four MARGARET part 4
The apartment was Grinch-bare now, spotless. Fridge cleared and cleaned, freezer defrosted. Vincent must have had some help getting things moved out. He still knew people here from high school, a couple of guys from his band who’d never left town.
The night I came back for my microKORG all the money from the bedroom floor was on the coffee table under a scented candle. I checked the fan of bills for a note but refused to take Vincent’s cash.
Now the money was rolled up and tucked inside a Mason jar in the center of the floor.
I took the cash, aimed all the presidents’ heads in one direction and counted. After a second count to confirm I put the money in my purse and looked down at the jar. Still no note.
Vincent hadn’t made a single attempt to contact me. No tearful drunken apology, no absurd semi-sober explanation filled with lies and science-fiction.
He had an established history of losing phones but I knew for damn sure he had my number. It was written in Sharpie on the inside of his belt, a habit he adopted in the days before cell phones to supplement his poor memory for numbers.
A few months after we moved in together I brought home a bottle of wine on a Friday night and we split it to celebrate our pidgin anniversary. Vincent announced he would make dinner, took my debit card and left the apartment in our car. He phoned two hours later, drunk and nearly unintelligible, wanting a ride home. I took a cab and found him passed out on top of a crushed grocery bag of salmon, lemon, new potatoes and pesto in the bottom of a phone booth at the Beacon Hill Red Apple Market. He was still clutching one end of his belt, our home phone number visible like a clue prised from the hand of a dead man in a French Noir film. That incident marked the beginning of the end of Vincent’s Golden Age of drinking. Ushered in a period of steep decline where it became increasingly difficult for me to watch him wave a red flag in my face and still see that shit as funny or cute.
The last time he did this I wrote a letter. An intervention was never an option because Vincent had no family, didn’t have any real friends or a proper job to lose like a normal alcoholic. I did my best to diplomatically depict my situation and illustrate the contrast between the way Vincent was living and the life I wanted to create with him. I leveraged my rage, my happiness, my faith in our relationship. I marketed myself as a fun buddy. A supportive partner, a matter-of-fact nurse, a strict prison matron. A worried mommy, some kind of martyr.
I wasn’t accustomed to having a boundary hold with Vincent. What had I written in that last letter? I felt like an absent-minded witch who’d struggled a thousand times to perfect a spell but didn’t pay attention to the final, successful formula.
I used the apartment bathroom for the last time. Remembered kicking Vincent when I found him face-down on the floor. Recalled how I gagged at the smell of alcohol on him, fuming from him, and how I kicked him again. Stepped over him to use the toilet.
He mumbled, rolled like a seal, said something about bears. Rifles?
I hated his face then, checkered like chickenwire from the hexagonal tile floor. Watched the alcohol drag him back down, a poisoned dumb animal growling then unconscious at my feet. I jabbed a heel hard into his hip when I reached for the toilet paper and found a bare brown tube.
Now I hiked my skirt and gathered it in a rumpled bouquet against my waist. Sat knock-kneed and peed beside a fluffy new roll of tissue, overhanging end folded to a point like the tip of a two-ply necktie. I looked around the beautiful bathroom, pristine and empty, warm with light. I had always loved the tile work in here.
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