I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

15. Wyoming Is a Gun in His Waistband

WINTRIC HOPES IT’S the girl who arrives. Let it be the girl. Let her walk the dirt road. Put her in pink pants. Put her arms up in a V. Put her in skin. Give her bones and blood. Give him her chest to target. Let him see the line of the bullet all the way through her heart. Scope that chest. Breathe that power. Squeeze that trigger.

The tomatoes are wrapped in a plastic bag on the seat next to him. He feels the onset signs — the skull-pounding pressure and muscle lock — here in the parking lot of the Holiday market. The anxiety and warped recall are near. He’s long forgotten the moment, years ago, when the memories joined the physical pain. He reaches beneath his seat and uncaps the plastic bottle. Although he has two pills in his system, he slips four more into his mouth. They’ll take a while to work, so he waits.

He doesn’t have a choice of scene, but the girl he’ll be able to process. He can tap into the decades-old mayhem and the I-die-or-you-die judgment. He can access his flurry of decisions — to squeeze the trigger, to raise his rifle, to don his uniform, to sign up for the army, to leave his hometown. Let it be the girl. Even though she’ll puncture the peace of a Wednesday afternoon, he can deal. With the drugs he can deal with a silver vest and pink pants. He was a boy then. He’s convinced himself of that. It should matter that he was there to deliver justice for attacks on American soil, but outside of a few crazies, all he saw were people searching for food. His mind grinds as it has for years: What do you call someone who kills? Murderer. What do you call someone who kills a girl? Hero. Let it be the girl. He attempts to guide his horror there, but he can’t conjure the dirt road, Big Dax and Torres at his side.

No matter what comes it won’t be easy, but the girl is easier than the darkness, the smell of burning trash, a push in the back, ripping flesh. Wintric won’t close his eyes. Darkness takes him there. He attempts to focus, to stay here in the parking lot, in Chester. The tomatoes are next to him. He’ll wash them when he gets home. The steering wheel is in front of him. He grabs it. A bread truck pulls to the back of the store for delivery. Kristen is in the store working. It’s almost time for her to come home.

Wintric sits in the tenth and highest row of Chester High School’s bleachers and wonders if Daniel will throw the next pitch at the batter’s head. Since the time Daniel started Little League, Wintric has preached that he should throw a couple wild pitches each game to keep the batters nervous about where the next one might end up. This method worked well during Little League, but Daniel, now seventeen years old, with a fastball that reaches the low eighties, has the control to aim his “wild” pitches, and when appropriately pissed off, as he is today, down 4–0, the heaters come in high and tight. Just last week Daniel cracked a kid’s helmet.

The batter digs his back foot in, and Wintric senses the energy in the afternoon, unsure what to do with it. Back from rehab and clean for a month, he rubs his hands together, still acclimating to the sharp sensation of unmedicated touch. The feeling keeps him busy, his hands moving from his pockets to his hips to the back of his neck, from sitting to standing to sitting to walking, nothing ever comfortable or calm enough. The acupuncture, meditation, and aspirin do nothing for his bad back and right hip, although they have helped decrease the frequency of his devastating memories. Most of his waking hours his bones feel misplaced and heavy. The counselors told him that this was what recovery felt like, that the promise of sobriety isn’t about comfort, it’s about being present, facing the moment aware, but Wintric is convinced that awareness isn’t worth the price of pain, at least not yet. It’s not like the drugs make him blind. He could be here, at this exact spot, present but pain-free, and still watch Daniel drill this kid with the next pitch.

Wintric stands and pockets his hands.

In front of him, the outfielders shade in a bit too much for the three-hole batter from Greenville. The infield grass is mostly yellow, and along the outfield fence thin pockets of April snow melt. Several of the town’s homes still have their fireplaces going, and the smell of burning wood mixes with early pollen.

Daniel adjusts his cap low, then spits. A few inches short of six feet and thick across the shoulders, he readies himself on the mound and peers in at the catcher. His windup is slow and compact, his hands waist-high as he starts his move, rocking back, then upright, left leg rising, right arm reaching back low, then whipping forward, the baseball delivered hard and cutting inside, the batter turning just in time, turning his back toward the sting, the flat smack of a fastball to the kidneys and the collective groan of the thirty people in the stands. The batter feels the pain, arches his back, and his hands go there as he falls to his knees.

