The Ram Keys I Lifted Off the Hook

He Told Me to Carpool

“So how do I get to work,” I said.

We were inside by then, the heat ticking in the vents, him at the counter and me not sitting down. The big new Ram sat out the window where my Equinox used to sit, and I could not stop looking at it.

“You can carpool,” he said, like he had thought this through, like it was the natural answer to a solved problem. “Half the plant comes in from this side of town. Somebody runs a carpool out of the Casey’s. Fifteen bucks a week in gas. I already asked around.”

He had already asked around. That was the part that sat down in my chest and stayed.

He had given away my paid-off car, signed the title, and arranged my ride to work, all before he said one word to me. He had planned the whole thing like you plan a surprise party, and I was supposed to be grateful for the thoughtfulness of it.

“And you keep the truck,” I said.

“It’s a truck, Lori. I haul for the plant. I need it.” He had never once hauled anything for the plant in that Ram. He drove a forklift on the shipping dock.

The Ram pulled a boat we did not own and a trailer we borrowed twice a year. It was fifty-nine thousand dollars, financed sixty-six months, a payment that landed on the fifth of every month bigger than our first mortgage used to be.

He had wanted it since spring and he had talked himself into it all summer. Now it sat out there gleaming while my clean-and-clear Equinox ran his mother to the Kroger.

I did not scream. I want you to understand that I know how to scream. I had screamed about the credit card and the time he went in on a side-by-side with his cousin and the Christmas he forgot to tell me his whole family was coming.

Screaming at Greg was like throwing a cup of water at a windshield. It splashed and it ran off and the glass was exactly as it had been.

So I did not scream. I said, “Okay.” And I watched his shoulders come down an inch because he thought that okay meant okay.

It did not mean okay. It meant I had stopped talking to him and started talking to myself.

I went to bed and I lay there in the dark and I thought about the hook by the back door, and the second one down, and the fat black fob that hung on it.