Ammunition
He knew about the affair as soon as she began
serving him steak. There could be no other explanation. She’d always been a Mac
‘n Cheese kind of girl, Hamburger Helper if you were lucky. She wasn’t any kind
of cook. He knew that when he married her. He married her because she was
pregnant. He knew his life was a cliché. He’d accepted that.
That was 15 years ago and Sammy Jo was in high
school now, giving him a heart attack every time she left the house. He said
everything he’d been supposed to say, made jokes about curfews and guns,
laughed nervously despite himself. Truth was, he’d never really learned to
shoot a gun. Truth was he couldn’t remember where he’d hidden the box of
ammunition. It had been years. He feared ever having to use a gun. He thinks he
probably hid it somewhere he’d forget on purpose.
She’d put a big fat steak on the table. He
couldn’t believe it. There was no way to make sense of a steak like that. It
was enormous, bloody, seething with fat around the edges. It bled onto the
plate. Parts of it were charred from the pan. What’s the occasion? he’d said, because he couldn’t think of
anything else to say. Nothin’, she’d
replied. It was going cheap.
He knew that couldn’t possibly be true. This
was a woman whose dedication to cheap carbohydrates meant that there were
always more buns than hotdogs because “you can always eat ‘em with ketchup.”
She was the kind of woman who ate hot dog buns with ketchup. Not the kind who’d
cook a steak. He felt a bit ill and sat down.
The next week she did it again. Sammy Jo had
gone out on a date and he’d come home to the smell of meaty grease. She’d
showered, he could smell the shampoo. There was a bottle of red wine on the
table. He had no idea what to make of that. He can’t remember the last time he
drank wine. Possibly never. For a few uncomfortable minutes he felt himself
sweat wondering how you got into a bottle of wine. All he had was a bottle
opener on his key ring, like any other man. Then he realized it was a screw
top. Pour yourself a glass, she called
from the kitchen.
Afterwards, he asked her why again, and she
used her kitten voice to tell him it was because he deserved it. He wondered
what, exactly, he deserved. A nice steak,
she said. Men like steak. He wasn’t
so sure. In fact, he had become convinced that men did not like steak; that it
was some kind of conspiracy on the part of women who couldn’t cook to hide
something. Like ammunition. As far as he could recall, he’d never particularly expressed
a desire for steak, knowing, as he did, that it wasn’t cheap and that she
couldn’t cook. Suddenly, he hated steak. He entertained the thought of becoming
a vegetarian.
She’d tried to go down on him. That was when
he was sure about the other man. He’d let her, kept his eyes closed, and
couldn’t come. She’d rolled over, and he’d said it’s not your fault.
That night, he sat up listening for Sammy Jo
to come home. Eleven, twelve, one, one-thirty. One thirty-four. Tires
crunching. Another 15 minutes at the door. He wanted to surprise her with the
gun, but it occurred to him that her boyfriend might be bigger than him, and
have a bigger gun. A loaded one. He meant to get up and let her know he’d been
waiting up, give her a piece of his mind about the curfew, but when she slipped
in and stepped silently up the stairs, he held his breath.
He was a man sitting alone in the dark with blue
balls and a cheating wife who couldn’t cook, a daughter who smelled like
cigarettes, an empty gun in his lap and a belly full of steak. When he finally
breathed, it sounded like a cry escaping around the lump big as a bottle in his
throat. He swallowed it back down.
He remembered where he’d put the ammunition. He
suddenly remembered, clear as broken glass.
