#straperine

When she told Gerald of her suspicions during one of their occasional calls a week or so ago, he only laughed and said that she should give the boul a chance. Her ex-husband had caught a glimpse of him once on a FaceTime chat with Taylor and said that he seemed nice enough. A little bit of an egghead, maybe, but that’s only to be expected from a broker. When she told Melissa the exact same thing in the teacher’s lounge the next day—(dissatisfied with that perfectly reasonable answer)—to her chagrin, her best friend only doubled over in laughter too, briefly holding on to her shoulder for support. 

“God, Barb,” she shook her head, her green eyes twinkling with amusement, “I do love the way you see the world, hon.”

So, with these humbling reactions in mind, she grudgingly supposes she’s going to give Mr. Marcus Wall Street a singular shot. 

He had better not waste it either.

She eventually finds the recipe, props it up against a half-empty bottle of Merlot, and starts rooting around her kitchen to ensure that she has everything. She’ll need to go to the store and grab the chicken, definitely… a box of Ritz Crackers for the crust too… and maybe a few other necessities besides. 

More TV dinners to neatly stack in her freezer. (It’s hard to cook for precisely one person.) Another half-pint of milk. (That she won’t be able to drink by herself anyway.) A fresh bottle of wine that she will slowly and methodically desiccate to its dregs throughout two weeks, allowing herself a singular half-glass when the home she has lived in for twenty-one years feels like a total stranger. 

(So quiet. It used to never be quiet in the Howard residence. Once filled with the pealing laughter of her two beautiful girls. Once filled with the ambient noise of Gerald flicking on the TV after a long day at work. Once filled with their shared laughter as they gossiped together about some neighbor or another. But this had been well before the disagreements had begun. They never had fights, her and Gerald. Just polite disagreements in slightly raised voices. And she’d go to school the next day, attempting to plaster on a beatific smile that would crumble as soon as Melissa saw her, clocking her on the spot, seeing her. Oh, how naked she was beneath that verdant gaze, so exposed, like the carefully layered outfits that she meticulously put together disguised absolutely nothing. And the younger teacher would rush to her in an instant, dropping everything, and in the embrace of her friend’s arms, Barbara would finally let the mask drop too—if only for a few seconds, a minute at most, her face buried against the crook of that warm neck like it was her own personal Bible.)

As Sam Cooke’s soulful voice continues to warble through her empty kitchen, she harmonizes with him as she makes her grocery list.

And idly pours herself a half-glass of Merlot.

It’s a perfectly normal Saturday night.

After she heats up a bowl of leftover tomato soup for herself, she settles in her favorite recliner in the living room and prepares to watch Jeopardy!, which’ll be on in about ten minutes.

She tries to call Melissa twice to see if she wants to get on the phone and watch it together—as they sometimes do these days—but to no avail. She gets hit by Melissa’s vaguely threatening voicemail twice.

“Melissa.” A slight pause, wary, like her dear friend thinks that even giving her first name might backfire on her. “Schemmenti. If ya need me, you know where to find me. If you’re tryin’ to sell me somethin’, don’t.”

She leaves a message on the second call, just a general no worries if you’re busy.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

And so, Barbara eats dinner in silence too, occasionally calling out the answers to clues. Hamlet. The Grand Canyon. Ghosts. Jennifer Coolidge, though the correct answer is actually Jennifer Hudson, which seems incorrect to Barbara but alright. 

She gets tired of doing that by Double Jeopardy, though, and sits the rest of the program in silence, idly stirring the dregs of her soup. The grandfather clock in the corner slowly drags her into seven, the toll echoing solemnly through the darkened room.

Melissa never calls her back.

And it’s fine, of course.

She’s well-aware her friend has a life of her own… but Barbara admittedly likes it—much more than she rationally should—when the two of them share their evenings together, even when it’s just over the phone.

Melissa’s been her saving grace in all of these endless months since the divorce, coming over on so many weekends—and now that school’s out for the summer, much more often than that. They’ve chatted and cut-up and talked about new art projects they want to try with their kids in the fall, shoulders lightly brushing, their curving hips, their thighs. Melissa has unfailingly cooked for her, always lamenting the deplorable state of Barbara’s fridge or else complaining about her depleted spice cabinet. 

