The Last Goodbye

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter like a dead thing. Elena stared at them, her reflection in the darkened window—hollow eyes, the way her body seemed to be eating itself from the inside out. She hadn't been taking her vitamins. She hadn't been doing much of anything except showing up to work and coming home to this apartment that suddenly felt too large, too quiet, too full of things that weren't hers.

"You need to eat something," her mother had said over the phone yesterday. "You're wasting away."

Elena opened the refrigerator. The wilted spinach stared back at her—her failed attempt at healthy living, at being the kind of woman who took care of herself. The kind of woman Richard had left her for, probably. The younger woman. The one with the career and the energy and the lack of dead dreams weighing her down.

She grabbed the spinach and threw it in the pan. Let it burn. Let everything burn.

Her father's old hat hung on the coat rack—a battered thing he'd worn through forty years of construction work, through her mother's cancer and Elena's wedding and now this. She remembered watching him leave for work each morning, the hat pulled low over his eyes, his shoulders already curved from the weight of carrying everyone else's problems but his own. She'd sworn she'd never end up like him. But here she was, thirty-eight and starting over, her own collection of regrets accumulating like interest on a loan she'd never agreed to take out.

"You've got to bear it," her father had told her once, when she'd cried about some boy who'd broken her heart at sixteen. "That's the thing about living. You just bear it."

She'd thought he meant endurance. Resilience. Now she wondered if he meant the animal—something primal and wild that lived inside you, something that could tear you apart or carry you through the winter, depending on how you fed it.

The spinach was burning now. She turned off the stove and stood there, smoke rising around her, and finally let herself scream. It wasn't a loud sound. It was small and pathetic and it was the most honest thing she'd done in months.

Tomorrow she would call a lawyer. Tomorrow she would buy new groceries. Tomorrow she would take her damn vitamins. But tonight, she stood in the kitchen of her half-empty apartment and burned dinner for the first time in her life, and it felt like a beginning.