She doesn' t want to be a home breaker, a husband snatcher, a marriage buster. The fact that Ken has to wake up to Helen' s bulldog face is not her problem, Debbie thinks. He can believe his marriage is over, and act like it, but it is obvious that the fat lady has a different idea, and Debbie doesn' t want to, doesn' t need to get in the middle of that mess. That ethereal connection between her and Ken, it is there, Debbie can feel it, but she also is afraid of it because it flies against common sense and reality. That feeling for him, it is nothing but a stupid longing, a relic of a lost youth, an empty desire with no substance. The only rewards for indulging in such a stupid longing exercise were her getting insulted by a stranger to her and Ken getting clocked by a stranger to him. What a pathetic pair they make, losers to the very end. Debbie throws the cigarette butt down and heads back into the building.

She is gonna have to call a taxi to take her back to the parking lotto pick up her car. She wonders if the bloody spot will still be there or if somebody has cleaned it. She shudders at the idea of seeing that black spot again. Even for a seasoned murderer like herself, killing doesn’ t come easy.

Headache

My bold head throbs. I say bold because the surgeons had left a hairless patch where they had operated so after I left the hospital I shaved the rest in the name of evenness. It wasn' t until now that I realized that my skull is shaped like a bullet. The doctor told me that my double vision would disappear as the days went by, and he was right. The headaches are not gone yet but they pound me with a diminished intensity each day, another correct prediction.

I woke up in a hospital room with the biggest whopper of a headache I ever have experienced. My eyes couldn' t focus and everything came in as double. There were two He lens, two James and two Freds – her brothers in law – when I came to, and zero Debbies. Not finding Debbie in the room had been a disappointment until the cops came to talk to me and told me that she had come in with the ambulance and had stayed by my side until Helen showed up.

An orderly told me about Helen' s going ballistic and getting on Debbie' s case. I don' t understand it. Helen has not moved a single finger to try to save our marriage and yet she goes bonkers about Debbie being next to me. A marriage is not saved by keeping people away but by spouses working their private problems out, starting in the bedroom, moving to the kitchen, to the rest of the house, and finally looking for things to fix outside the house. It is too late to try to keep me away from Debbie or anybody else.

I was still using the guest room in our house, soon to be Helen' s house, before I moved out. I went to talk to a lawyer and after wards I told Helen I wanted a divorce. I didn' t and I don' t expect to patch things up between us; as I said, it is too late. Helen response came as a bout of hysteria and her only solace was bad mouthing me and Debbie and everybody else on Earth. Of course, she sees herself blameless on this matter. Asking her for a divorce was likes wallowing a bitter horse pill to cure a disease; it didn' t go down easily and I almost choked, but I had to do it.

Getting whacked on the side of the head rattled my understanding of things. From this forced shakedown previous truths came tumbling down into the dust, among them my commitment to a failed marriage, my resignation to a crappy life, my shame at telling my son that his mother was no longer my wife. The doctors told me that a little more force behind the blow to my head could have shattered my occipital bone and driven the broken bone pieces into my brain. A second impact on the same area would have done the job too. I didn' t see my life flashing before my eyes, or lights above calling my name, or angels waving at me, or any other bullshit signs of my forthcoming demise. The truth is, I don' t remember a damned thing. I just woke up in a hospital with a terrible headache and seeing double.

Still, the close call made me realize that life is short, that it can be made quite shorter by many means, like a baseball bat, and that I' m not a young man who can get beaten and be up on his feet the next day, bruised but ready to go again. It takes me a lot longer to heal now. What is left of my life I need to make the most of it, before my mind is gone and my diapers are full of crap and I don' t remember who my son is, or before I fall off a horse and land head first on a rock.

It is not easy to drop years of marriage and a wife like if they were unwanted baggage. No matter how odious wife and marriage have become, there remain good memories that stick to you like your own skin and make shedding the old life a painful thing; it is like being skinned alive. The initial shock and pain are subduing and now I can see options in my future that I couldn' t before, but there is also a lingering pain that may never go away, a scar that will never heal.

Debbie shot dead my attacker. Jesus, it' s the second time she comes to the rescue. Now I figure that the hip bag she carried at the bar, the one she never opened and looked heavy, had a gun in it. I' m so fucking brilliant, a Polish Sherlock Holmes. Things are always obvious after the fact, when it doesn' t matter anymore. Anyway, I' m still breathing because of Debbie' s prowess with a firearm. Instead of John Wayne saving the girl, the girl saves John Wayne, again. The cops told me that all stories check out and that it was a good shooting. The bastard who hit me happened to be her ex, an ex con andal ready in parole violation and wanted by the law. Nobody is shedding tears for the bastard.

Since two days ago I live in a motel next to I-25. Helen had become vicious with her bile and her insults so I moved out. I should have left the same day that I told her that our life together was over because living under the same roof afterwards became a very bad idea. Had she used that internal fire to try to make things work instead of using it to debase me after the marriage was history, probably I wouldn' t be living out of a suitcase, with a shaved head, going to sleep with the sound of trucks on the highway and strangers banging their ho’ s in the rooms next to mine. But you know what? There is no point in thinking about the past when the present and the future are as shaky as a drunk Humpty Dumpty rocking on at all ledge.

I haven' t reached for Debbie since the day I got whacked, and she doesn' t seem to be looking for me either. I' m in the phone book, just like my business is so if she wanted to, she could have given me a ring. I have being taking care of my business since I left the hospital. Medical bills and Litigation are liable to get expensive, and I need to keep things going. These things don' t wait for you to get healthier or for you to get your shit together; they just come at you no matter if you are ready or not. With a baseball hat buried to my ears I get to supervise my crew. I don' t want the sun to burn my pale scalp. The guys tell me that I look like Dumbo. I had to take care of my rental properties too. Because of my work I have been running like a beheaded chicken and I haven' t had time to get in touch with Debbie.

I think about her all the time. At nights I cannot sleep thinking about what the future may be like, about us being together. At times I allow myself the luxury of fantasizing about our happy life together but each time the bubble bursts and I land with a flat thud on the hard surface of reality. That' s not how things work Bubba, I say to myself. That night at the bar, the hours before we ended up washing dishes together, they had been nothing but hell. I didn' t walk away because of my self pride, of being afraid to admit what a fool I had been for chasing after somebody who really is a stranger. Yet, those few minutes together, side by side with our bellies to the sink, they had been a nirvana that cannot be explained with words. Such a stupid thing, standing side by side washing dishes, I cannot believe that I' m getting a divorce because of it.