 

            But it was too late.  The feeling of loss was too real and Liz had begun to cry, silently at first and then more audibly as she went on.  She let her shoe drop to the floor.  Liz knew she wasn’t just crying about this instance, she was crying for her mother and the loneliness they shared.  She couldn’t shake the image of her mother standing in The Cabin that day, staring at her so blankly.  “Can I help you find someone?” her mother had said.  Liz could only look at Caroline.  She felt like she’d swallowed her vocal chords.  “Miss,” her mother said, reaching out and taking her wrist, shaking it slightly, “Miss, can I help you find someone.”  Liz looked around at all of the other residents shuffling about the Common Room, greeting their loved ones.  She noted a man playing checkers with himself in front of the fireplace.  He would make a move on one side of the table, stand up, walk over and sit in the chair on the other side and make a move as his own opponent.   She looked back at her mother.

 “Um.  I was looking for my mother, but I just remembered she,” Liz paused.  “She doesn’t live here anymore.”  Caroline let go of Liz’s wrist and looked at her like she felt sorry for her.  But before she could say anything, Liz turned around and walked out.  She would rather disappear than be forgotten.

Liz continued to replay this scene in her head until she realized Hank was staring at her from the other side of the couch.  “Hon,” he said.  “They’re just gas prices.  You know how they are—up, down, up, down—they’ll go back down.”  Liz looked up and slowly turned her head towards Hank. 

“My mother’s forgotten me,” she said, ignoring Hank’s comment about the news story. 

“Oh,” Hank said, as if he were confused.  “Well, I’m sorry.”  Liz could tell he meant it and she felt a little better.  “But I warned you, didn’t I?  Remember?  That’s what happened with my dad—forgot all of us.  And just wait ‘til she starts getting nasty with you, that’s when it gets real fun.”  Liz continued to stare at Hank, losing any sense of comfort she’d felt before.  She didn’t know what to say to him.  Whenever they talked about her mother, Hank acted like it was all old news because his father had Alzheimer’s too before he passed.  It was like he expected Liz to be okay with the progression of the disease and the way it changed her mother.  But she wasn’t.  Of course she wasn’t.  And as Liz sat there, continuing to cry, Hank stood up from the couch and walked toward the kitchen.  Liz watched Hank as he walked across the room, stared at his work pants that were covered in layers of dried paint.  Hank painted houses for a living and had come home for as long as they’d been married covered in paint head to boot.  It was charming in the early years.  Liz even thought Hank looked cute when he came home with paint speckled in his hair, smeared across his forehead.  But after they saved up for new couches when the boys were older, Hank would come home from work and sit on the couch without changing his pants and while he swore the paint was dry, he ignored Liz when she asked him to please take his boots off and to change out of his work pants.  Liz delicately lifted her shoe with her toe and flung it at Hank and his filthy pants, just missing them, as they entered the kitchen.  She heard the fridge open and close and then she heard Hank open a beer.  The backdoor opened and closed.  Liz was alone.

On the morning Liz left Hank, she wanted the familiar, the familial and, although she was neither of those things to her mother, that’s what Caroline was to her. 

Liz signed in at the front desk as she always did when she came to see Caroline.  Except this time it was different.  She normally came on Saturdays or Sundays when the place was packed wall to wall with sons and daughters and squealing children.  This was a Monday, however, and the joint was empty.  Liz looked across the lobby and saw her mother sitting next to a large fireplace in the Common Room, looking down on the brown, muddy river winding like a copperhead between Ohio and Kentucky.  She thought her mother looked lost.  She swore she saw in her mother’s slumped shoulders and wringing hands the sort of loneliness that must accompany knowing no one.  She felt sorry for her mother for living around so many people and still being so alone.  She felt sorry for her mother for only having memories of randy Randy and the days she used to work at the downtown Macy’s before the city emptied out.  Underneath those feelings, in a dark, shameful way, Liz felt sorry for herself.

She walked across the large room, around empty tables and chairs, to her mother by the window.  For a short time, so as not to startle her, Liz stood behind Caroline before clearing her throat.  Caroline turned around and looked at Liz with the same lack of recognition that she had for the last year.  Her large brown eyes, the same as Liz’s, searched Liz’s slender face as if there was something in it she might’ve known at some other point in time.  “Hi,” Liz said.  “Do you recognize me?”

“I’m sorry,” Caroline said, wringing her hands, “but I don’t think I do.  Should I?”  It made Liz sad to see her mother look so defeated.

