Read More: A brief Q&A with Jen McConnell
First, you will move into a dismal apartment on the other side of town.
It will have one bedroom. You will consider two-bedroom places but your sixteen-year-old daughter informs you she will never sleep anywhere but her own bed and when you calculate rent plus mortgage on your ex-house, you realize the extra room isn’t worth it.
You will call it the Man Cave. This last trace of romanticism in you tries to make the shithole apartment sound better than the stains on the walls, the third-hand carpet, and the bathroom that grosses out even you.
You will realize that, in addition to many other things, your wife made you appreciate a clean bathtub and toilet.
You will spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning the Man Cave though you will never invite anyone, except your eleven-year-old son, inside.
You won’t have a television. You will watch the big game at your buddy’s house, in his well-appointed den, drinking his beer and watching his giant flat screen TV that is exactly like the one in your ex-house. His wife will greet you and offer you food but it is clear from her manner that you are now a bastard.
You will wear the bastard label proudly for a while, until even your son begs off staying at the Man Cave. It smells sad, he tells you. This breaks what is left of your heart. His still-little-boy-smell as you slept next to him was the closest thing to joy you had left in your life.
You will teach your daughter how to drive even though she hates you. She will roll her eyes when you tell her she is a good driver. She thinks you are bullshitting her. That you believe this makes up for being a bastard. But she IS a good driver. This will make you unreasonably proud.
You will spend too much time on Facebook. You resist being ‘that guy’ until the night that a third beer gives you a why-the-hell-not feeling. You send friend requests to every girl you remember from high school – attractive or not.
You will receive three responses right away. These will be from the ones who are married and fat. The ones you are most curious about will ignore you. You will cyber spy on them for a few weeks.
Nothing will feel as good as you remember: masturbating, reading without interruption, watching a ball game by yourself, hogging the covers.
You will start to remember only the good things about your wife. You fear she is remembering only the bad about you.
You will be broke all the time.
You will shrug when people ask what happened, then trot out the tired explanations: we were married too young, we grew apart, we weren’t in love anymore. You can’t remember what actually happened.
One night you will ask your ex-wife and she will loudly, painfully, remind you what actually happened.
You will have one dark night – at least one – when the brutality of the situation can no longer be blunted by alcohol, work, sex or sleep. You have failed. You no longer get to ask her “how was your day?” Whatever was happy and pure in the framed wedding photo you have on the bookshelf no longer exists outside of that moment. You will put the frame into a drawer.
You will miss your dog and must refrain from stealing him when you pick up the kids one Saturday.
You will buy an animal – a rebound pet like a fish or hamster – that you will forget to care for. Your daughter will find its lifeless carcass and it will take you two weeks to realize her white hot anger is not about a dead animal.
You will start lifting weights.
You will attend a rock concert with a woman in her twenties and your ears will ring for days.
You will humiliate yourself putting on a condom.
A never-married female co-worker will offer to take you shopping for new clothes. You want to find her attractive but you just don’t.
You will buy some house plants and diligently water them.
You will no longer notice the looks of pity on your co-workers’ faces.
You will no longer deny that the rebound girl was a rebound.
You will move into a bigger, cleaner apartment. You ask your wife, in a moment of civility, if she will help decorate it.
You will go to dinner at your ex-house and you will enjoy it. Your children will no longer beg for you to move back home.
You will begin to see beyond your own misery.
Finally, slowly, the fissures in your heart will begin to scar over.
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Jen McConnell is a fiction writer and poet. Her work has recently appeared in DASH, Paragraph Planet, October Hill, The Disappointed Housewife, and Sledgehammer Lit. Her debut collection of short stories, “Welcome, Anybody,” was published by Press 53 and she’s polishing up her second collection. Jen’s story “Earthquake Weather” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont. By day, she works as a copywriter in the corporate world. Her website is jenmcconnell.com.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Jen McConnell