First Chapter: Daybreak
“It feels like I’m cheating,” I muttered to myself, tearing the plaid flannel sheets off the bed. The top sheet came easily, landing in a tangle around my feet, but the fitted one gave me a fight, clinging with all its might to the far corner of the California king-size mattress Michael had insisted we buy as a wedding present to ourselves.
I climbed onto the mattress to get more leverage, giving one last tug before the tight elastic popped loose. The sheet shot off the mattress and into my face. I startled and fell onto my back, the side of my head slamming against the corner of the bedside table with a very painful crack.
My vision blurred, bright stars coming into focus in my periphery, and I clutched the sheet against my chest and stayed still, waiting for the throbbing ache in my skull to quiet down. I tried my best to not let my subconscious get the better of me. I’d changed these sheets a thousand times in the past three years, but this was the first time I’d changed them with intent. This orange and brown and cream plaid flannel was not going into the washer, it was going into the trash.
“The sheets don’t know what’s coming,” I promised myself, pushing up to sit. With a wince, I closed my eyes and reached behind me, testing the small knot behind my ear that had already appeared from my run-in with the side table.
The sheets didn’t know better.
No one knew better.
And no one would know better because there was no one here.
At that though, I heard a noise in the doorway, and I looked behind me as if it could be anyone besides Gus, my four-year-old Great Pyrenees. He stared at me with his big, dark, brown dog eyes, as if to say, “I know.”
I let go of the sheets and scrubbed my hands over my face, tracing my fingers over my eyebrows, but then I stopped. Michael used to tell me I only ever did that when I was sad, and I didn’t think I could throw the sheets out if I was sad. I was so tired of being sad. I dropped my hands to my lap and stared at my palms, the plain gold band still heavy around my ring finger, just as it had been since right after I turned eighteen.
Michael and I had only been married ten years before he was taken from me. A brain aneurysm, the doctors in Montpelier said. Completely unpredictable and unavoidable, they said.
Nothing any of us could have done.
But wasn’t there something we could have done?
Maybe not to save his life, but couldn’t we have loved each other a little harder? Couldn’t we have taken that vacation to Brazil Michael had talked about since the first time he’d made me watch the movie Up? Could we have maybe not gotten a dog the year before he died so I wouldn’t have to live with a four-legged reminder of the only man I’d ever love?
No.
There wasn’t anything we could have done differently because none of it would matter. Michael would still be dead, and I would still be here in the same house the past five generations of my family had been born, lived, and died in. And I would still be alone. And I would still be in Burlington, Vermont with thousands of other people who didn’t know a thing about me anymore, but always looked at me with sympathy in their eyes when they saw me.
I didn’t want their sympathy or their casseroles or their condolences.
I wanted my life back.
But Michael had been gone for three years, and it wasn’t like he’d taken a trip and disappeared. Michael had died, and he wasn’t coming back, and there was no need to keep the sheets we’d fought over buying the day he died. I didn’t need the sheets. I didn’t want the sheets.
I didn’t.
Swallowing back a tangle of feelings that sent my blood pressure through the roof, I stumbled off the bed, grabbing the top sheet from the floor and dragging it behind me as I walked out of the bedroom. Gus trailed behind me, ever obedient and watchful, and I pulled the sheets off the ground as I headed downstairs, gathering the still warm flannel into a ball I clutched in front of my churning stomach.
My thick wool socks made a sandpaper sound as I shuffled my feet down the stairs, and the third one from the top creaked like it had since before I was born. Down I went, through the dining room and kitchen, into the laundry room and farther still to the garage, only stopping to put on my work boots so I didn’t track dust and motor oil back into the house.
The garage was degrees colder than the house, one of the major reasons I hated working in the winter, but money was money, and I knew better than to turn it down. I’d gotten a decent sized payout from the insurance company after Michael had died, and I’d invested it carefully. My bank account was substantial enough to get me through the slow months, keep the house running, and allow me to keep doing what I loved most. On the workbench, my stare landed on a hot pink sticky note reminder I’d left for myself about moving up the propane delivery since the tank was running low and a storm was rolling in. Winters were one thing I simultaneously loved and hated about Vermont. They’d been better when I had someone to tuck in with for the night, but that was a lifetime ago.
