Thank God the house got internet service. I set up my computer in a little bedroom upstairs that warehoused Christmas ornaments and dusty cardboard boxes marked with phrases like Uncle Joe’s funeral or Dewitt 1938. That’s where I read, made my lesson plans for the fall, and checked Facebook every night, watching my friends go to bars, literary readings, parties, and conferences.
I wasn’t going to lie; I had a lot riding on tonight’s date. I was desperate to remove our relationship—even for a few hours—from the farm and Elsa, to resurrect the kind of fun, spontaneous times we’d had in college, before grad school and illness had claimed all our Friday nights. Mary liked the idea. She’d been excited when I mentioned it earlier in the week.
“A night out,” I’d said, “before the school year starts. We won’t do a single productive thing.”
She laughed. “Promise?”
Now, driving back to Pine Valley with a silence that was building even higher walls between us, I wondered again where I’d screwed up. Or did she screw up? Any stranger watching us tonight would have been embarrassed at how hard I was trying, but I was obviously trying the wrong things. The wrong movie. The wrong restaurant. Would it have been better if we’d gone to the local Dairy Queen and traded bites of Blizzard while teenagers flirted their way around our booth?
The lights of Pine Valley warmed the horizon, and as much as I hated personification, it was like the town itself was visually shoving the answer down my throat. Yes. Yes, you tried too hard. You wanted a Minneapolis date, but you don’t have a Minneapolis wife anymore.
With that uncomfortable thought in my head, we drove into town, a small grid of streets surrounding one main drag of businesses underneath the soybean plant’s smokestacks on the horizon. A few gas stations, the Dairy Queen, and a CVS pharmacy were the only places still open at 9:00 p.m. on Friday night.
“Can you stop at the pharmacy? I need to pick up Mom’s medicine and some pictures.”
Obediently, I pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine, following her inside. She went to see the pharmacist and sent me to the photo counter in the opposite corner of the store. The salesgirl didn’t notice me approach and I didn’t care enough to try to grab her attention.
I didn’t have a Minneapolis wife anymore.
To say that I wasn’t prepared for this change in Mary was a laughable understatement. It had never occurred to me that I’d need to prepare for it. The trouble with vows was that they were too damn generic. I’d stood in that church a block away from here and repeated, “For better or for worse,” imagining the worst to be Mary laid low with a cute, flu-like sickness requiring chicken soup and boxes of Kleenex. Maybe we’d lose our jobs. Maybe we’d have to deal with infertility. I’d projected every normal scenario into those vows, everything people told me to expect, but the minister never said, “You might move away from everyone and everything you love into a rundown farmhouse in the middle of a desolate prairie, where you won’t have sex or even any conversation that doesn’t revolve around the state of a dying woman who hates you.” No, he’d stood smiling in front of us and said, “For better or for worse.” Better or worse what? I’d agreed to adjectives. I’d happily squeezed Mary’s hands and made vows with unknown placeholders for nouns. For someone who aspired to be an English professor, binding my life to someone else’s with a game of Mad Libs suddenly seemed like a terrible joke.
“Can I help you?”
I blinked. The salesgirl stood on the other side of the counter now, obviously waiting for me to say something.
“Oh. Yeah. Pictures for Mary Lund?”
She promptly went hunting through the bin.
“Nope, nothing for Mary Lund.”
Usually I asked clerks to take a second look whenever the first answer was no. Most of them were young and bumbling and found the item on the second or even third try. This girl was young but looked like she’d never bumbled over anything in her life. She’d already straightened back up to face me, supremely confident, equally ready to hand me my hat or let me try again. I was the one fumbling now under her attention.
“Um, how about Elsa Reever?”
“You have some interesting aliases.” She grinned this time before diving into the Rs.
“A rose by any other name . . .”
“Would still have pictures at CVS,” she finished, pulling an envelope out of the bin and waving it with a flourish.
“Apparently.”
She rang up the pictures on the cash register. “So, Elsa, did you need anything else today?”
“Um—” I glanced back in the direction of the pharmacy, looking for any sign of Mary. Did she mention anything else? I couldn’t remember, and given the course of the evening, it was probably safer not to spend extra money.