She always wondered if he hadn’t left her sooner because he was working for her father. When they eventually split up, it destroyed his entire life, top to bottom, and somehow he blamed her for the fact that he had lost everything. Their relationship, his home, the children, and also a steady paycheck. Clay had been a salesman in her father’s furniture showroom for almost four years, the entire length of their marriage.
Cecilia’s father had taken great pleasure in bringing down the ax: he’d let Clay sweat for an entire week, until he thought it might not happen and started to relax, and then called Clay into his office and spent an hour relentlessly chopping him to bits. He practically smacked his lips as he described it to Cecilia later, taking his time recalling the details, relishing every second of the way he had tortured his soon-to-be ex-son-in-law.
Cecilia was no less vindictive. She took Clay to court and fought for full custody of the kids, accusing him of things he hadn’t done, dragging him through the dirt. He had virtually no friends by the time she was done, the hit job had been so thorough, and the stories made their way back to the woman he’d been cheating with, a waitress at a bar near the furniture store, and he couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid as to think he might not get caught. The girl hadn’t known he was married, or that he had kids, in part because he didn’t wear a wedding ring. He’d tried, at first, but when he was selling bedroom sets to lonely middle-aged women, it helped to flirt with them a little—not too much, but enough to keep things interesting—and a ring ruined the fantasy.
It wasn’t the first time he’d slept with someone else, or the first time Cecilia had grown suspicious, but it was the first time there had been incontrovertible proof, right there in the form of a used condom Cecilia found lurking under a nest of crumpled tissues in their bathroom trash, and the first time he hadn’t been able to sweet-talk his way out of things. Earlier that afternoon, she’d gone to the movies with a friend and left him home alone with the children. He hadn’t wanted them to walk in, so he’d given them each a dose of Benadryl before he put them down for a nap.
Clay had had the usual stints on the living room couch—the cold shoulders, the dinner plates smacked down on the table in front of him, the screaming and broken glass and slammed doors—but this time was different. Fortunately, he’d squirreled some money away for a rainy day. There had always been a part of him that had known it would end, if not like this, then in some other equally brutal fashion. He had a habit of exploding his life, and it would have been nice to grow out of it, but he seemed not to have learned his lesson. That would come later. He was still only twenty-five, with good looks and a full head of hair and charisma that just poured out of him—it was a gift, is what it was—and it worked on women and children and pets and almost everyone, really, but he’d shit the bed with his wife and her family, this time for good. They’d forgiven him numerous times in the past: for seducing her when she was still a high school student, getting her pregnant, trying to get out of marrying her. For being a bad husband, a mediocre father. At least he had tried, he wanted to tell them, but they were miles beyond caring. At least he hadn’t knocked her around. This was a pathetic consolation, even to himself.
He slept on a work friend’s couch for a month, got another job, moved into a studio apartment where he could sit at the table eating crackers and peanut butter while he propped his feet up on the bed. He’d ruined his life. He’d ruined all their lives. His own father had stuck around, but he didn’t even bother to hide his affairs, and he did hit their mother—not often, but enough. Clay had wanted to be a different kind of man, but in the end, he was no better than they were, his father and his father-in-law, who hated him so deeply that he gave him a job where he could always keep an eye on him and paid him a salary too high for the work, so he’d never be able to leave.
In their old house, Cecilia stalked around, ranting about Clay until she was hoarse. She put on a cream-colored bodysuit and dark leather boots that folded down slightly at the knee. She left the children with a babysitter and went to the steak place on ladies’ night and got men to buy her drinks, and before you knew it she’d found the kids a stepdaddy. He was also too young but he was so good-looking, and though she’d brought other guys back before him, this was the first one who had stayed.
The kids didn’t like him, but they didn’t like anyone anymore. The older one had taken a knife to the walls of his room, jabbing it all over the place, and the girl still sucked her thumb and slept with the light on.
It could have been worse, of course. It can always be worse.
