I leave the keys on the front seat of my car and I get out. I just run. I run and run even though it’s cold outside, even though my body is starting to heat up faster than it should. Even though I feel like I’m giving myself a fever. And then I stop, instantly and abruptly, because I realize that I cannot outrun myself. I go across the street and walk along the sidewalk until I see a bar. I don’t have my wallet, I don’t have my keys, but I walk in anyway. It’s early enough in the day that they let me right in and then I sit at the bar and I drink beers. I drink beer after beer until I can’t feel my nose. When I’m done, I pretend I’m going to the bathroom and then I sneak out the back, not paying, not tipping, not even saying thank you. By the time I get home, knowing full well I’ve locked myself out, I’m just plain sick.
I puke on my own front lawn. It’s barely 8:00 p.m. Neighbors see me and I ignore them. I sit down on the grass when I’m done and I pass out. I wake up around 11:00, and I’m too discombobulated and inebriated to remember where my keys are. I do the only thing that I can do to get back into my house. I call Ana.
“At least you called me,” she says as she walks up to the sidewalk to meet me. “That’s all I care about.”
I don’t say anything. She walks up my steps and unlocks my front door. She holds it open for me.
“Are you drunk?” she says, rather shocked. If it were any other time in my life, she’d probably think this was funny, but I can tell she doesn’t, even though I kind of do. “That’s not like you.”
“It’s been a rough couple of days,” I say and plop myself down on my own sofa.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Well, my husband died, so that was hard.” I don’t want to talk to her about any of this. I don’t want to talk to anyone.
“I know,” she says, taking my sarcastic remark as something genuine. She can’t possibly think that was really my answer. Instead, she is treating me sincerely so that I have no choice but to be sincere. It’s crafty, I’ll give her that.
“I moved his stuff out,” I say, resigning myself to the therapy session that is going to come my way. I don’t want to talk to her about our last conversation, about our fight, although I’m sure she’s going to force that on me as well. She moves toward me on the sofa and puts her arm around me. “I gave away some of his stuff to Goodwill,” I tell her.
Goodwill! That’s where my keys are.
“I’m sorry, Elsie,” she says. “But I’m proud of you. I’m really, really proud of you for doing it.” She rubs my arm. “I don’t know if I’d be able to do it if I were you.”
“What?” I say. “You were insisting that I needed to start moving on! You said I should do it!”
She nods. “Yeah, because you should. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t know it was hard.”
“Then why did you say it like it was easy?”
“Because you needed to do it and I knew that you could. No one wants to do it.”
“Yeah, well, no one else has to.”
I want her to leave and I think she knows that.
“I’m sorry about the other night. I was out of line. I’m truly sorry,” she says.
“It’s fine,” I say, and I mean it. It is fine. I should be apologizing too, but I just don’t want to talk to anyone right now.
“All right, well, I’m going to go,” she says. She gathers herself and leaves.