Clutching the sheets and straightening up, I stepped into the garage, and I definitely didn’t let my stare linger on Michael’s unfinished 1966 Mustang. I walked past it, pretending the metallic green paint didn’t remind me of his eyes, then I balled up the sheets and shoved them in the trash with a little more force than necessary.
I’d never liked the sheets, and I’d liked even less that we’d fought over them, but as the years between his life and the present spread, it all somehow seemed less. The fights less severe, the worries less impactful, the love…
That was the one thing that time couldn’t change.
The car, though. I hated that car more every day.
And I hated that it sat there. Shiny and full of promise, if only I could be brave enough to put my fucking hands on it again.
Michael’d gotten the car when we were in high school, back when we’d been so in love, even though we barely knew each other. Hell, we barely knew ourselves then. We were kids and there was so much we wanted to do. So many places we wanted to go. But Michael had gotten that damn car as a birthday present, and he didn’t know shit about it and neither did his pops.
My dad had told him to bring it over and I offered to help him get it together, but then there were always sports and finals, and then college, and then we were married and there’d been better things to do with our hands. The car sat and sat and collected dust and rust and then Michael had gone and died, and the car still sat.
Gus barked at me from the laundry room, and I cleared my throat and stomped back into the house. I kicked off my boots and closed the door, twisting the ancient latch so it would stay closed.
“You’re fine,” I told myself and swallowed thickly when I realized I didn’t need to say it out loud.
Michael had been gone for three years, and at first I’d had to tell myself the lie a dozen times a day, but it had whittled down and the pain felt like it had softened around the edges. At first, his absence had been a jagged and bottomless hole in my chest, but maybe I’d rubbed at it so much the corners had turned smooth and missing him had become more manageable over time. There’d still be moments, maybe a day or only a breath, where something would remind me, and I’d be back where I’d been.
But most of the days now were good, and that was why the sheets had to go and why the car had to go eventually, too. It wasn’t that I was ready to be in a relationship with someone new, because I wasn’t. But I had to admit it was time to move on. Michael would have wanted me to move on, and I know Gus wanted it, too. If dogs could want human kinds of things.
I looked down at him and he shoved his head against my palm and barked so I’d pet him, and we sat at the kitchen table like that until my fingers cramped from how long I’d scratched between his ears.
My phone chirped from the counter beside the sink, and I sighed, standing up to silence it. Both of my knees cracked, an audible reminder I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. Gus let out a sharp bark at the sound of my body failing me, then lay down underneath the table, resigned to the end of his head rubbing. I swiped the screen open, knowing who the message would be from before I got to the counter. It was always one of a handful of people.
There was Finn, my closest neighbor who owned the farm down the road. He checked in sometimes to make sure I wasn’t dead, which was… obligatory and appreciated. My best and only real friend, Devon, who had a habit of showing up unannounced and leaving just as quietly. More lately though, the messages had been from Emmett, the man who’d saved Gus’s life a few months back when he’d come down with bloat. We’d gotten close over the fact that his wife had died and my husband had died, and close was probably an overstatement. We talked sometimes. We drank sometimes. But he had Tai now, and they’d both tried to come over more than social calls required, always under the guise of checking in on Gus.
It wasn’t unwelcome. At least not anymore. But it was a Wednesday evening and I knew what the text would be—an invite to Vino and Veritas, the LGBT owned wine bar in town, and I knew what my answer would be. I was only a man, after all.
Tai: V&V.
I pulled a bottle of cider from the fridge and shuffled to the front door, setting everything down on the side table and shrugging into my jacket. It was colder than normal outside on account of the storm that was meant to blow through over the following weekend. The air was crisp and sharp, the sky dark and full of what was to come. I had a pair of slippers near the door and I shoved my feet into them, picking up the cider and phone to shuffle outside.
I set everything on the rickety table on the long porch and fell down into an ancient wooden rocking chair, kicking my feet up onto the railing and crossing them at the ankle. After I settled, I answered Tai with a no, like we both knew would happen, then I turned my phone to silent and tucked it into my pocket.
Michael would have been mad at me. He probably was mad at me if he was floating in the clouds somewhere, watching me still. He wouldn’t want me to waste away alone, and neither did I, but getting rid of the sheets had to be enough of a first step for now.