Wintric studies Daniel, who has taken two steps toward the plate. Straight-faced, he runs his pitching hand along the side of his thigh and studies the batter, who fights to hide his distress. Wintric searches for the slightest smile on his son, a glance his way in the bleachers, but Daniel stands still, now chatting with the catcher while the batter rises slowly and twists and trots down to first.

Wintric wasn’t surprised when it was Daniel who picked him up from rehab down in Sacramento. Kristen’s threat to leave had forced him to go in the first place, and the threat still retains its tangible power as he curses the aspirin bottle three times a day. She hasn’t asked a single question about his time with the counselors or what he confessed or learned in the small group sessions. All she cares about is that he’s clean, that he’ll stay clean. On the way home from Sacramento, Daniel was exuberant, and he flung questions at Wintric one after another: How was the food? Not bad, actually. What was the worst you saw? Meth — never screw with meth, son. Did you catch any Giants games on TV? God, no power in the middle of the lineup. How do you feel? Hollowed-out but happy. We going deer hunting this fall? We’ll put in for out-of-state, get us a big one.

Daniel drove and they rode 99 up through Yuba City, Gridley, and Chico, through the miles of almond orchards, before they turned northeast on 32 into the mountains. Wintric listened to his son go on and on, asking questions, then shooting off on tangents about his ex-girlfriend, about an English teacher who had it in for him, about maybe becoming a firefighter after finishing school. Wintric realized that he knew so little about his son and finally wanted to know everything. He understood then that his son had always worshipped him, and still did at seventeen, that there was no justice or redemption in that. His son didn’t know him at all — he loved the idea of a dad and not the father that Wintric had been. It was pathetic and beautiful and easy. Sitting next to Daniel, Wintric was suddenly grateful and scared that Daniel would forgive all of his future sins.

In the stands Wintric rubs his hands together and hears a logging truck downshift beyond the outfield fence. His fingertips and scalp ache, and he shakes his head at the thought of forty tiny needles pressed into the skin along his vertebrae. Will he always yearn for the drugs? Even now, watching his boy play ball? If he could only leave his body somewhere else for a couple hours and come back to this place. He fights the thought, but he knows he can get the pills a quarter mile from the bleachers where he stands. He remembers the address. He saw the guy at the gas station two days ago. He has enough money in his wallet.

From two rows down, someone from Greenville says, “The kid meant to do it. Look at him. Didn’t even say sorry.”

The mother of Chester High’s third baseman says, “Come on. It slipped,” and glances back at Wintric and grins.

One of the counselors had bright orange hair, which annoyed Wintric, but the guy, Jeff, had been to the far bottom of heroin and back up and he talked straight and cussed, so Wintric listened. Jeff took Wintric on walks down to the American River, where they’d watch the whitewater rafters and where Jeff repeated his sign-up message: “Pain isn’t a fucking choice. Neither are the flashbacks. They’re there. Comfort, happiness, all that weird shit we say when we mean ‘not in pain,’ that’s a choice. A hard choice. If you ever stop choosing it, you’re fucked. Optimists are deluded but sign up. You want in that club. Whatever it takes, sign up.”

To Wintric, Jeff’s speeches came off as too simplistic, even juvenile, but the guy was adamant and would occasionally sneak him a Lucky Strike. Wintric didn’t notice anyone else getting the American River treatment, and Jeff kept reminding Wintric that he was one of the blessed ones: a family waiting for him, not suicidal, no heroin or meth.

On the mound, Daniel wears his baseball hat low on his forehead as Wintric used to do when he was a boy playing Little League centerfield. Daniel licks his fingers and twists the baseball in his hand. The crowd has settled down, but everyone is anxious for this first pitch after the wild pitch. Was it really an accident? Has the pitcher lost control?

When Wintric returned home, Kristen told him to come to her at the supermarket and interrupt her whenever he needed help, but he holds on to the beginning of newfound pride in not having gone to her once since his return to town. If Kristen ever does ask him, he’ll tell her why he’ll never relapse. He’ll tell her about his small group sessions, how he saw the whole spectrum from lifelong fucked-up meth heads to three-drinks-a-night country-club housewives. It didn’t matter whose turn it was to speak; the stories all ended up at the same fear — being alone.

