“Fine,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air. “I’m leaving.”
As she drove off, I half-sat and half-collapsed down onto my front step.
“What the hell, Luke?” I said.
“Pissed off women are worse than Hell.”
I jumped up and turned in the direction of the voice. My heart almost burst through my chest.
“Oh, fuck. God, you scared me.”
Albert, my octogenarian neighbor, was standing next to one of the pillars outside his front door. A cigarette glowed in his hand.
He was always outside smoking. I would see him out there four or five times a day. His wife had died years before, but she hadn’t allowed smoking in the house.
“Just because she ain’t here, that don’t give me the right to break the rules,” he had once told me.
We usually exchanged pleasantries, but never much else.
He took a long drag and exhaled into the sky.
“Did you see all of that?” I asked.
I hadn’t noticed him standing there earlier. But, I had clearly been distracted.
“Yup.”
I hate drama, always have. I pride myself in avoiding it. But, here I was, putting on a soap opera for my neighbor. God, how humiliating.
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head ever so slightly, like he saw people fighting in driveways every day.
Albert tossed his cigarette to the ground and stomped it out with a boot that was probably older than I was.
He turned to go inside, then stopped before he reached the door. His head turned back my way.
“You know, that blond haired gal?” he said. “Every time I see her, she always smiles and says, ‘Hi Mr. Lang.’ I’ve told her a hundred times to call me Al, if I’ve told her once.”
I’m not sure if I would have remembered his last name if someone was holding a gun to my head. I always called him Albert. Or Al. Or, I’d call him The Cigarette Smoking Man in my head.
“Few weeks back, she drove me to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription. Said she needed to go there anyway.”
I knew nothing of this.
He let out a sound that was a cross between a laugh and a cough.
“But, funny thing is,” he said, shaking his head. “She didn’t buy a damn thing.”
He reached for the door handle.
“Goodnight, Luke,” he said.
Within a minute, I was in my car, driving toward her condo.
Holly, I’m sorry. Talk to me please? I texted as I drove.
I didn’t expect a reply. And didn’t get one.
I’m coming over, I sent next. Please talk to me.
Still nothing.
I got a text from April.
Can you tell me what’s going on? it read.
I ignored it and drove.
The drive seemed longer because I spent it waiting nervously for Holly’s response.
But one never came, and when I got to her condo, there was no sign of her car.
Where are you? I sent.
I tried calling her. Once. Twice. Four times. No answer.
Give me ten minutes, Holly. Then you can ignore me all you want, I texted.
Five was her response.
Finally.
Okay, five. Where are you?
Driving.
I’m at your place.
I’m not.
Yes, that’s pretty goddamn apparent.
I couldn’t text that. But I thought it.
Do you want me to meet you somewhere?
Sure.
God, the short answers made me want to scream.
Where?
It took a few minutes for me to get her response.
It was a picture.
Here, it said.
I knew exactly where she was.
I hadn’t been there in a long time.
When I got to where she was, her car was the only one in the parking lot. Holly was sitting on a bench that I knew was the one we had been sitting on the last time I was there.
While we had dated, two of her high school classmates had gotten married. Holly had practically begged me to go to the wedding with her, and although I put up a fight, I ended up going.
I hadn’t been to a wedding since my own, and I wasn’t eager to go watch another one after how my marriage had ended up. Holly and I had never actually talked about my feelings regarding that, so she took my objections to going as me not wanting to meet her friends and get involved in her life. It wasn’t that, of course, but I didn’t want the argument, which was the main reason I went.
The wedding brought back a lot of memories, and I found that it was a lot harder for me to get through than I had ever thought it would be. When it was finally over, I left the church as quickly as possible and found a wooden bench outside that overlooked the courtyard between the sanctuary of the church and the fellowship hall where the reception was going to be held. Initials were carved into the left side of the bench: KM+ WP.
I needed to breathe, needed to clear my thoughts, needed to be looking at something other than two people promising to spend the rest of their lives with each other. I remember being tempted to yell out in the middle of the ceremony how “till death do us part” might come a hell of a lot sooner than either of them thought.