JUST THE WAY I LIKE IT
Shea Duffy
The word ‘divorce’ always seemed so permanent. Sure, we fought a lot more than most. But it had never been out of anger. No, no, it had never been like that. It’s not like I had any choice. If she wanted a divorce, she was getting a divorce, even if her life depended on it. She always got what she wanted, but I guess this kind of thing was different. This was not up for discussion. This was something I had to be okay with; losing her was something I had to be okay with. My index finger traced the nearly invisible stitching on my navy slacks where the tailor had sewn up a tiny rip near my hip bone. I loved wearing suits. I loved the feeling of commanding the room’s attention when I walked in, knowing that my outfit, head to toe, was as much as my secretary’s monthly rent. A suit brings power to the weakest of men. I was certainly not weak, yet, still, a navy suit and brown shoes always made me the most powerful man in the room. Strangely enough, we had met at a gas station in Hillsborough. I noticed her in my rearview mirror at the green light before the dirt road merged into the freeway. I almost crashed into the blue bumper in front of me, and, without thinking, I signaled left and switched lanes. Of course, I did this only to avoid love-tapping that tacky blue Suburban that braked as frequently as the school bus that peels out of my neighborhood each morning. North Carolina should really make drivers' tests more difficult to pass. Somehow, we ended up at the same gas station 36 miles from Charlotte, from home. I remember the way her eyes burned a hole in my navy suit as she pumped her gas. She was bold, always the one to make the first move or start the first fight; on the contrary, she was never the first to apologize. The night of our second date, three weeks after our gas station run-in, she told me she loved me. She was my obsession, but I was hers too. We just worked. There is something so empty about wearing a suit when the only people you have to impress are a lawyer and a judge. She was so late, almost 25 minutes now, but that didn’t surprise me. Nothing about her ever surprised me. She was so unpredictable that I had grown to recognize her impulsive, spontaneous patterns, like when she leaves in the middle of the night to sleep at her sister’s house or how, bimonthly, she throws out all the food in the refrigerator so that she can finally make it past day four of the Whole30 diet. I scanned my surroundings. No one else in the courtroom seemed to notice she was absent, but, then again, everyone else was so focused on the papers in front of them that I’m sure they didn’t even notice me either. For someone so insistent on the divorce, she should have been on time. Deep down, I was hopeful that she had perhaps changed her mind, that perhaps the judge was about to get a call that canceled the entire procession. “Go home, Luke,” they would say, and minutes later, I would be home with her where I belonged. I remember the night that I thought everything might be okay. It was a Saturday, two weeks after she hastily set the manila envelope on the tiny little table by the door that she had insisted on painting eggshell blue. I hated that table. I thought it was tacky and cheap, like her collectible snow globes that sat on the windowsill and the pink plastic hangers she used to hang her old sorority T-shirts on her side of the closet. She knew I hated that table, but like most things were with her, she got her way. Perhaps I was always too scared of losing her to challenge her authority. I guess, in the end, that didn’t matter. It was a Saturday. As if nothing were out of the ordinary, she tautly sat on her chair, her head turned away from the door. That was her chair. She was a wooden puppet
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