When he thought about what he would say to the group when it was his turn to speak, he expected to bring up the war, how much of the war he wasn’t sure, but as he sat silently in the folding chair day after day, it dawned on him that his time in Afghanistan was nearly twenty years past. Something about the number twenty jarred him: twenty years of waking up, living, sleeping, repeat and repeat. Maybe it wasn’t the war or the girl he shot or the rape or the foot, or maybe it was that, but twenty years of other shit as well. Maybe it wasn’t cumulative, not twenty years, not even one year, perhaps just twenty-four-hour segments as they passed. Maybe an hour or a second or how he felt right then. How was he supposed to know? Where’s the turn? The bottom? The point where things start getting better and always get better? Twenty years later and what’s new? The hundreds of roofs he’s nailed down, shingle by shingle. A son that’s not like him in any meaningful way. A wife he loves threatening to leave him — he was at the sink washing tomatoes when she grabbed his arm, gently at first, then harder. Still in her Holiday market clothes; her mascara had run, and she wouldn’t let him look away as she spoke.

The next batter, the cleanup hitter, a muscled boy who hit a double his first time up, walks to the plate and pauses outside the batter’s box and studies the third-base coach. If Daniel hits this kid, there will probably be a fight.

When Wintric rose to speak to the small group in rehab, he didn’t know what he’d say, but Jeff was there, and that helped somehow, and he heard himself confess: holding his son for the first time after his birth while high on Percocet. Loading up on Oxy before going to a party for Kristen when she was promoted to general manager at the Holiday market. Dropping pills before sex with her. These were moments when elation should have been enough, and may have been, if he’d just let them happen. As bad, he didn’t know what hurting meant anymore. Sure, his back and hip had been giving him problems for years, even after the foot stopped, and sure, the flashes of war hit hard and unpredictably, but what was legitimate pain versus haunting versus routine? And he loves his wife more than anything, more than drugs or pain, and maybe it was only now that he understood that they were all linked, that he should have understood long ago. And he knew he was talking a good game in Sacramento, hours from home, coming clean, promising the world, but he feared what all of them feared. He now knew that the pain of the war, of the past two decades, of yesterday, would never recede all the way; the hurt simply finds new things to infect, things he has always loved — Christmas lights, interstate signs, hunting campfires, baseball games — but happiness and release also live somewhere among these things. He knew it was just a matter of finding them.

Wintric moves down the bleachers over near the Chester dugout and fingers, then squeezes, the chain-linked backstop. The outfielders have moved back, and the bruised boy at first takes two steps off the bag and waits.

Someone yells, “Throw strikes.”

The cleanup hitter steps into the batter’s box and toes his Nike cleats up close to the inner line, right next to the plate, but then, in short scoots, works his way back, further back from the plate than the first two times he was up.

Wintric sees it: this boy on his heels, the horrible recognition that he’s not in control, the safe space on the outer edge of the plate. And Wintric looks out to his son and wonders what he knows.

Where’s the next pitch going, Daniel?

The good nerves in Wintric’s body spark, and he doesn’t question whether he’s choosing this or how long it will last. He squeezes the fence and brings his face close and looks through the holes. He is close enough now to see Daniel’s eyes underneath his hat, close enough to see Daniel pause and look at him. There’s no nod or wink, only three seconds when his son’s eyes meet his.

Northbound on Highway 32, two miles past Potato Patch campground during the summer season, Wintric and Daniel stare at an injured, thrashing deer blocking the road. Its back haunches smashed, the panicked doe scratches at the double yellow lines with her front legs, but she can’t stand.

The man who hit the deer sits in his car with the windows up. The front left bumper is dented, but it’s drivable. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel, unable to look.

Of the five stopped cars, only Wintric, Daniel, and a woman in a Chico State T-shirt stand near the animal.

The deer swings her head into the air and back down, making frantic attempts to gain momentum, but it’s hopeless, and the three of them hear the slap of her head against the pavement, the scraping front hooves.

“Crap,” the woman says.

Wintric realizes what has to happen — knew soon after he got out of the truck and saw that the deer wasn’t going anywhere. He’d hoped that the doe had been hit well enough to be on her last breath by the time he walked up, but the car had caught her back end, which meant working lungs and heart.

