Salt Water and Shadow

The movers had left three hours ago, taking everything except the folding chair I'd bought at a drugstore and the bottle of whiskey sweating onto the faux-marble countertop. Outside, palm fronds rattled against the sliding glass door like dry bones. This was Florida now. This was starting over at forty-two with a master's degree I'd stopped using years ago and a marriage that had ended not with fireworks but with a long, quiet erosion.

The dog — Buster, a golden retriever who'd slept at the foot of our bed for eight years — had stayed with David. He'd gotten the house, the car, the dog. I'd gotten the settlement and a one-way ticket to Sarasota. Fair? The lawyer had said so. But sitting here alone in this rental with thin walls and thinner patience, fairness felt like a currency that had lost its value years ago.

I poured another drink. My hands were shaking. I hadn't washed my hair in three days and I could feel the grease weighing it down, could smell David's shampoo that I'd stolen in a moment of petty retaliation, now just another reminder that everything I touched, I ruined. We'd promised each other forever, but forever had turned out to be exactly eleven years, seven months, and four days.

There was a knock at the door.

I considered ignoring it. I was halfway to being one of those women you read about in articles about loneliness and alcoholism, the ones who die surrounded by cats and unopened mail. But the knocking persisted, somehow polite and desperate at the same time.

I opened it to find a woman my age, maybe older, holding a casserole dish. Her hair was a stark unnatural blonde that I recognized immediately from the bathroom trash cans of my twenties.

"I'm Sharon," she said. "Next door. Saw the U-Haul earlier. Figured you might need something that wasn't takeout."

"I'm not staying," I heard myself say. "Just passing through."

"That's what they all say." She smiled, and I saw something in her face that I recognized: the particular exhaustion of women who'd borne too much and kept going anyway. "Then you'll need this more than the ones who plan to stay. Come sit on my patio. I have a zombie apocalypse theory I've been dying to test on someone new."

I looked at the whiskey on my counter, then at Sharon with her casserole and her unexpected invitation. Outside, the palms kept swaying in the Gulf breeze, indifferent to the small tragedies and unexpected kindnesses that made up a life.

"Okay," I said. "Give me ten minutes to wash my face."

She nodded like she'd expected nothing less.

Buster would be curled on David's couch by now. The house I'd loved was gone. But Sharon had brought lasagna, and the sun was setting over the water, and somewhere in the space between loss and whatever came next, I found myself not ready to die just yet.