Page 12 of It Takes a Thief

I used to get onto Facebook and PM people, pretend I had friends. That made me feel better for a couple of years after Fidelia was born. But I guess my depression became too powerful for something that feeble to lift me up. Nowadays I journaled.

I got into Word and just added to whatever drunken rant I’d started the night before. It was always about Ford, how he’d let his jobs overtake him. I was just a trophy wife with trophy kids to be trotted out at every Policeman’s Ball or Humane Society event. What if I just don’t show up? I typed that quite often. What if I just didn’t come to his Public Officials Night dinner? His retirement party dinner? His Elks Club crab feed?

Ultimately, though, I always showed up, obedient. Hell, it was the only time I ever saw Ford. We slept in the same bed in theory, but I was usually passed out by the time he crept ever so silently in after showering down the hall. I always told him to wake me and he never did. He said I was a nurse and needed my sleep and he didn’t want to detract from that.

Some unfortunate nights, I was still wide awake drunk when he came in. Sometimes I could rein it in, to keep my ire under wraps. Then we’d have sex, just bang it out, like we were taking out our anger at each other. Other nights, I yelled at him. Same thing over and over. Where were you, you know I can’t tell you, love the man, love the club. Why didn’t you just text, I can’t stop in the middle of what I’m doing and text, oh so you’re afraid it might look bad in front of your badass friends? No, it’s not that Maddy, you know I’m negotiating a very dicey deal, a very touchy deal and I can’t exactly stop and go hey, I’ve got to text my wife. Maybe you should! Maybe it’d make you look more like an honorable family man instead of a scuzzbag two-bit hustler!

That was the point we’d reached. The same endless argument over and over in a tape loop. What was that damned saying? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.” That’s what I’d been doing.

No more.

Tonight, I typed:

I feel the winds of change coming on. I’ve long known if I can’t change Ford, I can always change myself. Like when I started going to Pocono by myself, going to gem and mineral shows alone, doing hiplet, getting out in the world after having Fidelia and building this house. Not that Ford ever seemed to notice me gone. But at least I wasn’t sitting around here pining or stewing, waiting to burst into a flaming ball of bitch the second he crept in the door.

Now it’s more of an existential meltdown I’m having. Winston thinks it’s job burnout but it’s more than that. That guy coding the other day really started it all off, but this is not something I can easily recover from. The winds of change are in my soul. Talking to Ogden solidified my vision, let me know what I should do. I should go find Galileo.

I hadn’t been able to get ahold of Ogden’s brother Galileo. Apparently herding sheep in the Canyon de Chelly wasn’t conducive to good cell service. So I was just going to drive down there. Yup. I was going alone into the Rez to find a sheepherder who more than likely was riddled with cancer, as Ogden was before being declared cancer-free. His new lover/Dom Haven had paid for his top of the line treatment. I doubted Galileo had anyone like that to pay for him.

More than the cancer alone, I wanted to help the downtrodden. Call me a bleeding heart, but I wanted to help the indigent, not these belly-poppers who wouldn’t have had a heart attack if their arteries weren’t clogged from decades of fast and shitty food. Working at the P&E hospital in cardio, I’d seen so many people who had brought it on themselves. But what had the Navajo—the Diné, I was supposed to call them—and Hopi done to deserve this shit?

I gasped and jumped when I heard Ford’s pipes rumbling up our access road. Automatically, I looked at the computer’s clock. Not even midnight! What the hell? I did a quick status check. Not too drunk yet. Should’ve taken more Tango & Cash to fall into an embracing stupor, but oh well. I had told my boss I was off on a sabbatical and there wasn’t much he could do about it, because “sabbatical” meant the person was doing more worthwhile work than yours.

We lived alone on Mescal Mountain. Ford had bought twenty acres of sandstone when all the Bare Bones businesses had first started coming together. We’d had various people living with us over the years—Turk Blackburn, June, homeless sweetbutts—but now it was just us. Six bedrooms had seemed like a lot at first, but with Fidelia and Niko occupying their own bedrooms and Ford and I having our own offices, it wasn’t.

Standing at my office door, I listened. Yup. He tossed his keys on the little table by the back door. Opened the fridge to grab a beer. Messed around eating something, probably cheese and crackers. He had the worst diet. He stayed buff lately with Krav Maga, while I had been trying out hiplet, a fusion of ballet and hip hop, to lose weight. That, and not eating anything at all, had helped me lose six pounds. I wasn’t going to appear naked in front of Ford until I’d lost thirty. These days you had to practically starve yourself to lose any weight.

Then he came upstairs. He went into the guest bathroom and took a pill from the med cabinet. I’d checked—it was Adderall. Did he plan on staying up, maybe going out again? He was being as secretive with his drugs as I was, so I couldn’t say anything to him. My fentanyl was obtained on the street, I hate to say. It’s not as bad as it sounds. My guy was a friend of Knoxie, who knew him from the world of The Bare Bones’ Triple Exposure live sex streaming studio. They used it a lot in there to get people to relax.

And relax me it did! By the time Ford came out of the bathroom, naked except for a towel wrapped around his trim waist, I wasn’t even that mad anymore. He was toweling off his luscious, satiny black hair, and he headed toward his office.

I had no choice. I had to say something, or he’d be sucked up into that other vortex of his office in a few seconds. Good luck getting his attention when he was in there.

“Ford.”

He stopped, did a half-turn, as if to say, “What?” But he didn’t. Just looked at me, gauging. Maybe gauging my level of drunkenness.

“We need to talk.” Oh boy! If those weren’t the most hated words of all time!

He stopped rubbing his head at least. “Oh, yeah? About what?”

“Well, why don’t we go into my office?”

We rarely went into my office. Why would we? Sometimes, if I was downstairs cooking or taking care of the kids, Ford would call me on the cell from his office. To ask, like, when dinner was ready, or to remind me to take Fidelia to so-and-so’s baby birthday party. He knew about that, because he had a lot of friends. A lot of friends with kids.

I took a few gulps of my gin and tonic. Why not? If I hid drinking from Ford, I’d be a closet drinker, wouldn’t I? And what was there to hide? He was the one driving me to drink.

I was out with it. “I’m taking a sabbatical.”

“A—what?” He chuckled nervously. “Isn’t that, like, when you take a vacation from work?”

“Sort of. It’s a work vacation. I’m going to the Four Corners Rez to work.”

His beautiful, composed face registered no emotion. “Oh yeah? Where you working?”

Since I didn’t have a definite job offer really, not exactly, or at all, I just said, “The clinic. The one in Beirut.”

“Oh. Yeah. Anson would know a lot about that.”