The Enchiladas I Took to His Ex

Shane

I want to be fair to my husband. He is not a bad man. I would not have married a bad man.

When he finally talked that night, it came out in pieces, the way men like Shane talk when they are not used to it. I made a pot of decaf. He drank two cups and did not seem to taste either one.

Last April, the plant had cut his line back from fifty hours a week to thirty-two. He had not told me.

He had kept leaving at the same time and coming home at the same time, and on the days he was not on the schedule, he sat in his truck in the Walmart lot in Worthington or drove out to the public hunting land by Lake Ocheda and sat there instead.

“I didn’t want you to know,” he said. “You’d already carried the mortgage when I was laid off at the other place. I wasn’t going to do that to you again.”

The money from thirty-two hours covered his share of the mortgage and the truck payment and not much else. Something had to give. He picked Crystal.

“I told myself it was just for a couple months,” he said. “I told myself the hours would come back, and I’d catch it up before anybody even noticed. Crystal’s tough. I figured she’d manage.”

“She did manage,” I said. “Barely.”

“I know that now,” he said quietly, and I said, “And the post office box,” and he winced like I had touched a bruise.

He nodded miserably. “The county letters. I read the first one. I couldn’t read the rest. I just put them in the glove box.”

“How many?”

“Five. Six.”

I thought about him sitting in a Walmart parking lot with six unopened letters in his glove box and his hours cut and his pride sitting on his chest like a sack of feed, and I felt sorry for him, and I was still angry, and both of those were true at the same time.

“And grateful,” I said. “You said I should be grateful.”

He rubbed his face. “That was the worst thing I ever said to you.”

“Why did you say it?”

“Because if I made it sound like a good thing, I didn’t have to say I’d been lying to you for a year.” He looked up at me. “It was pride. That’s all it was. It was pride talking, and it came out mean.”

I did not say it was okay. It was not okay. But I did reach across the table and put my hand over his, and we sat there like that while the furnace ran.