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With This Ring by Ginger Beck She stood in the small dining room, crowded by the hand-me-down dining table that mocked her by its classic, grown-up style. Everything in this house was false. It was her lunch hour. She’d come home yet again to find him sitting in the living room with a friend in the living room, high on drugs she knew nothing about. The week before, she’d found acid – within reach of the baby - in the clear outside wrapper of a Marlboro light pack in his pants pockets and thought it was cigarette ashes. She found out differently when he scrambled through the trash looking for it the same day. The fissure inside her had been growing for nearly two years finally broke. Everything was red, and all she wanted was to go home. This house that she’d tried so hard to make pleasant, to make comfortable for the baby, and for him, was never home. She grabbed the nearest weapon, a paperback copy of Delores Claiborne by Stephen King, and hurled it at him, she screamed at him that she was leaving and never coming back. He laughed and told her to get the fuck out. Running to the car, she grabbed her chunky cellular phone. It cost a pretty penny to make a long distance call, but she would have given every cent to call who she needed. Daddy was in Arkansas, an hour away. He told her not to worry, and told her what she’d needed to hear for months: “I’m on my way.” She drove like a madwoman to the babysitter’s house. It was naptime and the children were laying on pallets and in playpens in the quiet, dark house. She scanned the room and found the baby, picking her up gently so as not to startle her. After putting the car seat in the car and heading back to work, she sat in the office holding her daughter tightly, tears burning her face as she waited for the phone to ring. Her co-workers comforted her and patted her and covered the front desk. Less than an hour passed and her father called, “Meet me at your house. We’re almost there.” At the house, the look on her husband’s face was worth the worry. Her massive father and matching brother darkened the doorway and terrified him in his haze of smoke. “Don’t start any trouble and everything will go smoothly, you hear me, son?” her father commanded. Her husband nodded, bloodshot eyes wide and darting between the huge men. She ran to the baby’s room to throw clothes and diapers in a suitcase, grabbed garbage sacks and threw what little of her own clothes she had into them. Her brother manhandled the new couch she’d worked hard to purchase, her first and only nice and new furniture she had ever bought, and hauled it outside to strap it to the top of his Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was sort of comical really, hauling a couch on top of a Jeep. She felt giggles of hysteria starting to bubble but forced them back when her husband called to her, begging for a second chance: He didn’t mean it. He would change. He would quit everything: the lying, the women, the drugs, the drinking. But she had broken. Where before there was sadness and hurt and dreams for their future, there was now only blackness. She was hollow, and that empty space was filling quickly with strength, hope, and elation. It was over. Her 1992 Honda Civic was loaded with what she could fit, including the baby and the Rottweiler. As she drove behind her father and brother down the neighborhood street, her heart raced with euphoria. Leaving Mississippi, they crossed the river. Since childhood she had been over the two lane bridge between states countless times, yet this time felt like the first. Halfway across the steel giant, the currents of the Mississippi churning beneath, she felt the last chains of the past few years leave her. She dared to grin. With her right hand, she twisted the cheap gold band off the fourth finger of her left and threw the tarnished symbol of unity out the window and into the river. |
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