A Meaning For Wife by Mark Yakich

Author:Mark Yakich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2011-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Maybe there’s something you could use as disguise—a hat or sunglasses in your parents’ car. They’ve always got enough junk in their car that a person could live out of it for a couple of weeks.

You pass by the same car you noticed on the way in—with the same guys listening to football on the radio. It’s obvious to you now that these are husbands of classmates and that they’ve never gone into the building. Maybe it’s better to stay outside.

“Who’s playing?” you ask.

“USC and Ohio State,” says a guy wearing a pink button-up.

“What’s the score?”

“We’re killing them, 28-3.”

“We?”

“USC.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Pardon me?”

“You must be from So Cal.”

“Yeah,” pink button-up says. He gestures toward the building. “Your wife in there too?”

“No.”

“So you’re a ‘member of the class’,” he says, making scare quotes.

“Right.”

There’s a blast from the radio.

“Aw, shit,” says a guy in a suit and a Yankees baseball cap. “We just fucking fumbled.”

Pink button-up turns back toward you. “How’s it going in there?”

“Hard to tell.”

The suit and baseball cap moans louder, sets down his beer, and turns toward you. “I’m Charles. Didn’t catch your name?”

“Jockitch.”

“What’s that?”

“Sorry, that’s what they called me in high school.”

“So this is your school.”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Okay.”

Pink button-up offers you a beer from a cooler.

“That’s all right, I have to get going.”

“Take one to go.”

“Thanks.”

You’re ten yards away when you realize it’s a light beer. Too many bubbles and no taste. For no good reason, you feel like cocking back your arm, yelling Go Ohio State!, and throwing the can at them. But getting pummeled in the parking lot of your old high school isn’t what you’ve come here for either. You set the beer down gently behind the tire of a car, the way you used to put ketchup packets behind the tire of the school bus; you knew you wouldn’t get to witness the mini explosion, but the idea of it excited you.

In the car you feel like a cliché. You’d like to stare at rain hitting the windshield, pretend you’re crying in the shower. Unfortunately it’s not raining.

Under the front seats, you find the dried, blackened peels of two bananas, a few mugs with old tea bags, an ice scraper, wrapping paper, three gloves, a ski mask, and assorted balled-up dirty tissues which probably contain peach pits and apple cores. You’re not even going to look in the trunk. Maybe you could walk back inside wearing the ski mask?

You don’t want to walk by the football fans again, so you start walking the long way around the building. Tennis courts, soccer field, football field surrounded by the track. Except for the houses that have popped up where corn and soybeans used to be around the school, everything is where you left it twenty years ago.

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