Wintric runs his hand over the pocketed knife that he’s had for years. His cardiovascular system pounds inside him. He reaches out and touches Daniel’s arm.

“Son,” he says.

“I know,” Daniel says. “Shit. I got nothing in my truck.”

“Nothing,” the woman says, and shakes her head.

“It’s okay,” Wintric says. “I got something. It’s not great.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls the knife out. He opens the three-inch blade and shows it to the woman, who purses her lips.

“It’s okay,” Wintric says.

Another car pulls to the back of the southbound lane lineup, and a man gets out, takes in the scene, then gets back in his car.

The deer exhales in short, violent bursts, her black eyes huge in her head.

“Poor damn thing,” the woman says, still shaking her head.

“Dad,” Daniel says.

“What do you want me to do?” the woman says.

“One second,” Wintric says.

“What can I do?” says the woman.

“Dad,” Daniel says. “I can do it.”

Wintric looks at the deer, at the deer’s neck, the fur there, and he can’t remember the last time he sharpened his knife.

He had felt good today, not perfect, but good. As long as he keeps the car rides under two hours, he can manage. He could stop everything now and wait for someone with a gun, but who knows how long that will take, and already there are enough people stopped to make a scene. They may be in their cars, but they’ll watch.

“She’ll kick like hell,” Wintric says. “You two hold her.”

“Step on her?” Daniel says.

“We’ll have to lean,” the woman says. “She’s strong.”

“That’s right,” Wintric says. “Lean on her. Get ready.”

He kneels down a few feet away from the doe, the knife light in his hands. Underneath him he sees the tons of tiny rocks that make the road. They dig into his knees. Black flies dart past his ears. While Daniel and the woman get into position he presses the knife against his left thumb, but it just dents the skin.

“Stay on the body,” Wintric says. “I’ll go fast.” He clenches his teeth. “I’ll go fast. Okay. Now.”

Daniel and the woman kneel on the deer’s flailing body and Wintric presses his knee down on the deer’s head and he feels the muscled power underneath him, the neck strong, trying to twist up, to breathe, lifting his knee, and him pressing back down with all his weight and his hand under the deer’s jaw grabbing at the folds there, feeling the deer throb, and his knife already at the throat, sawing, sawing into the neck fur, the knife edge disappearing into the fold and the shit smell and he saws the blade deep, but there’s no blood, and he presses harder into the animal, sawing the blade, and the deer heaves, and he searches for an opening where he saws, but there’s nothing, and he yells “Shit” and with his right arm already tiring and his back flaring he drives the blade hard into the neck and the fur now opens, but only a little, and he yanks at the sliced fold but he can’t grab enough to pull it back, and the sweat in his eyes and the black flies, and he saws hard and fast at the space there, and his arm is giving out and the deer yanks and bounces his knee into the air, and he yells “Shit” and slams his knee back down on the deer’s head, and he holds the knife up into the afternoon and shakes his arm out, and “Fuck,” and he stabs at the deer’s neck twice, and the first spots of blood appear on the road, and he saws, his arm and lungs and back giving out, and the shit smell everywhere, and his vision turns and he saws and feels the blade through the skin now and blood, warm blood on his hands, but not enough, not spurting, and the shit smell on him, and the blade against cartilage, and his arm numb and weak, and the sparks in his vision, and the breath he can’t draw, and he looks over at Daniel, who slides to him fast and takes the knife from Wintric’s hand, and Wintric lunges over the deer’s body, straddling the thrash, pressing the front legs down, breathing in the shit, shoulder to shoulder with the woman, flies at his face, hearing Daniel’s loud grunts, eyes focused on the road, the millions of rocks, the thrashing and wheezing underneath him, and Daniel grunting and a thin crack and Daniel yanking the deer’s head back, and Daniel’s voice, “Through,” and the rocks of the road, a stream of bright blood, a desperate whistle-wheezing and thrash, the woman’s voice, “Can we get up? Can we get up?” and Daniel, “Yes,” and Wintric rises, and the deer’s front legs scratch at the road and Wintric’s hands are wet and dirty, he’s wiping them on his jeans, and the deer’s legs scratch at the road, then slow and stop, and Wintric looks at Daniel, at Daniel’s blood-soaked hands, Wintric’s knife in his hand.

