Dry Fire
Part Five
He let the revolver dangle in his hand and started to get up before he realized he still had his finger wrapped around the trigger. “Great, good job, ya moron. Blow a hole in your damn foot that’ll show the cancer, really show her up too.” He mumbled to himself before he laid the heavy thing down on the nightstand on top of the piece of paper that spelled his inevitable doom.
He came around the bed and walked into the master bath. The tub and tile would be easier to clean up, but he barely fit in the damn thing. He would have to climb in and shift his legs over the side and let them dangle. The whole thing seemed so absurd. What would he care if his legs looked funny? He would be long dead, his brains so much runny garbage dried out on the shitty yellow tiles he always hated looking at. No, this was her bathroom. It didn’t seem right.
He remembered one of those crime shows she was always binge watching, people tended to go when they died. Nothing put him off the whole thing more than knowing he’d be found with a load in his shorts. He took a moment to empty out what needed to be and what he could to limit the chances of that particular embarrassment and then he went back into the bedroom.
The revolver and the piece of paper were coming along as he took one final tour of a house that he was only a few years free from making payments on. Just like the bathroom so much of the rest of the place didn’t feel right. It wasn’t a cop out or a chance to argue what he planned to do, he just wanted this one last thing he did to have enough meaning to him. The living room was all hers, dining room and kitchen too. The spare bedroom was her sewing and crafts closet, doing it in there would be a direct affront. Again, he didn’t hate her and certainly not enough to mess up her things.
Wouldn’t anywhere in the house be messing things up though? Weren’t realtors required to tell people about deaths in the house when they sold a place? Of course, she would sell. With him gone and her able to shack up with that sister of hers. Everything made would be pure profit, she would be insane not to sell.
The garage!
The place wasn’t exactly his, just a covered space for the cars when they felt like bothering to park them inside, but nearly everything that was his was out there. Packed up in boxes or stashed in one container or another underneath the never used workbench he built one summer when he thought he liked woodworking. He did not.
The place was dirty, and hot, the concrete floor was stained brown from years of leaking oil and what have you. It was as good a place as any but it was hot. Damn hot.
He would cook out here. If she waited until after the weekend to come and get the rest of her things…the smell. No. The garage wouldn’t do. He was looking around, dismayed and wondering if he would have to wait and go through with the worthless charade of leaving on a fishing trip and never coming back. He would have to wait another day. A day being stuck there in that place, waiting to see if she came to pack up her things and have one final argument.
That was the crux of it all for him and why it had to be today. There were thirty-three years of those arguments and he always lost them, or came away wishing he had. Bad enough that things ended the way they had during his early arrival home. The argument had in the aftermath of that would be nothing but a word salad of how dare you and you made me.