The House I Emptied In A Day

Nine years of carrying

Here is what the next nine years looked like, and I am going to be honest about it even though it shames me.

I worked. Travis chased.

I took every shift they would give me. Doubles. Weekends. Holidays. I drove out to the far farms in the ice to check on shut-ins because the extra mileage money was real. I paid the property taxes on the house. I paid the electric and the propane and the water. I paid for the internet he needed to “build his brand.” I bought the strings and the new capo and the microphone that cost more than my winter coat. When he decided he needed a better guitar to be taken seriously, I cosigned a loan at the credit union and I made the payments when he forgot, which was every month.

I paid for the trips. That is the part that still burns. When Travis heard about an open mic in Nashville or a “showcase” that somebody’s cousin was putting on, he would go, and I would hand him gas money and hotel money and here-is-a-little-extra money, and I would work a double the day he left so I would not sit home in the quiet feeling how empty the house was without him. He would come back with stories about the man he almost met and the deal that almost happened and the girl at the merch table who told him he had “it,” and I would nod and smile and warm up his supper.

He was not lazy about the music. I will give him that. He practiced. He wrote. He played the bars in three counties, the VFW dances, the county fair, the fill-in gigs when a bigger act canceled. But the money from all that never once covered what it cost. It went for beer with the band and new equipment and merch he printed up that sat in boxes in my spare room. Not one dollar of it ever landed in the account that paid our bills. Not one.

And the marriage he promised never came.

Year three, I brought it up gentle, and he said he could not ask me to marry a man who had not made it yet, that he had too much pride for that, that he would put a ring on my hand the day he could do it right. I thought that was noble. Year five, I brought it up again, less gentle, and he got quiet and hurt and made me feel like I had kicked him while he was down, and I spent the next two weeks apologizing for having needs. Year seven, my cousin got married in the Methodist church and I cried in the parking lot afterward and Travis told me I was letting other people’s timelines poison what we had.

By year nine I had stopped asking. I told myself the paper did not matter. I told myself we were as good as married. I told myself a lot of things, standing at that sink, rinsing his plates, night after night after night.