How do you
explain this? You can't. It's 2 a.m. You should be home right now,
sound asleep with the cat purring near your head and the desire, if not
the reality, of a warm body sleeping beside you. You need comfort, not
bone-chilling cold. You should not be here, at this hour, in this
place, waiting in this line. But here you are. You hold the ticket up
in the moonlight, and you see the number 27. You can hear the mini-vans
and the cars and the trucks running in the parking lot and you imagine
the heat. You can't risk it so you bundle up as tight as you can
possibly be. You draw yourself up inside of yourself, like so many
other recent nights and descend into the darkness. Part of what brings
you here is the understanding that he is there at home, with his
youthful dreams of something that must better than what it is, and the
other part of it is the knowledge that so much of your life together
has been wrangled so completely out of your control. The divorce. The
violence. The terrible abruptness of departure that has settled upon
the two of you so heavily that it makes you choke sometimes. You can
feel his inherent trust in you withering in this dark winter. Words are
beyond you now. Words have no currency anymore. It kills you that your
only way back into his heart may be through the object that sits on the
shelves in there, beyond those big glass windows and bright neon signs.
It's 2 a.m and you feel as if you have sold your soul to something
wicked. You finger the credit card and hope to God that there is enough
of a ceiling left to allow you to bring it home, wrap it up and be his
hero again, if only for that one morning in December.
