Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn by Kris Radish

peeking under the couch, searching desperately for a pile of sentences that he can put together in an answer.
    “I thought we could try and work this out.”
    “Work this out,” I repeat back to him. “Work this out.”
    “Yes,” he says forcefully. “People go to therapy, talk about things, see where they are headed. It happens all over the place. In fact, it's happening right now in dozens of places right in this city.”
    A spark of anger rises inside of me. I think I could hit him. Really hard with the back of my hand on the edge of his chin so his head pops up. I actually have to hold my hand so I don't do it. I could actually hit him.
    “Is that what you want, Bob?”
    He doesn't hesitate, which is a bigger part of the answer than the answer itself.
    “I'm not sure.”
    My response comes as quickly.
    “I will go to a therapist, but I will not go with you. I have to go. But, Bob, this has nothing to do with you. Nothing at all.”
    There is a look of tight confusion galloping across his face. I can hear thundering horse hooves and the room is suddenly filled with dust from dozens of legs pounding in the stampede.
    “I'm sorry, Meg,” he fairly whimpers. “Jesus God, I'm sorry.”
    Once I loved this man. I could not wait to see him on Friday nights and the simple thought of him made me weak in the knees. We made babies together and I cried in his arms. One night, so long ago I could not begin to reach back and pull out an exact time, we stayed up for two entire days reading poetry to each other, making love and then reading more. Was I twenty? Who was I? What was I doing? Did I really love him?
    Questions are piling so high around me, I have to stop myself, otherwise I will not be able to get out of the room. The door will be blocked shut, the windows sealed; any form of escape will be obliterated.
    “Bob,” I finally whisper, but I do not go to him.
    He looks up and what I see is him in that bed, our bed, and the woman under the red tent and his knees bucking and his head pushed back against the headboard and the bed moving and I slowly begin to back away from him.
    “I can't help you now.”
    He says nothing.
    “I can't help you, Bob.”
    “I'm not sure I understand, but I do understand that I deserve nothing from you right now, Meg. Nothing at all.”
    “You will have to leave me alone,” I demand. “I don't know what will happen. I don't know anything right now. Do you understand that, Bob?”
    “Yes.”
    “Fine” is the last thing I say or will say to him for a very long time.
     
     
    Katie calls late Friday and says she wants to stay overnight again at her best friend's house. I say yes and at the same moment am choked by a wad of panic that begins boiling in my stomach and rolls to the top of my throat. I am going to be home alone. Again. The quiet of my nights in the house, his house, someone's house, has risen up to haunt me, and in every room there are laughing echoes taunting me with voices I can barely hear.
    “What?” I ask the walls through the beating drum of my own heart. “What do I do, where do I go?”
    My feet listen. They know what to do. I push some money into my pocket, dislodge the house key from my ring set, lace on my tennis shoes and I start walking.
    In three blocks with the summer air blowing in across Lake Michigan, sounds of neighbors putting away their grills and the rumbling conversations from open car windows, I realize with a great deal of glee that I am lonely. Maybe I have been lonely for a very long time. The house walls. My schedule, the absence of a husband, my daughter's exploding life—I am alone more than I realized.
    “Not tonight,” I say out loud. “People. Just some people.”
    I diagnose my malaise as loneliness just as the RadCalf Wine Bar and Café appears at the end of the block. Before I can talk myself out of going into the bar alone, before I remember how many years it has been since I went into a bar alone, before I realize the last time