Lately Torres has talked about his international speaking gigs, memories of Big Dax, the Denver Broncos, the weather, the Rockies, and his wife, but Wintric hasn’t heard him talk about his daughter, Mia, in over a year. Wintric closes his bedroom door and lies on his bed, phone on speaker. Torres seems sober.

“I don’t know about regrets,” Torres says. “It’s the great thing about life. You don’t know the alternative. Make your decisions and press on. Mia made her choices. She wants to raise that poor child on her own, let her. She wants to live in Cortez and do it alone, let her. When you walk away from family, you walk away. Life is hard, but some people like it that way.”

“Yeah,” Wintric says. “Doesn’t make it easy.”

“Nothing’s easy, I guess.”

“I don’t know,” Wintric says.

“I thought she’d come back. It’s been four years. I haven’t seen my granddaughter. Most days I don’t care, but sometimes I do.”

“That makes sense.”

“Does it?”

“It’s family,” Wintric says. “Everything and nothing makes sense. It’s your kid, doesn’t matter if they’re six or twenty-six.”

“They’re not always your kid.”

“No?”

“Mia doesn’t get that you have to choose to be in a family. After a while it’s not guaranteed. If she were to show up right now, I don’t know if I’d let her in. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t. There have to be consequences. Listen, I don’t pretend there’s justice in the world. Only fools think that. She’ll probably win the damn lottery or something.”

“I don’t know,” Wintric says.

“There’s no justice, but there are rules. You don’t have to like them, but they’re there. You want to get pregnant, move out, turn your back on your family, fine, but you’re not going to be sailing the Mediterranean on your yacht. And I get it. It’s not all about money. But she chooses the hardest way possible.”

“I get it.”

“All of that, and if she showed up, I’d probably let her in. Why wouldn’t I?”

“I guess you would,” Wintric says.

“It wouldn’t be about forgiveness, just about the kid. It’s my only grandkid.”

“Old man.”

“Old enough.”

“Drop her a note and see what happens.”

“A note?”

“Write it out, old school,” Wintric says. “You might be surprised.”

“You’d forgive everyone. That’s your rehab talking.”

“You never know. Things grow out of control, but sometimes there’s a good reason. I mean that things may be okay after a while. Maybe she comes back different and things are good.”

“Do you feel different?”

“I feel how I feel. I try to remember how I used to feel, but I never know if it’s better or worse. I don’t believe people when they say, ‘This is the worst I’ve ever felt.’ I don’t think anyone remembers how good or bad things were.”

“Maybe.”

“I think about being on the drugs,” Wintric says. “I remember being calm. I remember feeling good, but I don’t know. I don’t trust myself.” He pauses. “What if it felt good but it could’ve been better? The only way to know would be to try it again.”

“Dangerous.”

“That’s the problem with drugs,” Wintric says. “They work.”

“I was on good stuff after the accident. You’re damn right they work. I’d be lying there in the hospital thinking that I’d walk again, I felt that good. I remember weeks after, still thinking I’d walk. Get me drunk enough and I’d probably tell you I still imagine it. It’s not good to think that way.”

“You never know.”

“Stop. It’s been long enough to know. But put it this way — if a miracle happens and I stand again, I’ll throw a party. I’ll fly out all the friends I can find. We’ll all hold hands and go on a walk together.”

“Am I on the list?”

“Hell, you are the list.”

“I don’t believe you,” Wintric says.

“I’m not drunk.”

“How’s your liver?”

“How’s yours?”

“That fair, I guess,” Wintric says.

“It’s not about fairness.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know what it’s about.”

“We’re older now. It can be about anything.”

“I remember being a kid on the playground at school and watching the cars driving by and wondering where all of them were going. It fascinated me that all these people could just go wherever the hell they wanted. And come to find out it’s true. You grow up and you can go wherever the hell you want. Just hop in the car and go. You get older and all of a sudden you have all these choices.”

“Independence,” Wintric says.

“In a way.”

“Yeah.”

“But you still have places to be.”

“Hopefully, places you want to be,” Wintric says.

“Your choice, my friend. Grab the family, hop in the car, and go. That easy. One-way trip. But I’ve been preaching at you for years. You know this. You aren’t going anywhere, because you like it there.”

