My father left my mother on Christmas day when I was ten, creating a real childhood memory of Mom chain smoking for two weeks, not bathing, and sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee non-stop, as if she was trying to stay awake for when he finally came home. That first week, I played outside as much as I could stand given the snow and cold. I’d come in and walk past her, sitting at the table, and I’d make myself some hot chocolate. We were having a new experience for our house, but instinct told me to leave her alone. It’s like walking in the wild and suddenly coming upon a rattlesnake. You may want to poke at it but you just know better.
When school started back up, I came home everyday finding her at the table, which is where I left her in the mornings. I made all my meals, did my homework, even showered, with no prodding from her about any of it.
“Thank God you’re nothing like your father,” she’d say sometimes, and not much more. Then, just like a bad storm that moves out after a thundering night, one day she got up from the table, poured the coffee down the drain, threw her carton of cigarettes in the trash and took a long hot bath. That night she made me my favorite dinner. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes.
I met Sarah two years into my career. We both worked at a San Francisco investment management firm. I was a portfolio analyst, she was a client relationship associate. We sat across from each other in large cubes of blonde oak, Management’s concession to making our work-space nice. Our relationship started off like any office romance, some small talk, progressing to lunch one day, then shortly after progressing to drinks after work which ended with us getting drunk and going back to my place for sex.
We married a year later. She found a new job in a rival company. She thought it was better for our marriage if we didn’t work together. I agreed. I tended to agree with every thing she did. I was so grateful to be in love and to have someone who loved me. I knew I’d never leave her, I’d never break her heart the way my father broke Mom’s. She’d never sit at a kitchen table, a modern day Lady McBeth trying to wring out the spot on her brain that was the ruins of our love.
On our sixth Christmas together, she gave me something I didn’t expect. She left. That morning I worked at a soup kitchen while she stayed home and put away presents. At least that’s what she said she would do. When I returned, she was gone along with all of her stuff. Her favorite CDs, her books. Her laptop. Photos of her family and of our friends, of Christmases we shared, of parties and vacations. All gone. My first thought was that someone had broken in and stolen her things. Then I saw the note on the table. “I just can’t,” she wrote. That was it. No apologies, no I’ll-always-love-you.
I sat at the table. I sat there all night, staring at the note, staring at the wall, putting my head on the table and crying. I got up and made some coffee, thinking I’d stay awake so that when she came to her senses and returned home, I’d be waiting for her, alert, ready to forgive.
The next morning, I called work, and told them I had the flu. The second week I called to say the flu had turned into pneumonia. I couldn’t tell the truth. It was too awful. I drank a lot of coffee. I didn’t shower. I lived in a Nike t-shirt and my sweat pants. Things stayed this way for two weeks. Then, on that final day, I got up, showered, and called Mom.
copyright DJ D'Ono