Cecilia didn’t marry the new guy after all, just let him spend the night every so often, so that the kids would find him sitting at the kitchen table in the morning, eating their cereal. When Clay sent the child support checks he addressed them to Cilia or Cecum, sometimes going so far with the dictionary that the bank wouldn’t cash them and she had to call him up again, enraged, to get him to make out another check. She retaliated by canceling his visits with the kids at the last second, then letting them sit for hours chewing their nails as they waited for him to show up, and consoling them with candy and fried chicken when he didn’t.
Her new guy ran off with another girl, someone younger and prettier who didn’t already have two little kids and a chip on her shoulder, and Cecilia loved the children, obviously she did, but she couldn’t help thinking about how much easier life would have been if she didn’t have them—if she’d planned ahead, or made better decisions.
But then Clay got someone else pregnant, and had another baby girl with her. They moved in together and he took the kids over there on the weekends he had them. He’d worked his way up a little, was a manager, and when he picked the kids up Cecilia still refused to answer the door or speak to him, but if she saw him from the window, he looked different. A little older, calmer, without the jittery energy he’d had when they were younger and liked to pop pills and play around after the kids went to sleep. Now he held their daughter’s hand as they crossed the street.
Cecilia’s father had a heart attack and died, and it turned out that he hadn’t had much in the bank, in the end. Everything he did have was tied up in investments. He’d been sending her a check every month since the divorce, so she had to sell the house and move into an apartment. The kids were sharing a room, a bathroom. She’d gotten into real estate, but her sales were sporadic; it seemed that she didn’t have a knack for it. The exam had been the easy part, as it turned out. She knew how to read people, but maybe too well. She often thought a husband was hesitant because he had someone else on the side, and surely the wife could do better than this dump, this bozo. And then Cecilia couldn’t help telling them what she was really thinking. She still hadn’t landed a listing in any neighborhood where she would have wanted to live.
There would be times, later, when she’d gotten her feet under her and learned a little better how to find the right match and turn on the charm and make a sale, but that hadn’t happened yet. She was still packing the kids bologna sandwiches or whatever she could find on sale. Now it was winter, and the kids were tired and bored, and they were all cooped up in their little apartment with nothing to do. She fixed them hot chocolate from the store-brand packets and made them go to bed early. It had been dark since 4 p.m. because of the weather. It seemed like the hours could go on forever.
Overnight, it snowed and snowed, and in the morning, the street outside the window was blanketed in snow. The plows drove up and down the street, the lights blinking under the spinning snowflakes, until the soft mounds that had concealed the parked cars were buried under a heavy layer of packed snow and dirty slush.
The boy woke up with a fever, his teeth rattling even when he was wrapped in several blankets, and the doctor told Cecilia to bring him in, but she couldn’t get to the car, which was entombed by this point. Finally, she couldn’t think of anything else to do, and she called Clay and asked him for help. He drove slowly through the snow with his headlights and windshield wipers on, and he carried their son in his arms down to the car, and they all went together—bundled in their coats, the four of them, as if they were still a family—and when they got back to the apartment, after they’d put the little boy to bed, Clay found Cecilia’s car and painstakingly dug it out with a shovel he’d brought over from his garage, and she watched him from the window as he did this, and it was a start.
Leah Browning is the author of Souvenirs from Another Life, a story collection published by Quiet Ocean Studio & Press, and Two Good Ears and Loud Snow, a pair of flash fiction mini-books published by Silent Station Press. She is also the author of a collection of poetry, three short nonfiction books, and six chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Her stories have appeared in Contrary Magazine, Vestal Review, Harpur Palate, Waxwing, Passages North, Four Way Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Flock, Necessary Fiction, Terrain.org, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Superstition Review, The Citron Review, The Petigru Review, Gone Lawn, New Pop Lit, Funicular Magazine, Two Hawks Quarterly, Newfound, and elsewhere. Browning’s second full-length story collection, Before and After a Slice of Cake, is forthcoming. In addition to writing, she has served as editor of the Apple Valley Review since 2005.