“Are you done complaining?”
“This is a hovel. It’s not even livable. Let’s get an apartment in town.”
“No, that will offend my family.”
His mother didn’t like me. Deborah glared at me. She didn’t like my clothes, my job as a graphic designer, the fact that my mother owned a bar or that she had six sisters, for some reason. She didn’t like that Martin didn’t marry his high school girlfriend, Mixie, because she was best friends with Mixie’s mother. Not kidding—that was her nickname. Mixie.
His father ran the family tire shop, Martin’s Tires, along with his mother. Mixie worked the front desk. She was a lumbering, sulky woman with a face like a prune, always scrunched up, with a personality to match.
When I went into the tire shop to say hello to Martin, or to see if he wanted to go to lunch, Mixie would say, “Why are you here, Bellini?”
The first time, I was polite, then the next time she asked, I said, “Why are you asking me that question?”
Her face scrunched up even tighter. She said, “Because I want to know. I’m responsible for who is in here.”
I said, “Are you?”
I told Martin about it, but he laughed and said, “That’s Mixie. She’s jealous because I didn’t marry her. You don’t need to be jealous of her, Bellini.” He smiled at me as in,But you should be.
“I’m not jealous of her, Martin.”
He seemed irritated. “Maybe you should be,” he muttered.
“I’m not.”
I started working at the tire shop as a salesperson because Martin asked me to, and I said I would, part time. Maybe if I got out more and met more people in town, it would help. I could also get out of the cave we called our home, which was making my brain rot.
I handled my freelance graphic design work on the weekends and evenings. I didn’t want to lose that business, because in the back of my mind, I told myself I’d leave the marriage soon—as soon as I could gather up my strength—and I would need a job.
I did well at the tire shop because I was respectful to people, and they trusted me. I soon knew every detail of every tire in that place and was working close to full time. Even Martin’s father and grandfather—both nice, if intensely dense men, like Martin—praised me and thanked me profusely for my work and how many tires I sold.
Mixie, sourer by the day, glared.
Deborah hmphed at me. She and Mixie whispered about me constantly and would abruptly stop talking when I came near them. Then they would glare at me together.
But Martin praised me. “Good job, Bellini. Thank you.”
“She’s a winner,” his father said to Martin, while grinning at me.
“She’s amazing,” his grandfather said. “Sharp as a tack, smart as a whip. Tires are flying out these doors.”
But every night, as I was driving home at six p.m. after a nine-hour day, I thought of how much I missed Logan. I thought of how my life was in a dreary town where everyone knew everyone and had for generations, but no one was interested in knowing me. I knew I was different from them. They knew it, too. I thought of my mom and her sisters and how I knew somany people in our town in Montana, and I wondered if I had, unintentionally, left people out, too, which I felt bad about.
The weight of my unhappiness was crushing my soul. Crushing me. Crushing all the joy out of my life.
My mother knew to her core that something—many things—were wrong, right from the start. I told her some of it, not all of it, but she could intuit the rest. I tried not to talk about it much. I had made my own bed of trouble. She was not intrusive or demanding, but she spoke her mind, often. “Come home, cookie. You made a mistake. It’s okay. We all do. I love you. But you’re not who you were. You’re not happy. Don’t get pregnant again and make this more of a mess than it already is… How about if I drive out to Eastern Oregon, and we’ll drive your truck back home together? Mother-daughter road trip!”
In the end, it was everything that shattered my marriage: Not wanting to be married in the first place. The miscarriage. The wreck of a house that Martin refused to put money into, even with a sloping roof, breaking stairs, and a floor that was uneven. One of the bathrooms didn’t work—the plumbing was jammed. I was constantly cleaning up leaks and messes.
It was my loveless relationship with Martin. I had been in a loving relationship with Logan, and the contrast I was living in was stark and shattering. It was the depressing town and two mean women I worked with. It was selling tires instead of writing books. It was having no control of my own life and my own dreams. My marriage was…sand and dirt. That’s all I could think of to compare it to. Sand and dirt.
I felt like I’d been in a fog of grief over my daughter and a fog of grief over my life. I had been emotionally and mentally paralyzed by both. I had gotten lost in my unhappiness and couldn’t pull myself together enough to find an opening to crawl through and escape. It’s a lot to ask a seriously depressed person to fix her life when she can barely get through the day. I alsonever wanted to get divorced. It had always been my plan to get married and stay married until I was old and doddering.
I had failed. It wasn’t even all Martin’s fault, I knew that. I wasn’t in love with him, which meant that I didn’t want to make sacrifices for him anymore. I’m sure he knew that somewhere in his heart. He probably didn’t want to acknowledge it. He could probably make some other woman happy. That woman simply wasn’t me.
But as I stood on the uneven porch falling off our crumbling house one night after we’d been married for almost three years, as the rain came pouring down, I knew I’d had it. I knew the roof would leak again. I knew the house would continue to smell like mold. And I knew that this was not what I wanted my life to look like. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write children’s chapter books. I wanted a cottage. I wanted a quiet life. I wanted to read, and do crosswords, and bake cookies, and play chess. I wanted to be in love with my husband and have kids.
Behind me, I could hear the water sluicing over our house in the middle of nowhere. I made a decision to leave. I would leave on Monday. At that moment, the step I was standing on broke, and I leaped off it before I was full of splinters.