Perpetually making sure that she has enough to eat.

She made the tomato soup that Barbara is currently picking at, having popped over for dinner just two nights ago with a foot-long baguette, a bunch of vegetables, and assorted spices that she dragged from her own kitchen.

“You gotta know I love you, hon,” Melissa had huffed as she dropped her haul onto the pristine island in Barbara’s kitchen. “I haven’t cooked for someone this much since Joe.”

At first, Barbara had easily smiled at the fact that she was loved by Melissa, warmth radiating through her chest and all the way down to her perfectly manicured fingertips, but then, she had been less pleased by the casual comparison to Melissa’s idiotic ex-husband, blinking in a manner that she hoped wasn’t too revealing.

“Joseph was hardly as good-looking as I am, though, right?” She had asked, trying to play it all off as a joke.

Of course it was a joke to her.

This jealousy that she was pretending to affect.

Melissa only chuckled, though, and lightly swatted her on the ass with a dish towel, which did something unpleasantly delightful to her insides too.

“Damn straight,” she winked, and Barbara hasn’t been able to let go of the moment since. She rubs the emptiness on her ring finger almost subconsciously, as though she can still feel where it had cuffed her.

(The inlaid diamonds had almost been as heavy as her guilt.)

She gets Final Jeopardy right.

Derrida.

It’s a perfectly normal Saturday night.

After taking her makeup off, showering, and slipping into her favorite silky pajama set, she finally crawls into the king-sized bed that she had once shared with Gerald and tries to settle her mind by reading. She and the ladies at her Bible Club have been making their way through a pretty hefty devotional lately—(in-between a little light gossiping about Brother Carlton Sanders’ possible mistress, of course)—and Barbara tries to stay on top of the weekly readings as much as she can with her busy schedule.

But tonight, the words of God are falling on glassy eyes. She can only get through a few pages before she’s distracted, disconcerted, discontent—staring at the empty space next to her, gently biting her tongue between her teeth.

It’s been eleven months since she and Gerald divorced, their thirty-seven year marriage ending as it had so beautifully begun—with a moment of quiet intimacy. They laced their hands together in their attorney’s office and both quietly shed tears at what they were about to do.

She almost changed her mind then, right as her shaking pen was poised above the dotted line with her name neatly printed beneath it.

Almost conceded to everything that would be required of her to not let him go.

Almost gave that crucial piece of herself away.

Here, take it—I can’t do this.

I don’t know how to be alone.

I don’t know how to be without you.

But Gerald, still holding her other hand, squeezed it and silently reminded her it was okay.

They had done everything right in a desperate attempt to preserve their marriage.

They had talked to their dear pastor first, Brother Hank, who told them that God knew the plans He had for them, plans for them to prosper and not be harmed, plans for them to have hope and a future.

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that your future is together,” he had added kindly, peering between both of them with keen eyes. He had known them for well over twenty years now and had been their friend through most of them.

It was time, he implicitly said without ever saying the words, but neither Barbara nor Gerald had been ready to hear it then, both stubborn to the last.

They had gone to at least five months worth of couple’s counseling after that, Gerald an unstoppable force and Barbara an immovable object on the subject of her husband’s possible transfer. He was an excellent welder, and his company wanted to send him down to New Orleans to work on the cruise ships that docked and departed from the Big Easy. The pay was handsome—far more money than Barbara had ever seen in her entirety of a career as an public school educator—but the emotional toil was steep. 

Gerald wanted to move back to Louisiana—where she’d been raised and where they had initially met when he temporarily located there for a job. It clearly made more sense than him traveling back-and-forth between contracts, but Barbara had been adamant about staying in Philadelphia. She was too old to start anew at a different elementary school in a now foreign place. And she didn’t want to leave Abbott, having invested nearly half of her life there, with so much more left to give yet. 

