Because My Ex-Wife Was a Cunt

The shift bell at the warehouse went off at five in the morning and I'd been standing under a loading dock light for eleven hours by the time it let me go, my shoulders screaming, forklift exhaust and cardboard dust caked into my skin so deep I could taste it in the back of my throat. I drove home the long way, past the turn that would've taken me by the old house, because I still hadn't trained myself out of avoiding it. Six months since Denise packed her half of the marriage into cardboard boxes labeled in her neat cursive and drove off behind Rick's truck without once looking at the porch where I stood.

I got to the apartment at six-forty and had the first can open before I'd even set my lunch cooler down. The kitchen light buzzed overhead, that same cheap fluorescent tube flickering every time a truck rumbled past outside, and I sat under it the way I sat under it every night, working through a case of beer like it was a second job. The divorce decree lived on the table now, permanent as a centerpiece, its corners curled soft from humidity and handling. Half my pension. The house on Willow. The Camry. Even the good knives, because apparently twenty-two years of marriage bought her the right to itemize down to the fucking cutlery.

By can four the numbers stopped being numbers and started being just noise in my skull, and by can six the noise organized itself into her face, always her face, Denise at thirty-eight standing in a doorway with a lawyer's smile, telling me Rick didn't want a kid cluttering up his condo, so Zoey would just have to stay with me. Like she was assigning me a chore. Like seventeen years of being somebody's daughter could get reassigned in a sentence.

I heard Zoey crying through the wall around eight, same as most nights, the sound worn thin and familiar as static. I didn't get up. I cracked can seven and stared at the water stain on the ceiling shaped like Florida and thought about how she used to look, sitting shotgun in the Camry with her feet not even reaching the floor mat, singing along wrong to whatever was on the radio, and how that kid had somehow grown into a seventeen-year-old girl who still couldn't drive a stick, still couldn't cook anything past scrambled eggs, still called for her mother in her sleep some nights loud enough that I heard it through two closed doors.