She asked that question two years before graduation and she never once asked me anything except whether the pharmacy was just for now.
He came to my apartment a week after the motel with flowers and a folded letter in his coat pocket.
“Please. Just let me explain properly.”
“Did your lawyer tell you to come?”
His silence got there before he did.
“I know how this looks,” he said.
“No,” I said. “You know how it is.”
He cried. Not performatively; I will give him that. And I stood in my own doorway with one hand on the door and found that I could look at it without feeling anything I recognized.
“I loved you,” he said.
“I think you did,” I said. “Just never more than you loved what I made possible.”
PART 5 — THE GLOVES
The settlement took eleven months and Mabel earned every dollar.
Those eleven months were the worst of my life and I want to say so, because these accounts always cut from the confrontation straight to the new beginning and leave out the year in the middle where nothing happens and you are broke.
