Dry Fire
Part Three
The truth is, he never really looked at anyone else. Everyone has stray thoughts sure but really, when she was already driving off and there was no one to yell or say Barry? to, that was what his mind settled on. The lies he was busy telling himself to make himself feel better. There was never anyone else, there never needed to be. She was enough for him. He had a few concerns though, an old friend of his back during those early years. Some guy from her work she talked about a lot not too long after that. He chalked it up to petty insecurity at that time. Now though. Didn’t they say once a cheater always a cheater?
Really though, what did it matter? She was fucking the neighbor because their marriage was just as old and uncomfortable as their mattress and that was that.
He reached over, daring to let his ass slip a little farther off the end of their ridiculously high bed. She was always the one who insisted the damn thing be so high off the ground. His opened his nightstand drawer and grimaced. The damn thing had more medicine in it than the cabinet in the bathroom. When had that happened? He had to push and pull at the mess of pill bottles, old receipts, pens, and worthless bric-a-brac until he finally found it.
The thing was heavy. Far heavier than he remembered. It was his fathers, one of about three things worth keeping out of an entire house full of garbage he had to pay strangers to haul away. She hated it of course, even the idea of it. For the first few years he had to keep it in the garage in the bottom of a tool box. He never told her about moving it. She never went snooping in his things and that was that. After all, the stupid thing only had one use, or so he thought at the time, and that was to scare off burglars. Nothing was going to scare off burglars sitting in the bottom of a toolbox out in a garage.
It was still in the brown leather holster he found it in when he was digging through his father’s things. He never took it out or looked at it closer than to acknowledge what it was before placing it in the tiny box marked home. The snap was hard to open, he pulled at the brown wood handle and it jerked free. It was colored silver and it was a revolver; he knew that much but that was as far as his knowledge of guns went. He placed the gun on the edge of his night stand and tossed the holster back in the drawer before shoving it closed.
He stood up long enough to pull his wallet from his back pocket. He had, with a certain amount of pride, aged out into the realm of men who carry obnoxiously overladen wallets in their back pockets. After all, we all live in the time of paper work, paper work, and more paper work and as you get older you just wind up with more and more of the stuff and it’s all pretty important so what is a guy to do? Carefully fold it all and play Tetris with it all until it crams every possible fold of his old and tired, stretched out lord Buxton, of course.
He pulled the most recently, carefully creased peace of paper out of the overstuffed outer billfold before replacing the uncomfortable rock right where it belongs, pushing into his right ass check for all eternity. He sat back down on his side of the bed, careful to keep his feet planted so as not to slide right off, as he unfolded the piece of paper.
The single piece of paper wasn’t alone to begin with, it’s been recently orphaned from an entire manual of bullshit stuffed inside an equally useless pamphlet rather carelessly labeled “Dealing with Grief.”
Dealing with Grief? The obscene thing had a picture of some white-haired grandpa with his smug, smiling family surrounding him. Who the fuck would be smiling when they got this kind of sit-down news? Come on down and around by the fire kids and grandkids alike and listen to a tale, a tale called Colorectal cancer.
That was the gist of what he had anyway. The only piece of paper he deemed worthy of keeping didn’t call it that. There was some obnoxious, fifteen consonant long aberration with a handful of vowels shoved in for good measure that was supposed to sum up in doctor speak that he was abso-fucking-lutely not going to wake up in the morning knowing it was all a bad dream.