The Dead Husband Project by Sarah Meehan Sirk

Author:Sarah Meehan Sirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

A ROAD IN THE RAIN

It was the crack of her voice in the message that made me go. Raspy, sleepless. Asking could I please get the rest of the things she’d left behind in her hurry to get out.

It had been raining for days. Damp jeans as I slid into my car, fog blanketing the windshield. Cold air blasted from the vents of the old Skyhawk. I breathed into my hands.

His kitchen smelled of coffee and cat food, Caterina von Kittenburg performing figure eights around my ankles while I leaned against the counter and tried to look at ease. I had never been there alone with him. It felt like a different room, a different place now that it was his not theirs, even though everything in it looked the same. He was different without her too. Quieter. Humourless.

He took a pull off a joint and asked if I wanted some. Silky coils of smoke rose to the ceiling above us. I felt him watching me as I inhaled. I passed it back without looking up from my hand. He bent down into the fridge to find cream for the coffee, his movements athletic as he shifted the ketchup, the Coke, the leftover Thai food containers.

“Fuck it,” he said, closing the door and opening the freezer above. He pulled out a frosty bottle of vodka, reached for two glasses on a high shelf.

He clinked his glass with mine. I drank fast, most of it at once, icy hotness lighting up the back of my throat. A few feet away he leaned against the oven, petting the cat’s arched back with his bare foot. I stirred the last of my drink with my finger, made a comment about the rain to crack the air.

It wasn’t all quiet. Cat von Kit’s motorized purr. The chug and gasp of the coffee maker. Jangly music from a TV commercial in the other room, gay and bouncing. I’d seen that ad a thousand times, a smiling, peaceful wife, mother, alone, flapping out a clean white sheet over a bed in a sunny white bedroom.

I was picturing her beatific face when he closed the gap between us. His arm against mine, his glass clacking down on the counter. The tips of his fingers, then, on the back of my hand, barely,

barely,

before he took my drink away.

Old Spice deodorant, booze on his breath. His nose, my nose, his lips, our mouths, his tongue, rigid and cold. The cool damp hand that had held his glass slipping up under the back of my sweater, pulling me into him. Skin to skin. Goosebumps.

—

Two nights earlier, Kendra had picked me up on her way to their apartment to get her things.

“It’s like a mutual letting-go,” she’d said of their breakup, jerking her head to get the long bangs out of her eyes.

Unravelling was more like it. Unhinging. I could think of other words, but I kept quiet and smoked the one cigarette she said I could have in her sister’s

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