Dear Wife(4)

She checks the time on her cell. “If we hurry, I could get everything through the system by close of business tomorrow.”

By then I’ll be long gone.

I push the envelope across the desk. “Then let’s hurry. I start my new job in two days, and I’d really like to be settled before then.”

She flips through the packet of papers. Her fingers pause on my bank statement, and the air in the room thickens into a soupy sludge. Apartment complexes require a minimum salary of three times the rent, which is why I added a couple of zeros to that statement in lieu of proof of salary. Part of the preparations for Day One included learning Photoshop.

It’s not the amount she’s focused on, but my former address. “Arkansas, huh? So what brings you to town?”

I relax in the chair. “I got a job at QuikTrip.”

It’s a lie, but judging by the way her face brightens, she buys it. “A friend of mine works there. She loves it. Great benefits. Way better than this place, though if you ever repeat that I’ll deny ever saying it.” She grins like we’re in on the same joke, and so do I.

I gesture to the packet in her hand. “I don’t have pay stubs yet, which is why I’ve included a copy of my contract.” Forged, but still. It looks real enough. As long as her friend doesn’t work in human resources, nobody but me and the Pine Bluff Public Library printer will ever know it’s a fake.

I give her time to flip through the rest of the documents, which are real. My real driver’s license. My real social security number. My real address—scratch that, former address. This entire plan rests on her accepting the papers in her hands, on me laying this decoy trail, then disappearing.

She looks up with a wide smile. “It’s not often that I get a prospective tenant with a record this spotless. Unless the system catches something I’ve missed, this is going to be a piece of cake.”

I can’t tell if her words are a question or a warning. I smile like I assume they’re neither.

She drops the papers on her desk and reaches for the mouse. “Let’s get you in the system, then, why don’t we?”

  You and I met at a McDonald’s, under the haze of deep-fried potatoes and a brain-splitting migraine. The headache is what lured me there, actually, what gave my body a desperate craving for a Happy Meal. A magical, medicinal combination of starch and salt and fructose that works better than any pill I’ve ever poked down, the only thing that will loosen the vise clamping down on my skull and settle my churning stomach.

But good, so there I sat in my sunglasses, nibbling french fries while tiny monsters pounded nail after nail into my brain, when you leaned into the space between our tables.

“What’d you get?”

I didn’t respond. Speaking was excruciating and besides, I had no clue what you were talking about.

You pointed to the box by my elbow. “Don’t those things come with a toy? What is it?”

I pushed my sunglasses onto my head and peered inside. “It’s a plastic yellow car.” I pulled it out and showed it to you.

“That’s a Hot Wheels.”

I settled it on the edge of my tray. “A what?”

“Pretty sure that one’s a Dodge Charger. Every boy on the planet has had a Hot Wheels at some point in their lives. My nephew has about a billion of them.”

You were distractingly gorgeous, the kind of gorgeous that didn’t belong in a fast-food joint, chatting up a stranger about kids and their toys. Tall and dark and broad-boned, with thick lashes and a strong, square chin. Italian, I remember thinking, or maybe Greek, some long-lost relative with stubborn genes.

I held the car across the aisle. “Take it. Give it to your nephew.”

Your lips sneaked into a smile, and maybe it was the carbs finally hitting my bloodstream, but you aimed it at me that day, and the pain lifted just a little.

Three days later, I was in love.

So now, when I push through the glass door to the restaurant, I am of course thinking of you. Different state, different McDonald’s, but still. It feels fitting, almost poetic. You and I ending in the same spot we began.

The smell hits me, french fries and sizzling meat, and it prompts a wave of nausea, a faint throbbing somewhere deep in my skull, even though I haven’t had a migraine in months. I guess it’s true what they say, that scent is the greatest memory trigger, so I shouldn’t be surprised that one whiff of McDonald’s can summon the beginnings of a migraine. I swallow a preventative Excedrin with a bottle of water I purchase at the register.

For a fast-food restaurant at the mouth of a major interstate, the place is pretty deserted. I weave through the mostly empty tables, taking note of the customers scattered around the dining area. A mother flipping through a magazine while her kids pelt each other with chicken nuggets, a pimply teenager watching a YouTube video on his phone, an elderly couple slurping brown sludge up their straws. Not one of them looks up as I pass.

I select a table by the window with a view of the parking lot. A row of pickup trucks glitter in the late afternoon sun, competing for most obnoxious. Supersized tires with spit-shined rims, roll bars and gun racks, wavy flag decals on the rear window. People of God, guns and Trump, according to the bumper stickers, a common Midwestern stereotype that I’ve found to be one hundred percent true.

Another stereotype: the lone woman in sunglasses, sitting at a fast-food restaurant with no food is up to no good. I consider buying a dollar meal as cover, but I’m too nervous to eat. I check my watch and try not to fidget. Three minutes to five.