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ter at the front of the store that I considered a solution to the mystery. Surely this woman was, or had been, married to a friend of mine, a dorm-mate in college. Yes, I had likely met my own wife at their wedding, only to hear from someone at my wedding years later that this woman and my friend were filing for divorce. I heard he took the kid too.
The woman was standing at the craft store checkout then, and I could not see her face, not her full face anyway. Twice she moved her head to the side as if she were gazing out over the parking lot, unboth- ered by the young employee who was ringing up her crafts, and I could catch the white of an eye and the intimate corner where her lips met. Still, I could not be sure whether this woman was the same woman who had told her husband, on the altar, that she did not need him, who had not cited some progressive wholeness, but who had instead reassured her dearly beloved that Jesus Christ was already filling her ev- ery need, that my former dorm-mate was just along for the proverbial ride. I wondered where that left her now. Did the now-absent husband and every-oth- er-weekend child leave a hole in a woman so filled
by the omniscient Christ as to wave Him around her wedding like the chaperone’s intimacy-busting ruler at a middle school dance? Was it even reasonable to expect room for another man, much less a baby, in such an arrangement? Either way, the woman was paying for her crafts. Soon, she would again be gone from the periphery of my life. This, of course, as- sumes that she was indeed the woman at the craft store in the first place. I stood watching, alone with my growing belly and my two spools of thread, wait- ing for answers.
My dorm-mate had been the sort of friend who was good for drinking beer and for smoking cigarettes, the sort of friend whose bond fades when you’re
all out of smokes or having to stuff plastic cups into trash bags before heading off to work. Sometimes, I wonder if I am also this sort of friend, or worse, this sort of husband. When I am sober, I hardly have any- thing to ask my wife, to ask anybody. My mind floats just out of my own grasp, ready only to respond. It is no real wonder then, my old dorm-mate’s disappear- ing after he tied the knot, and who could blame him, having to compete with Jesus Christ for this woman’s attention. I, for one, was never able to make the short drive across town to his house, 20 minutes and two highway interchanges.
Perhaps, in the end, it had been a large and jealous Jesus who had brought about their divorce. Perhaps fistfuls of post-wedding weight had done them in. Or perhaps they had simply run out of words. I still ask myself whether it takes so little to undo holy matri- mony, whether it is worth our time then to go along ascribing holiness. My old dorm-mate had really cried at his wedding, tears and snot and red on his cheeks. I had been picture-perfect smiles at my own wedding, hardly a glossy eye. Did we ever stand a chance? Again, I considered the thread in my hands. Again, I sought out the woman’s face at the register eying her purchases, which were now ready to go in a paper bag. Then it hit me: if I could make it to where she was standing before she took the bag and left,
I could ask her where it all went wrong. I could ask her if I would soon suffer the same fate. But then the woman was leaving, still a mystery, and I was putting both spools of thread back onto the rack.
Before I left, I pressed my face against the storefront and watched the woman drive away, her identity still obscured, this time behind a tinted windshield as she backed up and out of the parking lot. The employees at the register were asking if they could help me,
but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of the distance between myself and the woman, between myself
and the young couple at the bistro. I was thinking about the bolt of wool in the front seat of my car and whether it could be made into something more than a scarf, more than an accent in a painful photograph. I was thinking about love and bistros and weddings and craft stores, the places where love goes to die, and I realized then that I hadn’t thought about love in far too long.
Brown has worked as a literary editor and as an award-winning newswriter. His literary work has appeared in or is set to appear in Full Stop, Oyster River Pages, Abandon Journal, COUNTERCLOCK, Jokes Review, Westview, PopMatters, Oracle Fine Arts Review, The Tulsa Voice, and elsewhere. He is a Goddard College MFA graduate and lives in Milwaukee, WI.
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