minor key
when you're not sure what you deserve
[hi, it’s throwback sunday. this fiction was originally published at medium in 2017 or so]
She stands on the front porch — not really a porch, just a slab of crumbling cement & the weathered deck chair her father dropped onto nightly after dinner — and watches Jack go. She stares at his back, notes how he hunches over a bit, squeezing his 6'3" frame into sort of a question mark and she almost calls out his name, calls him to come back, but she whispers it instead, maybe so she can tell herself she tried, but not really.
It wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t about him. And she knows how that sounds — “it’s not you, it’s me” — such a cop-out, but that’s what happened. She happened. She changed. She doesn’t want to change, but something grips her brain; it’s like taking a peppy rock song and playing it in minor key, where everything suddenly feels raw and open.
She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like what she feels when she’s with Jack; hell, she doesn’t like what she’s feeling when she’s alone, either, and that somehow makes it worse.
Marriage: they said they’d talk about it as soon as he got a Good Job, and now that he’s been at the Good Job for a year and things were better than he’d ever hoped they would be, he wanted to discuss it again. For as long as she’d known him she knew Jack liked to push his ideas forward, to make people see things his way, to come around to his thinking. That trait made him good at his job, but it sucked the life from their relationship.
He wanted to take care of her, to wrap her in optimism and give her everything he said she deserved. He promised to take care of her parents, to buy them a new house, a house with a real wooden porch. And oh, how she would love that: never have to worry about money again, to drive a new car, to travel, to be free to do whatever. But she fell out of love with Jack — and to stay with him for the money and the promise of material happiness seems dishonest, and she prides herself on her honesty.
So here’s Jack, walking toward his Mustang, bending into the car, and all she can think of is him folding, and Jack never folded. She waits for the gravelly sound of the motor kicking in — the car is so loud — but there’s nothing. Jack just sits in the car, hands gripping the wheel, not moving, not folding, not yet. And there she stands on the porch, staring into the car, not moving, not folding either.
She whispers his name again and she swears he hears it, turns his head slightly toward her. Does she still love him? Does she? She can’t tell anymore if she loves him or loves the idea of spending the rest of her life with someone taking care of her. Before the Good Job, she wondered if she loved him enough to spend forever with him. But with her brain acting all funny — again she thought about a song being played deliberately off key — she wasn’t sure she could trust her heart to act in harmony with her brain and give her an honest answer.
And when he started making good money, it made everything worse. He wanted to move everything along. He talked about “forever.” She felt suffocated, dreaming nightly of being buried alive in a mound of hundred dollar bills; and in those dreams, rather than reach for Jack’s hand when he tried to save her, she dreams of letting go.
He still hasn’t started the car; she still hasn’t left the porch. A stand-off: the first one to go will be the one who gave in, forever owning the breakup, the blame.
Maybe Jack should get out of the car and run back to her, beg her to marry him. Maybe she should walk toward him, call his name out loud, say it’s all a mistake and she loves him, needs him. Maybe they’ll stay like this forever, neither one of them knowing what they really want, what they really need. As the sun sets, as the heat of the day dissipates, so does her resolve. Her father will be coming out the door soon to sit in his chair on the cement porch and watch the fireflies. He’ll ask what’s going on. She’ll tell him. Time to stop thinking about that new wooden porch, she’d say. He’d shrug.
And then, just as the last sliver of light disappears: “Jack.” As she says his name out loud, the engine of the Mustang roars, drowns her out. “JACK,” she says louder, puts up her hands, waves at him. But he’s staring straight ahead, and his radio is on, that song he likes about staying eighteen forever. She takes a few steps toward the car, panicking a bit that he’ll leave and never know she called his name, wanted him to come back and talk, but also panicking that he’ll turn off the car and come running to her. When he puts the car in gear something explodes in her and she runs, covering the walkway in three leaps. She’s at the car, at the passenger window, when he pulls away.
She walks into the street, her heart doing double time, stares after the Mustang until it makes a sharp turn three blocks down. She thinks about texting him, about getting in her own run-down car and chasing him down. She thinks about a lot of things, of missed opportunities and honesty and being buried in hundred dollar bills. Her body feels prickly, her breath is short, and a vaguely familiar panic bursts forth and envelops her. She sits on the curb and thinks, thinks, thinks, how Jack is at least a mile away by now and it might as well be a hundred miles. She tells herself to breathe. In with the good, out with the bad. Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep breathing.
It’s dark now, the fireflies are out. Her father comes out and sits down on the plastic chair on the cement slab of a porch. She thinks about how he’ll always sit there now, and maybe it was just meant to be that way. She tells him about the breakup and he shrugs. They sit there, crickets and katydids filling their silence. Finally her father asks if she’s ok. She’s not.
Come later she’ll dream about hundred dollar bills, about happy songs played in minor key.