Shelly spoke loudly into the phone as she walked across the room, “Mommy will be home shortly.”
Reaching a patch of empty hallway near the bathroom doors, she hushed her tone and hissed into the phone, “You’ll get paid when I have the money. I don’t know when that will be.
She paused and listened and then snapped “Then sue me, go ahead. Fine.”
She slammed the phone shut and sighed deeply, her eyes focused on the dingy gray wall in front of her. They were going to turn the phone off any minute now. She was not sure how much more of this she could take, but for the sake of her daughter she would take as much as the world dished out, because she was one hell of a good woman.
“Bill collectors?” a deep voice behind her said. “They try to shake you up. Don’t worry about it.”
Embarrassed, she did her best to muster a weak smile and nodded. She looked into the main dining hall. If he heard her, did they hear her? She would die if they did.
“So I see you’re not wearing a ring over here,” the man said, each word taxed by a strong, guttural accent heard only in the Valley.
Her heart sank. She was in no mood for this. “But I see you are,” she snapped.
Surprised, he looked down at the gold band on his finger and said, “I guess I should take that off, huh?”
She sensed he was not being sarcastic or coy and there was a look of sincere questioning in his eyes, but no one, she reckoned, could be that stupid.
“If I were a cheating piece of scum,” she said brushing past him, “I would.”
He recoiled, stung by her words that lit into him one by one, like burning arrows.
“It’s not like that,” he said, almost shouting, but he did not shout because it was not his way. “I’m separated and not divorced yet. You just—it’s just takin’ it off you know, it’s — um.” He threw up his arms and looked to the left, “I jumped the gun on that one. I’m sorry. I’m new at picking women up.”
She could tell they were honest words spoken by an honest man.
“You laid that on with a trowel.” She smiled but the words came out sounding harsher then she intended and because he was looking at the floor when she spoke, he missed the adjoining smile.
“I didn’t mean picking up women in that sense, what I meant was,” he threw his hands in the air, totally and completely defeated. “I work with my hands.” He showed her his palms. “Words and me, forget it. I’m sorry.”
She felt sorry for him. He was a human being in deeply over his head and he had resigned himself to drowning. He seemed like a nice guy and he was handsome, but— She said softly, “I’m real flattered and all, but I don’t date guys who are separated. I’m sorry but there’s just too much baggage with that. I’m really sorry.”
Sal stood to his full, considerable height, and mustering what little dignity he felt he had left he said bravely, “No problem. No big deal. I understand completely. In fact, that’s a smart move.”
“I have a daughter,” she continued. “It could confuse her”
Embarrassed, he stared across the aisle at a homely, heavy-set young lady in a red dress who seemed to be hiding herself in a booth far in the back.
“I’m not being mean or anything, it’s just that—”
“I understand,” he said with a smile she liked instantly. “Separated people, they got issues and suitcases, like you said.”
“Baggage.”
“Yeah, and luggage, you name it,” he said.
She stopped leaving. It seemed like the decent thing to do. He needed to talk and she felt compelled to listen.
She nodded and gave him the slightest of smiles.
“I hate this singles thing,” he said more to himself than to her. “At my age, and after fifteen years of marriage, you just feel like you should get some sort of seniority rating, privileges of rank. But you don’t. You just have to start over again. And I want to start over again, but I don’t want to. You understand that?”
She had to laugh. She understood it exactly. “Oh, brother,” she said with a wave, “believe me, I do.” She was glad she had stopped leaving.
He didn’t hear her. He was talking to himself aloud. “The thing is,” he said never moving his gaze away from the picture, “I don’t know what happened. Over the years, things steamrolled, and the next thing you know, the entire situation just went too far.”
“Yeah,” she said, “and you don’t know how to make it stop or get it back to where it was. And you’re so dug into your points, your principles on making him try to understand that you don’t hear the other side anymore. You want to go back to what things were and you can’t, and you know that even if you could it would never work, and things would never be the same. You just want it all to go away. We went through so much together and most of it was his fault. Still when it’s over, you’re shell-shocked and at the same time you feel like the whole world sees your failure.”
They fell into a comfortable silence for a second, each staring into different directions. After a couple of seconds, he spoke up, but without looking at her, and said, “I regret everything. For these past two years, that’s all I’ve done, regret, regret, and regret some more. I think the problem with that is, that you can get so caught up in regretting the past you start to forfeit the future. What I resent is that I’m an intelligent, capable person, but I’m in this place that I don’t understand. I’m in over my head. I’m confused.”
“You mean about life?” she asked worriedly.
“No,” he answered, “I mean divorce. It doesn’t come with a roadmap. Neither does life. But you wish it did though, huh?”
She smiled and said, “Listen, about divorce and making sense out of it. I can tell you from my own life, you’ll never understand why you got divorced. And if you spend too much time thinking about it, you become a slave to trying to understand what happened. So when you give that up, you start thinking, “Will I ever love again?”
“What I regret so much is the harm I’ve done to my daughter. I may get over this, but she may never get over this. She’s with my wife, who is good. She’ll bring her up better than I ever could, but I gotta say, she poisoned her against me and that bothers me. When there’s kids involved, there is really no such thing as a no fault divorce. You know what the most hurtful thing that was ever said to me was? My little girl says to me one day, ‘What about your love?’ and I said, ‘It’s over, Princess,’ and she says, ‘No, Daddy I mean me.’ I felt like a knife got rammed into my stomach. Divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there's less of you. I think my ex is crazy.”
“I know my ex is crazy,” she said and then added, “You’re easy to talk to.”
“You too.” “It’s nice to get things off your shoulders, huh? You’re busy and here I am rambling on.”
“It’s okay.”
An easy silence fell over them and he said, “I live alone. It’s very hard for me to be alone.”
“I live with my daughter,” she said. “It’s sort of like living alone.”
“I don’t do alone well,” he added. “I’m a people person. I come from a big Italian family. People all over the place. When I was a kid, I used to wish for just one minute in the bathroom without somebody banging on the door.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “To live without being loved or giving love, it’s not really living, it’s just like surviving, and frankly, I’m scared. I’m man enough to say that, too. I don’t care what people think.”
“There’s no shame in honesty.” Shelly said.
He liked her. She was nice. For the first time in months, he felt his shoulders lower and loosen. “Still,” he said, “you wonder sometimes, why you try..”
“You know what I miss?” she asked. “I miss watching movies with somebody else. Watching movies alone, it’s just not the same thing, you know? I miss movies.”
“Well, look,” Sal said, “you know, you like movies, and I like movies. Maybe if you’re interested—”
“Yeah,” she said, “I would like that. A lot. But I’m still involved with the guy I used to live with. He might move back in. We’re working on it.”
He smiled and nodded and said, “It’s all right, I’ll be around. Let me know if anything ever changes.”