He didn’t know how much he depended on her habits to set the pattern for his days until they were gone. He never knew what he was supposed to do with himself when he was alone, and wondered what people did who lived by themselves their whole adult lives. He’d not eaten a single meal inside his house since Jess left. Days off he texted his friends to see what they were up to, see if he could get himself invited over to their houses or else peel them away from their families for a few hours. If that didn’t work, he knew at least one bartender in most of the local places, and could go from one to the next, never a shortage of available spots. He could eat a sandwich at the bar; he didn’t even need to talk to anyone. The sound of people talking all around him was enough company, far better than ESPN droning on in his empty living room.
On Halloween, the day that Jess left, he went to work as always. People filed into the Half Moon dressed as rock stars, as ghosts, as characters from TV shows everyone recognized, and there were moments when what had happened earlier that day was too surreal to be true. She’d taken the day off to organize the closets, she said. And she really had organized. He went to the gym around noon, and when he came home, he threw his keys on the hall table and noticed her duffel bag by the door. But he was distracted. It had been a tough week at the bar. His food supplier had to float him for the second time in a month. He’d already switched to a bar-food-only menu, no fresh vegetables, only stuff that could live in their walk-in until the apocalypse. The next step was scrapping food entirely and simply giving out bags of chips. More worrisome: he’d missed a payment with the Guinness guy—missed three payments, actually—but the last time was the delivery guy’s fault. He didn’t grab the check even though Malcolm left it out for him. They reported him to the state liquor authority, the alert went out, and since then he had to pay cash on delivery with all the booze suppliers. He owed the guy who came around in his beat-up van to clean the draft lines. He owed the soda guy. He owed the trash removal guys. He was owed his cut from the ATM and the jukebox, but the guys who ran them were so young he felt cheap going after them for it.
And then they ran out of vodka, a stupid miscalculation on his part, so he sent Roddy up to the liquor store to buy whatever vodka they had, full price. Instead of grabbing a variety, Roddy returned with six bottles of Absolut, and of course the next person who ordered asked for Ketel One and soda and the one after that asked for Stoli and anyone under forty-five wants Tito’s and everyone acts as if everyone else’s favorite vodka is garbage even though no human can actually tell one vodka from another.
Did a feeling of dread come over him when he noticed her duffel in the hall? He could hear her moving around up in their bedroom. He flipped through the mail and then threw it on the table next to his keys. As soon as he climbed the stairs and walked into their room, he saw that she was packing her old roller suitcase, too. “Malcolm,” she said, as if she was surprised to see him.
“Are you going somewhere?” he asked. But then it hit him, what was happening, and he did the thing she hated whenever he was reeling on the inside. He made his body a suit of stone. He crossed his arms and pulled on his tight shoulder as if he’d not asked a question, as if he weren’t waiting for an answer.
She took a deep breath, and he felt the hairs at the back of his neck rise.
“Just for a while,” she said. “To think. Mal, there’s so much that we need to—”
“To think,” he repeated, and she nodded, looking up at him like she was making herself brave, like she was ready to answer anything he might ask her. He could see her pulse flickering in her slender throat, her long dark hair swept up as it always was when she was around the house. But he was too surprised to ask another question.
“I can’t deal with this,” he said. “Not this week. Do you even know what’s going on at the bar? I can’t.”
He gestured at her little piles of clothes and shook his head as if to say this—leaving—was what they promised each other they’d never do. They’d never even joke about it. They were family, thick or thin. And yet.
She turned back to the suitcase. The headache she’d been nursing for days coalesced into a fine point behind her brow.
If he’d been paying attention, he would have figured it out the day before. She’d cleaned out the drawers of the bathroom vanity. She got a giant black trash bag and threw out every half-empty hair product and lotion. She was about to throw out all the unopened pregnancy tests but something stopped her. Instead, she opened one, peed on it, examined her face in the bathroom mirror while she waited for the line to appear. It had been two years since her last pregnancy test. She tried to remember what she used to think about as she waited, whether sometimes she thought of errands she had to run and what she might eat for dinner, or whether she always, every time, imagined what it would feel like to push out a baby and hear her shocked wails, have her placed on her chest for the familiar smell of her body, the only home she’d ever known. This is air, she’d whisper to her baby. That’s light. Those are people, like you. She opened another test and did it again, though there was barely enough left in her bladder to saturate the stick. She imagined what she’d do if two lines appeared. She’d read the stories, women conceiving when it made the least sense. A hundred thousand dollars spent on fertility but lo and behold one weekend in Puerto Rico when she was not even ovulating did the trick. If that stick displayed a second line, whose baby would it be? Cold shock rolled through her and she clutched the edge of the counter.
She needed to tell him about Neil. She needed to tell him before he heard it from someone else.
“Malcolm,” she said and stood up. “I know it’s not a good time, but I need to clear my head. I just don’t think the way we are right now can go on any longer. Before I go, I need to tell you something that I should have—”
“Those are mine,” he interrupted, looking at the set of earbuds in her hand.
The rest of her sentence was cut off as if he’d clapped a hand over her mouth.
“These?” she asked, holding up the earbuds.
“They’re mine,” he repeated. He wasn’t going to ask where she was going or why, but she could see in his stance that, by God, those earbuds would be the hill he chose to die on.
“I think they’re mine,” she said. “See?” She showed him the dot of nail polish she’d used to mark them, to differentiate them from his.
Packing he could take. The fact that she was leaving he could take. But that little dot of nail polish sent him over. He pounded down the stairs, and when he slammed the door the whole house shook.
Ten minutes later he was back, rooting around for something or maybe working himself up to a question.
“You don’t want to know where I’m going?” she asked when he didn’t say anything.
“Nope,” he said.
“Well, I’m going to Cobie’s,” she said, her voice catching.
“Go to the fucking moon if you want,” he said, and left the room again. He went downstairs and she imagined him pacing, cracking his knuckles, trying to decide what to do or say. She thought she’d hear the sound of his car starting, him driving away, but he stayed. He’s hurt, she told herself. He’s angry and feels stupid. Just as she would feel if the tables were turned. Just as anyone would. They’d talk, surely, after a cooling-off period. They’d talk after they got used to having a little space from each other. Then she’d tell him everything.
As she finished packing, little kids started ringing the doorbell, crying out, “Trick or treat.” She listened to Malcolm make a big deal about costumes, imagined him waving to the parents standing at the curb. Amazing, the way he found a different thing to say to each kid. She alone knew how hard he must be working to sound friendly and normal. But why? Was it a positive attribute, or was it pathological, that desperation to shield the world from his personal business? Listening to him, no one would guess what was going on in his life, his house, at that very moment.