Bates couldn’t get the scene out of his head. It stuck there, like an axe wedged halfway into a split-open skull, blood oozing out of the crack and dribbling down onto the forehead. His expression wasn’t much different from the imaginary murder victim’s—eyes wide with disbelief, alive with terror, yet already starting to glaze over as they slipped into death’s cold and everlasting grip.
She’d walked away. Just turned and walked away. No words. No expression. No gratitude, even for an unwanted gift. And worst of all, no apology. Just a sudden exit, sudden as her entrance, and not one bit less dramatic.
People had asked him, “So…how did a guy like you…” —a guy like him being a 50-something, muscular, on the short side, bull of a man with a weathered face, a bum knee, thinning hair (masked by his crew cut), and a propensity to have just one too many drinks—”how did a guy like you ever get a girl…”—they didn’t say woman, because she was, in every aspect except her actual age of 43, girlish (long hair in a pony tail, wide eyes, flushed cheeks and full lips, a lilting laugh, and a wardrobe full of distressed jeans, halter tops, and sundresses)—”how did a guy like you ever get a girl like her?”
Bates had wondered it himself, from the time she knocked on his door, claiming car trouble (he never did find out if this had been a pretense), and he—in fatherly protector mode—invited her in, only to be seduced before he—shrewd as he was—fully realized what was happening. How does that song go?
Well you are such an easy evil
Such a sensuous sin
Sometimes I don’t know where I’m going
’Till I’ve been taken in
By morning, he was in love—at least in lust leaning toward love—smitten, bitten (literally in a number of exquisitely private places), and she was talking about moving in. It all happened so fast. And yet, at the same time, it felt as if time had stopped. The world fell away. It was just the two of them, suspended in air—flying, dancing, weightless—as the force of their love for each other (his real, hers, in retrospect, perhaps contrived, though he didn’t want to go there) canceled the force of gravity, reversed the rules, and turned everything upside down.
A year. This went on for a year. His children-all adults—thought he was crazy. But, as each admitted to him privately, they liked her. She was—fun! She would never be their stepmom; she didn’t fit the stereotype and had no apparent mothering skills, not that these were needed. She was more like an older sister, a happy-go-lucky cheerleader, the life of the party—who once actually danced around Bates’s staid New England living room (with Grandma’s sofa and wing chairs, those yellowed lace curtains, and the bowl of fake fruit on the colonial coffee table) with a lampshade on her head. They had all cheered her on, tossing embroidered pillows and even juggling the plastic fruit (Bates’s son was an expert juggler).
So why—after he had finally proposed—did she just walk away?
Was he too old after all? Did he smell bad? Was it something he’d said? Had she not liked the ring?
Bates would never know—and he turned away himself, vowing never, ever to find out. He would begin at the end—it was better that way.
Note: This piece was written in (and slightly edited after) our free Thursday night Zoom creative writing class.