Ava surely needed her. Though the once thoroughly incompetent principal had grown leaps and bounds over the past few years of her tenure, she still relied upon Barbara for some help with the budget and other administrative duties.

Her young mentees too—Janine, Jacob, and Gregory—all coming into their own as fine, young teachers, of course… but still, whenever they encountered some hard problem or another, they unfailingly continued to consult Barbara. They called her their work mom and she fondly (if a little exasperatedly) claimed them as her own.

And then there was the problem, the possibility, and the exquisite pain of surely losing Melissa Schemmenti.

Melissa—her dear, sweet Mel—independent and self-sufficient, bold and thoroughly capable and so full of life… probably didn’t need her.

But Barbara did.

Barbara needed her best friend.

She would never admit it aloud—not even to herself, much less to Gerald—but even the mere thought of parting with Melissa fueled an almost ungodly amount of her hesitation. She had been inseparable from the younger woman for nearly as long as she had been teaching at Abbott, then new to Philadelphia, lacking a community and a context beyond her nuclear family and the Baptist church they went to every Sunday.

But then there had been Melissa, whom she had instantly clicked with despite the thousands of differences between them: their ages, their upbringings, their overall demeanors and almost every last habit in-between. But before three months had passed since Mel had become a teacher at the school, the two of them had already claimed the round table closest to the fridge in the teacher’s lounge as their own.

A South Philly native, born and raised, Melissa took her under her wing and made her feel at ease in the city, something that even her husband hadn’t been able to accomplish. She would never forget this initial kindness, even though she has long since striven to repay it. 

She would always remember that Melissa had been the first person who made her feel at home.  

But there was something about this particular truth that felt like it was unsavory—a confession of sin weighing upon her otherwise stainless soul. 

So they argued about thousands of different things.

But never once about Melissa.

She wouldn’t dare probe that tender wound for Gerald to see, somehow finding it much more tenable to let it fester beneath her carefully buttoned shirt and become an abscess, a maw, dark and desolate, devouring her from the inside out.

It gnawed on her that her husband of three decades had to beg her to leave, but she innately knew that her friend of nearly the same amount of time didn’t have to so much as lift a finger to convince her to stay.

What was wrong with her?

How had her kind and loving marriage arrived at this terminal end?

(And what, pray tell, had her relationship with Melissa become in all the intervening years?)

(Friend was starting to feel insufficient, lacking the gravitas to encapsulate the fact that the two women had spent nearly thirty years together, teaching side-by-side in the unchanging hallways of Abbott Elementary. Partner felt closer—maybe comfortable even—but partner was dangerous too, laden with some of the same connotations that encircled the diamond encrusted band on her fourth finger.)

(So friend would have to fit. She would make it fit, damn it. She was Barbara Howard, by God, and if anyone could maneuver a square through a circular hole, it was surely her.)

“You could retire.” If Gerald had brought this suggestion up once, he had done it a hundred times. “My salary would finally be more than enough to support us, Barb, and you wouldn’t have to work anymore! You could finally have time for all the hobbies you’ve wanted to do!”

Barbara had intimately known that he was just trying to be considerate when he made remarks such as these, but it had simply devastated her, with each occasion, to know that he had thoroughly misunderstood her life’s project. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life pursuing hobbies; she wanted to be in Classroom 1A, teaching the next generation how to read.

Their marital counselor, a kindly lady named Mrs. Russell, emphasized honest communication, encouraging them to voice their wants, needs, and fears to each other—something which they increasingly found they could only do with her in the room, and even then, in front of the counselor and God Himself, Barbara could not be completely vulnerable.

“We’ve raised our daughters here,” she once said, deflecting.

“And our daughters are grown now,” Gerald replied gently—always gentle, her Ger. She loved that about him. Sitting across from him in a hard-backed chair, she had never hated that trait of his more, how it cast the weakness of her protestations in clear and ungainly light.

“But what about your family?” She grasped at straws. “Your stepfather?”

“My brother can finally step up to the plate to help with him, and we can always come back to visit.”

“Taylor’s only an hour or so away from us now.”

“Taylor can fly out to see us anytime she wants to.”

