Broken Glass

     His wife begins making the hanging flower baskets at the pub and that's what finally puts it all into perspective for me. Before that I am having these awful dreams that wake me up at night and make me feel horrible and achey all of the time. Before that I am getting sick to my stomach whenever I see his car parked outside my work, and nearly jumping out of my skin when I pass one of his children on the street. I am totally strung out on still wanting him and unable to find a cure, and then she stops by unannounced on the first warm day of spring.

     I am hungover and working, and thinking of the daffodils that are pushing up around the crumbling headstones in the old cemetery. It strikes me as indecent to have all that yellow laughter somewhere that dead people are trying to rest. I am nibbling half-heartedly at a cheese sandwich and taping bandaids over the cuts on my toes, hoping that I've got the worst of the glass out. The pub is filled with the usual crowd of men, and they make fun of my accent and ogle my tits as I refill their drinks and pretend to think they are funny. It is an unspoken kind of rule at this place that the women don't come in during the day, so when the door opens and I see her standing there, at first I think that it is a trick of the light sticking to the webs of cigarette smoke.

     I have seen her before of course, this village is small. Everyone knows everyone, and certainly they know the the girl that their husband is sleeping with, and vice versa. I have been as close as a few people away from her but she has never acknowledged me, never looked into my eyes. This time she does and it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Her eyes are brown. Dark brown and angry looking, and I can see the lines around her mouth from a lot of years of smoking. Maybe some lines from laughing, and a few from frowning. Probably some that I put there myself. She sidles up to the bar and it is so silent that you could hear a pin drop. Everyone hangs suspended waiting to see what will happen.

     "I have been wanting to have a chat with you," she says calmly, though I see her hand shake as she lights a cigarette.

     I am frozen in place, so startled my heart cannot even race. I am still staring at the details of her face, unable to tear my eyes from hers. These are the features of the woman he goes home to every night. These are the nose, the eyes, the lips of the woman that I have betrayed. Somebody snickers but still I don't move.

     She smiles at me in a hard way and then takes a long drag off her cigarette. "Lisa has asked me to make up some hanging baskets for the pub. She said that you might help me to decide where they should go and what colors are suitable."

     I have long suspected that my boss hates me. Now it is confirmed. I open my mouth to answer and have to settle for a shrug, still unable to produce a sound of any kind.

     She leans over the bar and peers at my feet and the crumpled bandaid wrappers that litter the floor. "My goodness! What have you done to yourself?"

     So close now I can smell her perfume. It is an old lady's scent and that makes me feel ashamed.

     "She dropped a champagne bottle on her feet," somebody booms helpfully. And people begin to chime in.

     "She's a f*****g disaster she is."

     "Our Cassidy."

     "Talk about ways to get caught nicking your morning drink."

     "Decadent little thing, eh?"

     "She'll be going barefoot the rest of the week."

     She can't seem to decide if they are joking or not and she sits down at the bar and orders a glass of wine. I pour it for her, careful to wipe the rim of the glass, and then for something to do I resume picking at my cheese sandwich although I have never been less interested in eating.

     "I am allergic to wheat Cassidy, did you know that?"

     I stare at her and shake my head no, and this time when her eyes meet mine they are more searching then horrible.

     "I am. I am allergic to a lot of things, even some flowers, but I don't let it slow me down much."

     I feel as if I am in a bad dream as she begins to tell me all about herself. About how much she likes making the hanging baskets, and what a chore it is to keep the dirt from under her nails. How tulips are her favorite flower, how she violently hates the color magenta, how her favorite time of day is early in the morning, and how she is trying out a new low carb diet at the moment that leaves her never feeling full. After a while, seeeing there will be no fight, the men drift back to their own conversations, and in the space of a few long hours, I feel I know most everything about her.

     She sits with me as I roll the cutlery at the end of my shift and pummels me with friendly questions about myself and my life. Never once does she run out of things to ask, and I can almost hear her brain trying to work out why her husband f***s me. And though I don't really get what's going on, all of the sudden I desperately want to make her feel better.

     Purposely I make my answers come out slow and stupid and I am glad for the fact that I didn't take a shower this morning. Glad that I am not wearing makeup and that the top I have on kind of makes my arms look chubby. I tell her that I have asthma and that without my contacts I am legally blind. I tell her about my college loans, my pissed off family, the fact that I have a cat back home that I haven't seen in five years and miss horribly. We talk about her kids, we talk about the weather, we talk abouut village life... neither of us mentions him.

     The next day she is the first person to stop into the pub and she breaks into my usual bleary, mental, daffodil grumblings with a cheery hello and a bright smile. She notices the new gash on my leg where I fell down the night before trying to drink away the experience of meeting her, and shakes her head reproachfully.

     "What kind of beverage were you trying to nick this morning?"

     That makes us both laugh for a moment, and then she looks at me seriously and touches my arm.

     "How old did you say you were, Cassidy?"

     "Twenty-four," I tell her tiredly. I am a year younger than her oldest son.

     "You need to slow down," she tells me in a motherly tone. And if not for the fact that I catch her peeking at my phone moments later when she thinks I am not paying attention, I might believe her when she says, "You are a hard girl not to like. But you really just need to slow down and think."

     At any rate, after that all of the dreams stop and the infatuation shatters like broken glass. I am more taken up with thoughts of her than of him. I want to know what she thought or saw looking into my eyes. I want to know if she cries at night or if she just stays angry and holds things in. And mostly I wish that I were a different person so that I could ask her these things and she could answer.

    

Reviews

[emmajoy]

That truly is a great st ory! You swept it along at a steady, well phrased pace and the ending was incredibly p lausible. It's a tale t o make the reader think.. Y ou're good with c onversation too , make it s mooth and subtle.

Thanks for sharing.