The Green Dress
I spent two years waiting for a man who kept three phones on his nightstand and never once answered mine after nine o'clock. I know how that sounds. I'm a forty-one-year-old high school biology teacher. I am not supposed to be the woman who sits in her car outside a diner at eleven at night, watching through tinted glass for a shadow she recognizes. But there I was. Again.
The diner was called The Rusty Spoon, right off I-25 in Albuquerque. Thursday nights, he told me he played poker with some guys from his old construction crew. For two years, I believed him. When you love someone, you believe the lazy lies because the alternative is unthinkable.
That Thursday, I wasn't even going to go. Then I found the dry-cleaning ticket in the pocket of his jacket. He'd told me he was visiting his mother in Santa Fe that weekend. The ticket was for a green dress. Not mine. Size four. I'm a ten.
I drove to the Rusty Spoon with the ticket folded in my palm like a blade.
His truck was parked crooked near the dumpsters. Earl's truck. My fiancé of eight months. The man who had stood in my kitchen in March and told me he'd never felt at home anywhere until he walked into my house. I believed that too.
Through the window, I saw him in the corner booth. He had his arm around a girl who couldn't have been older than twenty-five. Blonde. Pink sweater. A flash of green fabric under her coat on the seat beside her. She laughed at something, threw her head back, and he kissed her temple the same way he kissed mine every morning before he left for work.
I didn't cry in the car. I drove home and sat on the back porch until the sky went gray. There's a cholla cactus in my yard that blooms one night a year, white flowers that open when it's dark. I watched them until the bees found them.
Then I did something I'd never done before. I didn't pack his things in a rage. I didn't call his mother. I didn't text him fifty times demanding an explanation.
I called a locksmith.
By noon on Friday, Earl's key didn't work. He'd charmed the locksmith into cutting him a spare copy that same afternoon — I found out when I heard the deadbolt turn at nine that night and I was already sitting up on the couch with the lights off. I called a second locksmith the next morning, paid him triple to come out on a Saturday, and taped a note to the invoice: under no circumstances is a spare cut for anyone but me.
Earl banged on the door for a while. Then he called. I didn't answer. He left voicemails, one after another, his voice starting off the way it always started. "Hey babe, what's goin' on?" Then it got tighter. "Alice, what the fuck." Then, the one I still have saved, the one I've listened to maybe twice because it taught me something. "You're really gonna do this? You're gonna throw away two years over a misunderstanding?"
I didn't throw away two years. I let go of them. There's a difference.
I stayed with him as long as I did because I was afraid of being the woman who asked for too much. Of being the one who wanted a phone call back. Of being "dramatic." Of being alone at forty-one in a city where everyone my age was already settled. It's easier to admit that now than it was then.
The Sunday after the second locksmith, my friend Ramona came over. She's a nurse at Presbyterian, built like a boxer, and she tells the truth with no anesthesia. She sat on my kitchen stool, ate a tamale, and said, "Men like Earl don't choose women. They choose what women provide. You provided stability. She provides newness. He'll be back asking for stability the second newness gets boring."
"But why wasn't I enough?" I asked.
"You were never the issue," Ramona said. "He's a man with holes in his bucket. Everything you pour in leaks out. That's not love. That's maintenance."
There was also the matter of the house. My house, mine for eleven years before I ever met him — bought with savings from fourteen years of teaching, four years before he came along. He'd moved in, sure, but he'd never once paid a dime toward the mortgage. Every time I brought it up, he'd say, "Babe, what's yours is ours. We'll get there." I hired a real estate agent that same week. It took most of a month to close, and by the time the moving truck idled at the curb, Earl had already found somewhere else to sleep — a double-wide off Old Coors Road, I later learned, belonging to the girl in the pink sweater. I never saw the green dress again. I stopped looking for it around the time I stopped looking for him.
Three weeks after the closing, a letter arrived at my new apartment, forwarded from my old address because Earl had listed it as his own with the county. It was from the Santa Fe County Clerk's office. A wedding license application.