“You’re guessing.”

“What’s the name of the lake?”

“Almanor.”

“You love it.”

“You’re guessing.”

“I’ve known you a long time.”

“That’s true,” Wintric says.

“You like getting up in the morning?”

“What?”

“Do you like waking up and thinking you have a day in front of you?”

“Sure.”

“My father used to rant all the time about random crap and most of it was worthless, but as I got older one thing he used to ask me was, ‘Why are you waking up today?’ I guess what he meant was that I’d better have something worth waking up for, and if I ever got to a place where I didn’t, I’d better make a change quick. But you ask that question too often and it gets tough. Doesn’t matter what you’ve been through. Don’t ask me to answer my own question.”

“You don’t have to think like that when you’re a kid.”

“You don’t ever have to think about it, but it helps sometimes.”

“We all got reasons to get up,” Wintric says.

“Do you know yours?”

“Maybe he didn’t mean the big stuff. Maybe it’s a small thing.”

“Could be.”

“Something simple,” Wintric says.

“It has to be simple or no one would understand. Has to be enough to get you out of bed.”

“Yeah,” Wintric says. “Something simple.”

The game is on ESPN2. An afternoon bowl game five days before Christmas. Channel flipping, home alone and bored, Wintric sees the game appear, and an unrecognized moment of peace passes before he focuses on the screen. Wyoming versus Oregon State. Flung into paralysis, he stares at Wyoming’s brown-and-yellow uniforms, the helmets: the saddled cowboy and bronco. Wyoming. Jettisoned to Nelson’s white door, Nelson’s dog, now huge and savage, the white door in the heat, the AFG sticker on Nelson’s Jeep, the dog pressing him, the McDonald’s parking lot, a white door, a garbage truck, desert and gunpowder, a postcard in his hand. He won’t write his name on it. He won’t send it. Wyoming is a white door. Trapped, Wintric holds the remote in his living room. He can’t move his fingers. He holds the remote. Wyoming is an exit off I-80. He stares at the television through credit card and beer commercials, through a missed field goal and an ACL tear. Wyoming is a gun in his waistband. He won’t use it. Wyoming is a white door. No one is there.

Wintric stands. He’s off the couch. His coat is on. He’s on a nearby street, squinting. The sun reflects off the ice-packed road.

The dealer’s house is in a row of shotgun homes. Someone has left a square of red Christmas lights on around the front window. The fence has been fixed and the home has been painted yellow since Wintric was last here, ten months ago. There used to be kids’ toys everywhere, but now there’s only this sturdy fence and two feet of snow.

Wintric doesn’t go inside. He waits on the steps. When he gets the pills, he selects four from the bottle, then tosses them into his mouth. He tries to swallow them dry, but the pills stick in his throat. He gulps twice, but they’re still stuck, so he rushes down the three stairs and cups snow from the yard into his mouth and waits for it to melt enough to swallow.

“What the hell?” says the dealer. “Get the fuck on.”

Wintric walks away, but not home. He turns down Second Avenue, past an empty lot where as a kid he used to break empty Budweiser bottles. Every step he takes seems to propel him a block. Rushing and ready for the Oxy to be absorbed, he walks past the old homes and families he’s always known: the McIntires, the Garretts, the Roulands, the Killingsworths. His breath plumes out wide into the cold. He doesn’t know where he’s walking, but he wants to be outside. Already he believes he could walk forever, go anywhere.

Down First Avenue now; a minivan and a blue Chevy truck pass him and he walks the road past the Salversons’ and the Hardigs’. The cold and anticipation push Wyoming away and he searches for the self-pity that will make all this worth it, and he thinks about his life, how he’s lost it, how the days don’t get better fast enough, how he’s seen the world but none of the parts he wanted.

Wintric steps and slips, but he steadies himself. He stops in front of the Waldrons’ place, a house he roofed in the fall. An inflatable Santa sits on the porch by the front door. Family friends for years; he’d only cleared three hundred on the five-day job. The snowpack lays thick on the roof, and Wintric finds himself here, in Chester, before the drugs have hit.