“Gerald,” she had only pleaded at the end, during the last fifteen minutes of their final appointment with the marriage counselor. Their careful budgeting wouldn’t allow them another, not if they wanted to make next month’s mortgage payment on time. “I’m not finished yet.”

Finished.

Barbara Howard used all her words very carefully, and this particular verb was no different. On her desperate tongue, it implied an end, a conclusion, a vital depletion.

She’d be passively destroyed, hollowed out, chipped away piece-by-sordid-piece, weathered with the patina of time until nothing was left but the ruins of herself still standing miraculously tall. She’d be the pillar of salt, perpetually looking back at the homeland she had made for herself as she slowly eroded to the grains.

I’m not finished yet.  

And I’d be finished if I went to New Orleans.

If I retired in a city I was unfamiliar with.

A ghost well before my time.

She begged him with her eyes, with the tears that were traitorously starting to leak from them, to read between the lines, to understand the magnitude of what she was still incapable of fully saying.

Gerald digested it quietly, agony straining every weathered line in his face. He stared at the ground and sat like a man carved from stone for what felt like minutes, hours, days—forever in a microscopic moment.

“Me neither, Barb,” he eventually croaked, finally looking up at her, with desolation in the darks of his eyes, and she knew at once that he wasn’t talking about leaving Philadelphia.

His own ghosthood was staying in it.

“I’m not finished either.”

Together, they had arrived at an untenable conclusion.

The only one that remained.

It was time.

They had been married for thirty-seven years, in love for perhaps forty.

Even still.

It was over. 

Finished.

It was an amicable split, a no-fault divorce, and the two of them have done everything in their power to remain on good terms with each other since then—not just for their girls’ sakes, but very much for their own. Their one irreconcilable difference has done nothing to change the fact that they still care for each other deeply, that they will always have thirty-seven wonderful years between them, that they will always be family. They chat on the phone at least once a month and send texts even more often than that. She forwards him mail all the way in Louisiana. He sends her pictures of weird birds he sees when he’s out on a job. She usually smiles and responds, LOL.  

Barbara most definitely isn’t in love with him anymore—the entire year they had spent fighting and ten months of separation besides has firmly put the nail in that coffin—but admittedly, she does miss him from time-to-time all the same. 

The companionship he offered. 

The safety.

The peace.

She places her devotional on top of her blanket-covered lap and stares off into the middle distance for what feels like an hour, though when she checks her phone, it’s only been three minutes. Her lockscreen is a selfie of her and Melissa from when they had gone on a road trip together this past spring.

It’d been the younger woman’s unsubtle way of saying, Hon, I’m dragging your mopey ass outta the house if it kills me.

Melissa’s chin is nestled against Barbara’s shoulder in the unsteadily taken picture, the sun glinting off the scarlet vividness of her hair, and Barbara herself is smiling down at her friend, visible affection in her eyes.

Love.

She is smiling even now, at this very minute, always heartened by the reminder that she exists at the same time as Melissa Schemmenti.

Oh, how she adores this woman.

It vaguely bothers her, though, that Melissa hasn’t returned her call or even sent a text to show that she's received it. It’s a bit unusual for her; she’s always been fairly quick about replying to Barbara…

She supposes that she’s just being a little clingy, though. 

Mel had mentioned something about going out this weekend after all. She likes to frequent bars occasionally and shoot pool with strangers.

Sometimes, she even takes them home.

Barbara crinkles her nose at the thought, distantly irritated by the image of Melissa swapping spit with some man who always ends up resembling Joseph in her head or trading lipstick with some woman who is devastatingly beautiful.

The women Melissa dates are always devastatingly beautiful.

That crucial fact always makes Barbara feel some type of way. She can deal with the Joseph substitutes—the slobs, the drunkards, the sleazes. After all, using Joseph as the paradigm and the example, she knows they’ll never last.

She cannot say the same of her own gender.

Indeed, she cannot say anything at all about the way that she has to repress an inexplicable urge to compete with Melissa’s inamoratas for her attention.

Even though she knows she maybe shouldn’t, Barbara wings one last text her friend’s way.