My breath stopped. Then I saw the date — four months earlier. It wasn't a wedding he'd been planning. It was one he'd already tried to have, with someone else, while he was living in my house and wearing the ring I'd helped him afford. The application had been rejected over some discrepancy with his license. I drove to the clerk's office myself to check for one filed under my name. There wasn't one. Two years, and I'd never been anything but the comfortable place he came home to between plans.
I sat in the parking lot afterward with the engine running and the AC fighting the New Mexico heat. I thought about my mother, who used to say, "Hija, if a man wants to be with you, he will cross a river for you. If he doesn't, he won't cross the street." I thought about all the rivers I'd crossed for Earl. Driving to Santa Fe at midnight to bail him out of a bar fight. Cosigning for a truck he wrecked out in the desert two months later. Eleven months of payments on that debt afterward. My mother's earrings, the only thing she left me, sold to cover his half of a rent that never came.
That was the day I stopped being sad and started being someone else.
The following Tuesday, I closed the joint checking account we'd shared — the one still holding my last two paychecks, since I'd been the only one depositing into it in months. Four thousand eight hundred and two dollars. Every cent of it mine. I walked out of First National with a cashier's check for the full amount.
Then I drove to Walmart and bought a thirty-nine-dollar suitcase. I parked across from the double-wide off Old Coors Road, put the envelope with the check inside the suitcase, walked it up to the front step, knocked, and left before anyone answered the door.
I know how that sounds. You'd have to understand what that money was. It was the last thing of mine he could still claim. He'd tried to take my house, my peace, my sense of my own judgment. He wasn't getting the money too — not by keeping it from him, and not by keeping it either. I left it there because I needed to prove something to myself: that I could walk away from forty-eight hundred dollars and still be fine. Better than fine.
The next morning, my phone buzzed. Earl.
"What the hell is this?" he said. "Is this some kind of joke?"
"No," I said. "It's every dollar that was ours. It's my way of telling you there's nothing left of me in your life. No house. No money. No waiting by a window. I want you to have it, and I want you to understand you can never come back asking for it. There's nothing left for you to hold over me."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You always were too good for me, Alice." He said it the way you'd give someone directions to a gas station — a fact, not a regret.
I hung up.
Ramona came by that night with two bottles of wine and a bad rom-com. We didn't talk about Earl. I fell asleep on the futon with my phone still on my chest, and I didn't wake up once to check if anyone had called.
A week later, I stood in line at the Wells Fargo on Main, depositing my first paycheck from a summer-school assignment. The teller was a young woman, maybe twenty-three, hair in a tight bun, a tiny diamond on her left hand.
"Morning," she said. "Did the summer gig work out? I heard the district was short on teachers."
"Language arts, six weeks," I said. "The students are wild, I hear."
"We were all wild at that age," she said.
"I wasn't," I said, and she laughed, a warm sound like a fire catching, and I found myself smiling before I'd decided to.
"I'll be in Room 204," I said, "if you ever want to bring a teacher a coffee after school."
Her name was Dana. She brought me a vanilla latte on the first day, too sweet, all wrong. I drank the whole thing anyway, and most days since.
It's been two years now. I rent a small adobe house in the North Valley, with a walled courtyard and a pomegranate tree. The cholla cactus came with me from the old place. It bloomed again this year, white and heavy, open at midnight, and I stood in the courtyard in my robe and watched it without having to explain to anyone why I was out there in the dark.
I heard, secondhand, that Earl and the girl in the pink sweater broke up over money. I felt nothing when I heard it, which surprised me more than the news itself.
Dana still brings me coffee some mornings before school, and some evenings we sit on my back step and split a bottle of wine and watch the bats come out over the ditch. It's not what you're picturing. Or maybe it is. I haven't decided what to call it yet, and for the first time in a long while, I don't feel any urgency to.
