Found Wanting Charlie Watts – Third Place Contest Winner
Prelude Billy ends his marriage with a note that says it’s me, not you; you’re great, I’m not. He leaves it on the counter under a vanilla-scented candle along with his last paycheck. Then he waits across the street in his Dodge Dart until she comes home. When she spots him, he presses his palm against his window and takes off. He feels like he’s dropping off the lip of a quarry, streaming down, toes pointed, toward the waffled water. The impact comes later. She was called Robyn even though her license said Mary Catherine. They lived near each other in a Tampa neighborhood bounded by auto dealerships, unregulated fabrication shops, and a spray of strip clubs that kept cars circulating in the streets 24/7. Robyn’s habitat since birth, the environmental jangle was her catalyst. Get up, get out, make it work. Billy, however, was a transplant. He had grown up inside an extended family of migrant harvesters, riding in the big combines and sleeping dorm-style in twenty-dollar-a-night motels. They moved with the weather until injury and exhaustion grounded his parents in Florida where they enrolled Billy in his first public school. The speed of moving objects and the density of human bodies felt to Billy like an angry thing. He didn’t like coming back to the same house every night. And there was never a spot where he could see straight ahead for more than an eighth of a mile. Robyn’s suntan and creamy, extroverted smile felt to Billy like an unexpected gift. She was as sugary to him as canned peaches, and for reasons Billy never explored, she decided to hook herself to him. She taught him about sex, working through a menu of techniques from a book she said her mother had given to her. She told him what clothes to wear and steered him toward the easiest classes. Her attentions made Billy drowsy, dulling the edges so that nothing seemed dangerous. When high school ran its course, Robyn announced their next step – marriage and a rental house in a less horrible neighborhood. It was then that Billy began to lose track of the horizon. Each ritual – engagement, bachelorette party, first apartment, salsa lessons – made Robyn stronger, more accomplished, more hopeful. Her expectations increased. It was like she was making their life into a how-to video with affirmations and crafty time-savers included at no extra cost. As she bloomed, Billy sagged, every day another brick in his backpack. He found work at a dairy ten miles outside the city. He learned the big animals quickly. The cows seemed familiar to him, and the return to producing something with his hands was a
relief. Billy could sense, however, that Robyn was not impressed. He watched her increase the pace of her extra-curricular activities, enrolling in classes and groups designed, she told him, to maximize her human potential. “Honestly, Billy, what is it going to take?” she had said, turning both of her palms upwards on her thighs and blowing a bubble through her chewing gum. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch, studying for her real estate exam. “What is your life plan?” She pushed her chin in his direction, as if to jab him. It was not the first time for this conversation. It was also not the first time he had no answer. Six days later, Billy drives north on a state highway into Wisconsin. Without warning, he comes upon a two-story wooden dollhouse sitting in the middle of the road. The structure is so unexpected that it does not register as an obstacle until the moment of impact. Immediately, the air fills with brightly painted balsa wood. Something lands on the windshield like a punch in the face. It is a little cloth man from the dollhouse. He’s wearing a white shirt with a tie painted on the front. The line of ink that was his smile has gotten smudged so that it looks like he’s blowing smoke against the glass. He looks like he’s thinking about something far away. The little man remains fixed to the windshield, pasted down by the wind. Then Billy turns on the wipers and flicks him into the wind. The remains of the dollhouse resettle on the road like a box of broken pasta. There are no other cars on either side of the road. He presses down on the accelerator and the car shimmies back up to eighty-five. Billy feels lighter, as if his sinuses have cleared and a bolt of fresh air has hit his brain. I. Invitation An hour later, Billy spots a cardboard sign wired to a pole at the side of the road. Farm Hand Wanted
Billy checks the rearview, pumps his brakes, and makes the turn. Soon he spots a replica of the sign hanging from an apple tree in the front yard of a small dairy farm. He pulls in and unfolds out of the car. A headache pulses in a very specific spot over his left eye.
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