He’ll always be here. He won’t get younger. He’s walked this street forever. The drugs haven’t hit, but he can wait. It’s him, alone on First Avenue. The Waldrons’ place right here. He’s alone but alive, and the drugs haven’t hit yet. He’s here, alone, and suddenly there’s enough time to fear.

When he enters the Holiday market, he pauses inside the automatic doors. The store is busier than normal in the winter months, and he frantically searches the checkout stations for Kristen, but she’s not there. He digs his nails into his palms and keeps his head down and paces fast down the cereal aisle to the back of the market. Wintric turns the corner near the frozen apple juice and sees her and stops. Her back is toward him, hands at her hips. Her hair is longer than he remembers.

Kristen is talking to Mrs. McIntire. She shifts her weight and brushes Mrs. McIntire’s arm.

Wintric steps forward, then pulls back near the freezers and grabs the back of his neck. He presses his forehead on the cold glass. Kristen loves him and he doesn’t know why. He’s starting to feel light and he’s scared to go home and scared to step out into the aisle, but he knows what alone means. He’s heard their stories.

He pulls his head off the freezer door. He steps out into the aisle.

It’s Mrs. McIntire who waves to him first, and Wintric waves back, but he can’t force a smile. His heart pumps the poison and Kristen turns toward him. She raises her hand to wave, and when she sees him her hand stops its move upward. Her mouth opens. Her hands fall to her sides.

Out back by the delivery dock, in an employee bathroom, Wintric jams two fingers down his throat for the second time. He cut the roof of his mouth with his fingernails on the first attempt and he tastes his own blood and gags, then throws up into the toilet. His head floats over the putrid water and he cries and waits for what’s next. His stomach clenches and he dry-heaves. He stands and washes his hands and face with hand soap. He exhales, then sprays a lavender-scented air freshener.

On the back of the bathroom door hangs a green-and-white Chester Volcanoes basketball calendar. Kristen must have put it here. He stares at it for a while as he gets his legs under him.

Wintric listens for his wife on the other side of the door, but he doesn’t hear her. A weak exhaust fan works above him and he searches for the switch to turn it off, but he finds only one switch, so he flips it off and it kills the light and the fan. It’s quiet now and he listens. What’s he opening this door to?

Wintric listens inside the dark bathroom. He feels the drugs. He smells the pungent lavender. He places his hands on the door. In the darkness he could be anywhere.

He waits for Kristen’s voice asking if he’s okay.

He waits and he cries and his chest is soft and the drugs warm the space behind his temples and all along his back.

He can wait. If he wants, he can wait right here. He can choose to stay in this place.

He thinks about flipping on the light switch, about saying his wife’s name. He thinks about turning the doorknob.

“Kristen?” he says.

He listens. He hears his own staggered breathing and squeezes his mouth. He waits. He feels for the doorknob. It’s small in his hand.

“Kristen?” he says, and opens the door.

Out on the delivery dock, a man Wintric recognizes unloads crates of milk. An announcement garbles over the store’s loudspeaker.

In the far corner, behind stacks of paper towels, Kristen sits on a stool with her face in her hands. She’s pulled her hair back into a ponytail. Wintric walks to her and stands close. He can smell her vanilla perfume. It’s cold and he doesn’t know if he should touch her or speak, so he wipes at his wet face and stands there and watches her. Her wedding ring covers her left eye. A bracelet he’s never seen is on her left wrist.

Behind him, the sound of milk crates being stacked. An announcement from the speaker somewhere above them. The voice calls his wife’s name.

Wintric reaches out and touches Kristen’s shoulder. His numb fingertips press against her cotton shirt.

He knows what’s happening. He’ll leave his hand here. He’s aware. He’s facing the moment. He’ll stay right here.

“Please,” she says. She stands up, shaking his hand off her.

She exhales hard and runs her hands down her chest and belly, over to the outside of both hips. She pulls at the bottom of her shirt. She stands close, her shoulder inches from Wintric’s chest.

“Kristen,” he says. He stands, motionless, her smell in his nose. The shape of her neck. The curves of her ear. She could turn to him. So close, she could turn his way. He watches her face. He waits for the turn.

Over the store’s loudspeaker, someone’s calling her name.

She keeps her eyes forward as she walks away and rounds the corner back into the store.

Wintric grabs the back of his neck, then folds his arms.

Someone is calling her name.

He listens to the sound.