Doreen
poured a cup of coffee and sank her chair: the Victorian parlor chair
with red velvet upholstery that she'd scored curbside fourteen years
ago. "Didn't pay a dime for it," she told visitors staring
at this throne parked in the center of the cabin. She ran her
hand across the armrest where Frodo had been allowed, nay, encouraged
to chew freely and with gusto.
"My
boy's teething," Dink would say, every time Doreen protested.
She shook her head. That damn dog had been teething for nigh eight
years.
"This
chair is the best thing that ever happened to me," she said. And
Dink, loyal vagrant of a husband, that part-timing, two-timing,
constant-whining lazy-ass of a husband had let Frodo destroy it.
For
three days, Dink had been gallivanting, rustling the skirts of the
pretty young things that dotted the mountain like wildflowers. Every
spring it was the same: Snow dissolved into rivulets. Robins appeared
in the oaks. The soil loosened itself. Dink, hoeing the garden plot,
would all a' sudden get that look in his eye. The look that said, I
ain't getting any younger.
"It
ain't easy," Doreen said, patting Frodo's head, "to go into
town when everybody there knows whose bed Dink's keeping warm."
She knew the tricks: The averted eyes. The polite inquires after her
garden. The wide circle people swept with their mouths around the
topic of her husband.
Doreen
watched as the lights from Dink's pickup snagged on the windows of
the cabin and dragged themselves across the floor. "He thinks
he's gonna melt my heart with pretty words. He thinks he's gonna'
traipse in here and tell me he's a changed man." Doreen shoved
Frodo off her lap and stood. "But he's wrong. Cause I'm the one
changed."
She
grabbed her suitcase and let herself out the back door.
She
didn't need to hear Dink's words.
She'd
heard them all before.
She'd
made it past the garden before she stopped.
That
chair.
She
couldn't leave it.
Kelly Garriott Waite on Google+
Labels: flash fiction, Trifecta Writing Challenge