Typical...2

“Where’s Daddy?” Anita had turned on lights and locked the door, noticed the letters, went into their—her bedroom and noticed Michael’s things missing; some of his things. There were still t-shirts and underwear in a drawer, paintings that he stole time to create remained on the living room walls. His cologne, the deodorant he never varied, had greeted her at the bedroom entranceway. Terry was standing in the middle of the living room when she retraced her steps. She could see the slightest hint of confusion on his tiny, sweet face. When Michael was in the Navy they made a point of telling Terry when his dad was on the ship those stretches of days that Michael was at sea. Before coming home that last time, he had been overseas for six months.

“I don’t know, baby.” Anita answered as she stared at the ivory paper with black writing. But she did know; at least, she knew he could be in only one of two places: with his parents in New York or with his grandparents in Mississippi. He had no other place to go. He was gone, so that meant he had quit his job. Money. Michael had walked out and taken an entire income with him. It registered, but she was more pre-occupied with the letters.

“He’s on the ship.” Terry offered as he tramped off to his room and his things, the security of what he knew for sure. Anita absently stretched out her fingers to pass through the air stirred by her energetic son.

Anita’s letter was an assessment of blame. “What happened, baby? It just all went wrong somehow. I know I tried.”  She bit down on her lip only partly wishing to draw blood; she gave herself credit for the smallest evidence of restraint. To Michael, “trying” involved sly attempts to pressure her into having sex after she’d left their bed to share the full-sized one in Terry’s room. Her eyes slid down the rest of the words which she could hear pounding in her ears—the same excuses, the incessant whining that had always hovered around the edges of their marriage. Michael was a mama’s boy and frequently complained and pouted; every argument ended with the reverberation of his sobs. It was an absolutely perfect match with Anita’s veracious maternal need to take care. But the part of her that required the strength and security of a solid man had been drained by his constant histrionics.

She could hear Terry digging in the large, plastic toy box, searching for a specific toy that only he could identify. “Terry, Mommy and Daddy aren’t getting along right now, so I’m going to live somewhere else. It has nothing to do with you. It’s not your fault.” It was funny how Anita was the one with the psychology degree yet the idea to inform her three-year-old that his father walking out on him was not his fault had never entered her mind. She steal held her keys, her purse hung from her left shoulder. She was in a sort of curiously calm shock, totally incongruous with what had happened to her in the fifteen minutes she and Terry had been in the apartment. The thing that had happened to her life throughout that entire day while she harassed people for immediate payment of their bills, she hadn’t known a thing about. Not for sure. Even acknowledging how sharply her spidey sense had tingled that morning, she couldn’t believe Michael had just walked out.

Copyright 2007  M. B. Levine

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