“Oh, no,” Liz said.  “I’m just a volunteer.  I wanted to make sure you were alright over here by yourself.”  

“Oh, I’m fine.  I just like to watch the river.”

“It is pretty from here isn’t it?”

“It sure is,” she said.  When Liz looked at her mother, she looked like the woman she used to know, but she also looked different, almost hollow.  Her body was there, but the person that she used to be was gone.  Her gaze seemed cloudy.

Aside from wanting her mother’s company, Liz wasn’t sure why she’d come.  She could no longer talk to her mother the way she used to, Caroline never remembered Hank or the boys nor did she really remember what Liz was doing.  About a year before her mother forgot her, Liz had gotten a job as a paralegal at a firm in Lexington called Humphrey, Richmond, & Bates.  All of the original founders were dead and the firm was now headed by Billy Bates, III, who Liz found a complete creep because he never looked her in the eye and was constantly wiping sweat from his brow and offering her old mints from his pocket.  She had told her mother these things when she first got the job, but now she’d completely forgotten. 

When Liz left The Cabin and the smell of wood burning and cafeteria food, she felt more alone than she had when she arrived.  In her head, she had the version of her mother that she knew and loved, the one she always longed to see.  In reality, at The Cabin, she had her mother’s shell, a woman who she recognized but no longer knew. 

The only place Liz figured she could go after she’d left The Cabin was Cleveland’s place.  Outside of his apartment, however, Liz sat in her car unable to decide what to do.  She could get out of the car and go to his door, stay, see what might become of the two of them.  She could leave and go home to Hank, she could try to make things work and confess everything to him—her affair with Cleveland, her lies about where she’d been.  She could confess to Hank the moments when she lay in bed with Cleveland after sex and wished she didn’t have to go home.  She could tell Hank about all of the times she touched him in the last month and how every time his skin met hers, she thought of Cleveland’s skin touching hers instead.  As Liz sat there, staring straight ahead, a car pulled up next to hers in the lot.  A younger woman, maybe mid-thirties, got out of the car and went around the back to get a baby-carrier, which held, presumably, a baby. 

The woman walked toward Cleveland’s building and Liz began to feel sick.  She felt like a fool.  The woman walked up the stairs on the side of the building that led straight to Cleveland’s door.  She knocked.  A few seconds passed before the door opened and Cleveland ushered the woman in.  He kissed her on the forehead and took the carrier from her.  Before he turned to go back inside, Cleveland looked down at the parking lot below his apartment.  Liz watched him look down, look at her car, and then turn, as if he hadn’t seen her, and go back inside.

Liz thought of the divorce law in Kentucky as she drove, which she’d come across so many times at work, and its description of a relationship and the surrounding circumstances under which a divorce might be filed.  “Irretrievably broken” is how the state defines it.  And the process of the divorce:  “irretrievable breakdown.”  The words stuck in Liz’s mind like her sons’ names had on the day she attempted to memorize them further.  Irretrievable breakdown.  Liz knew that was what she and Hank were approaching.  She imagined their names under the heading of “Irretrievable Breakdown” on some official looking document in another office like hers.  Their marriage would be simplified into a stack of paperwork left on some stranger’s desk to be filed away.  There was no room for residual feelings of love or longing or hope on the papers she would fill out and give to Hank, Liz knew.  She knew there was only room for facts, for what she was willing to admit to Hank as the truth, for loss.  She had loved this man for years and now she didn’t.  Time had changed them.  Time had pushed them apart.  They had, in their own hurtful ways, pushed each other apart.  And, to Liz, that was as true as true could get.   

As Liz passed through and out of downtown Lexington, the streetlights became fewer and farther apart until there were hardly any outside of town, out where the Interstate crosses over Richmond Road.  She loved this area and the way the hills looked just after dusk, that deep blue rolling.  Liz thought about the breakdown again and found it almost comforting, like chaos settling into stillness.  Her thoughts moved to Hank, who was most likely walking in the door from work and into the kitchen for a beer.  After opening his beer on the edge of the counter and allowing the cap to fall to the linoleum floor, he would see Liz’s letter and take it over to the table by the window.  He would take a large gulp, maybe even belch after a moment, and consider the curls of Liz’s handwriting.  She could almost hear the bubbles fizzing from the bottle as Hank roughly set it down.  He would rip open the envelope now, set it to the side and unfold her letter, she figured.  It hurt her, then, to picture Hank’s face as he read the letter because she didn’t know how to picture it, how Hank would react to her leaving.