Girlfriend, call me back in the morning!

Let’s grab brunch.

Perhaps they can go to Over Easy—that breakfast café up the road from Melissa’s house—and inappropriately sip mimosas at eleven in the morning and share a stack of waffles as they talk about their week. And perhaps, like the last time they did as much, Barbara will have the opportunity to reach over and thumb away the little bit of whipped cream that somehow gets on Melissa’s cherry-red nose…

It'd been so lovely, sharing that domestic intimacy with her.

It doesn't strike her as odd at all that she wants to do it all over again.

It’s a perfectly normal Saturday night.

And then, Barbara’s phone rings precisely six minutes after midnight, startling her upright in that big, empty bed. 

Groaning, moaning, fumbling a little in the coagulated darkness, she flicks the latch on her bedside lamp and snatches her phone up from where it had been laying facedown on her devotional.

Her first thought, seeing the unregistered number, is that it’s just another one of those damn robocalls, interrupting what had been a very good sleep, but the area code seems to suggest that it’s local.

She tentatively decides to answer—perhaps solely to chew the midnight caller out—pulling the phone up to her ear.

“Hello?” She asks crossly. 

“Hello, yes,” comes a tired voice—gruff but not necessarily unkind. Clinical, practiced even. This person is a professional. “Is this… Barbara Howard?”

He says her name like he’s reading it from a document, and sudden terror carves through her like a knife. 

“Yes, this is she,” Barbara grips her phone so tightly that her arthritic wrist starts to ache. “May I ask whom I’m speaking to?”

All of the sleepiness has been sieved from her in an instant, shed like a decaying skin. She palms her stomach, suddenly and completely nauseous. 

“My name is Dr. Alex McGill, and I’m in charge of the emergency room at St. Vincent’s tonight,” the voice identifies itself, nearly doing her in right then and there. St. Vincent’s. The hospital about twenty minutes away. She’d given birth to Gina there, and the association immediately makes her think of her girls, even though one is certainly in New York and the other is all the way in California. But then she comes to her senses—remembers that it’s highly likely that she’s still listed on Gerald's medical forms—and that terrifies her just as powerfully. “I’m calling to inform you about—”

“Who is it?” She interrupts sharply, incapable of enduring polite decorum, not now, not when every muscle in her body is clenched with unbearable anxiety. 

There is only one type of phone call that this can possibly be.

A short pause.

And in that infinitesimal moment, that tenth of a second before the entirety of her world is irrevocably shaken at its foundation, Barbara suddenly realizes the awful answer before Dr. Alex McGill ever articulates it.

“I’m calling because you’re listed as Melissa Schemmenti’s emergency contact,” he says, so gently, but even still, Barbara lets out a strangled cry that she barely registers as coming from herself. “A driver in a truck rear ended her around eleven this evening and caused her to skid off the road.”

The proclamation is simply ruinous.

And its hypotheticals violently assault her, seizing across her mind’s eye in a whirl of vicious colors.

Melissa in a pool of crimson blood.

Melissa slumped over against the wheel, turning blue.

Melissa, cold, laid out beneath a white sheet.

They force Barbara Howard on her knees, these horrible visions, these phantasmagorias; she feels the cold metal of their possibility against her goosebump knotted skin. She waits for the inevitable pull of the trigger.

Melissa! She wants to yell. She wants to scream. She wants to shake the world with her primal grief and tear it all asunder until someone, anyone, feels an ounce of the horror that is currently rearranging her central nervous system.

Melissa.

Please, God. Not now, not yet—not ever. 

“Is she—“ She can’t quite get out, choked and choking.

“She’s still alive,” Dr. McGill quickly assures her, his voice steady where hers is not. “She’s in surgery now with one of St. Vincent’s finest.”

And Barbara, holding the phone against her ear like it’s a lifeline, begins to weep with visceral relief.

She’s alive.

The doctor tries to console her further, she thinks—perhaps even giving her specifics—but she barely registers that he's speaking; her head only has room enough for one recurring refrain.

She's alive.

She's alive.