B.B. Garin
Annie should’ve left the box in the car. There was no reason to bring it into the motel room. It wouldn’t have gotten cold in the car. Now, she couldn’t face the thought of sleeping while it watched from the chair by the TV. It felt like the nights she had made Nick sleep on the sofa for some minor infraction. And she wasn’t mad at him, she didn’t want him to think that. It wasn’t Nick’s fault he was dead.
Since she couldn’t bring herself to touch the box of ashes again, she went out to the concrete balcony overlooking the parking lot. A tall man leaned on the paint flecked rail there, considering a cigarette in his bony fingers. If he had been a woman, Annie would’ve thought him anorexic. Because he was a man, she thought long drug abuse. Neither thought was charitable and Annie felt a wave of nausea.
Nick had always admired her charitable nature—the six bridesmaid’s dresses she never found a disparaging word for, or her instance that all the service jobs she’d worked through college had been “good experience.”
“Smoking kills, you know,” she said, trying to be friendly now that she’d made horrible assumptions about this stranger who looked at her with dark, tired eyes.
“I know,” he laughed. “These aren’t even cool anymore.”
It did seem quaint. Annie couldn’t remember the last time she saw someone with a paper and tobacco cigarette. It was all e-things, lately.
“You’re right,” she said. “They’ll probably go the way of Radio Shack tomorrow.”
He laughed again. The cigarette flickered out. He hadn’t brought it to his lips and now he opened his fingers, letting it fall. It took a mesmerizingly long time to spiral to the pavement.
“Where are you headed?” Annie asked.
“New Orleans.” He pronounced it slow, like he’d only just remembered. She wondered if he was high. If she ought to go back in her room and lock the door.
“My car broke,” he said.
“That’s where I’m going.”
He raised his eyebrows and she felt an inexplicable urge to offer him a ride. Then she remembered her passenger seat was spoken for.
“Friends there? Family?”
She didn’t want to tell him she was alone, that no one knew where she had gone.
“My husband always wanted to go,” she said.
“Divorce trip, is it? Good for you. Screw him.”
She bit her lip and didn’t contradict him.
“Should’ve kept the ring,” he continued. “Could’ve thrown it in the gulf.”
She stretched out her left hand. She’d been driving with her arm out the window, and already the skin on her ring finger was darker. Her friends were shocked when she took the ring off before the funeral. But it hadn’t felt right; she wasn’t married anymore. She’d kept her vow to death do us part, and once it had, the little band of metal she’d worn for five years felt too tight. Maybe her fingers were swelling, maybe that was a symptom of grief.
She asked his name. Benjamin Jones, he told her in the same way he pronounced New Orleans; not quite an accent, not quite a statement.
“Why are you going to New Orleans, Benjamin?”
“Jones,” he nodded, like he had just decided that was his name. “I hear they still smoke real cigarettes there.”
“Everyone must stop here. I got the last room. The lady at the desk was so distracted she nearly forgot she had it.”
“There’s a barbeque festival,” he leveled a thumb over his shoulder. “Couple in there are cooks.”
She wondered why he wasn’t smoking outside his own door. He must’ve been smoking and walking, crossed paths with the barbequers. He was bored and chatty, that was all.
But she turned quickly for the stairs. Perhaps, it was the vagueness in his eyes or the way he held himself slouched and still. Except for his fingers, tapping an absent rhythm on the rail.
Nick had always been a flurry of motion. He would’ve pelted down the rickety steps, stealing her hand, drawing her in his wake. She would’ve scrambled across the baking asphalt to keep pace. He wouldn’t have given her a chance to catch the stale oil in the air or the glass glittering like a broken star among browned weeds, as she crossed the road to a dog-eared convenience store.
Her first dates with Nick had a nostalgia about them that Annie fell in love with; a bowling alley, roller skating, an amusement park with ringing arcades and cotton candy. Later, she realized they were together a year before he sat down and simply shared a meal with her. That was the night he proposed.
He took her to a popular red sauce restaurant. Nothing fancy, but a step up from the taco drive thru. He ordered wine too, which he always said was a waste of money, so Annie suspected even before the waitress came with a lava cake and a cascade of giggles.
The diamond sparkled out of the gooey interior.
“You say you love chocolate more than anything.” Nick looked sheepish for the first and only time. “I thought I could be second?”
“Let’s see,” Annie slugged back the rest of the red wine, feeling it coat her teeth, knowing how bad all the photos taken by strangers at the surrounding tables would look. “Chocolate. You. Basset hounds. I could live with that order.”
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