A dark, heavy, overwhelming feeling of dread took over my body.Fight or flight response.I had heard about it, but I had never experienced it before like this. I had a terrible desire to run around the room, screaming.
In my moment of blinding panic, the words from my best friend Destiny’s women’s group came back to me. I had never gone to a meeting at the Second Chances Club, but I had heard enough about it from Destiny. “I am a beautiful, intelligent, capable woman,” I told myself and repeated it three times until I could breathe again.
There. Better. Maybe there was something to women’s groups, after all. I had made fun of Destiny and her sayings, but it turned out that they helped in a pinch. With as much serenity as I could muster, I looked down at the papers again. They were divorce papers with little colored tabs attached, showing me where to sign. Divorce papers. Steve had even left a pen next to the papers for me. A disposable Bic. Disposable like our marriage. How thoughtful.
“I’m a beautiful, intelligent… Oh, crap, this isn’t happening!” I screamed. I stumbled backward, away from the papers, and dropped my phone on the floor. My head was filled with a loud buzzing noise, and I was having trouble breathing. There were so many thoughts running through my head that I couldn’t catch them. But I knew they were all bad.
I walked backward like a dyslexic zombie until I practically fell into my recliner. Leaning back, I shivered, and that’s when I realized that the man I had loved for twenty-five years had taken my grandmother’s handmade afghan, along with most of my belongings, and now I would be cold.
And alone.
CHAPTER 2
“A Rocky Road”
I stepped over an empty bag of Chips Ahoy! cookies and a half-eaten family-size frozen lasagna and plopped back down on my recliner. The floor was a minefield of empty packages of carbs and preservatives. I didn’t care. I was self-medicating. And just because it wasn’t working didn’t mean I would stop. After all, it was becoming habit.
Three days ago, my life blew up, and now I was reclining amongst the ashes…in my recliner. I had dragged the television from the guest room upstairs to the downstairs living room and managed to heave it on top of the mantel. Now, I was catching up onReal HousewivesFrom Everywhereand a binge ofBreaking Bad. Both shows gave me ideas on what to do next with the remnants of my life, but I discarded the ideas in favor of Pop-Tarts.
I covered my body with the blanket I brought down from the guest room and opened the Pop-Tarts foil wrapper. Steve had taken our bedroom set, which was almost okay with me because I hated the massive oak furniture. I chewed while I visualized what Steve and Tight Tammy were doing on my massive oak bed right now. A tear rolled down my cheek, which surprised me. I mean, how much can one person cry? How did I still have liquid in my body? I must have had superhero tear ducts. What a crappy power…crying. Why couldn’t I fly instead? Or have a high metabolism?
I changed the channel to home shopping and dropped the empty Pop-Tart package on the floor. Drying my eyes with a blanket I’d brought down from upstairs, I soothed myself by imagining that Tight Tammy made Steve do squats and push-ups before she allowed him to do the nasty.
The nasty.
I hadn’t done the nasty in nearly a year. Steve had said that he was tired and overworked and just not in the mood. Obviously, he was a big fat liar. Could he have been having an affair for nearly a year and that’s why he didn’t want to do the nasty with me? My tear ducts went into high gear again.
An ice cream commercial came on TV. A woman spooned creamy Rocky Road into her mouth and smiled. It was magic Rocky Road, able to make a woman smile. Maybe ice cream could make me smile, again, too. Maybe that’s all it took to go from catatonic depression to happiness.
I rolled off the recliner and shuffled to the freezer. No ice cream.
“Isn’t that just typical!” I shouted in my filthy kitchen.
Now, what was I going to do? I scanned the refrigerator and cabinets for something to replace magic, happiness ice cream, but after three days of binging, I was down to canned beets and stale All-Bran cereal.
It was time to leave the house. I took a deep breath and grabbed my purse off the counter, avoiding looking at the divorce papers, which were still on the counter where I had left them. I dug my keys out of the purse and walked to the garage door. But when I put my hand on the doorknob, I remembered about the rental car. It was still in the driveway, blocking the garage. I turned around and went to the front door. As I opened it, I was gripped with a terrible fear.
The outside world was scary. There were judgmental people out there, along with my husband and people who had bathed in the past three days, unlike me. I hated the outside world. I never wanted to see the outside world again.
But I needed the happiness ice cream.
I opened the door and stepped outside. I gasped. Somehow it had gotten dark out, and after three days and nights on my recliner, I had lost track of time. I checked my phone to see what time it was. The screen announced I had missed another call from Destiny from her vacation in Hawaii. So far, I had kept the divorce secret, but I got the impression that she was suspicious. How could I tell her that my husband had left me, that my perfect life had turned to doo-doo? The phone said Eleven-thirty. Normally I was asleep by now, and so was the neighborhood. It was very quiet out, and the night sky was lovely and peaceful. But that didn’t help my anxiety.
Yep, I needed happiness ice cream.
I only had thirty minutes before the store closed. I hopped into the Honda Fit and drove away from my fortress of solitude. Driving down the street was like being in a ghost town, like my neighbors had all gathered together and decided to give me much-needed privacy.
The local grocery store was deserted, too, and the parking lot was empty. I locked the car and got a basket. Inside was a cornucopia of self-medication. I could practically hear a choir sing Hallelujah. I stopped at the cookies and crackers aisle on the way to the freezer section. With wild abandon, I tossed at least ten packages of trans fats and artificial colors into my cart.
Chips were on the end caps, and I tossed in a few bags of those, too, along with some salsa so that I would get my vegetables. Finally, I made it to the freezers where the ice cream was.
But something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.
“Hey, where’s the Rocky Road?” I called. The ice cream section was practically empty. There were only two, frost-covered gallons of mint chocolate chip, and a quart of soy banana ice cream. I didn’t like mint, and I didn’t like banana.
It was like the universe was against me, as if it was playing a sick and twisted game.
“Rocky Road?” I called again, holding the freezer door open.
