I threw some cash at 107.1, thinking maybe it’d turn into something, thinking maybe anything could still be built out of the wreckage. Mostly it meant getting dragged to concerts and pathetic little meetups full of aging radio hacks and drunk twenty-somethings chasing free T-shirts. One night it was Timbers, some dive that looked like Paul Bunyan’s outhouse sitting off Division Road in Bend, Oregon. Supposedly a “premiere event,” which meant the cheapest beer in town and some sorry bastard with a microphone pretending he still mattered. I was still technically married back then, but the marriage had been on life support for years. Separate bedrooms. Empty beds. Bottles stacking up like sandbags against a flood that had already washed us away. Having another kid hadn’t saved us. Opening the tequila bar hadn’t saved us. Nothing was saving us. We were two corpses lying next to each other, waiting for someone to call it.
I was halfway through my second whiskey when I saw her. She smiled at Steve—poor bastard was sitting right next to me—and it was like a shotgun blast straight to the chest. A real smile. One of those rare, stupid, dangerous things that made you forget how the world actually works. Red lipstick, teeth like pearls, eyes like promises nobody keeps. Turned out she was Steve’s assistant. She floated over, chatting him up, lighting up the whole miserable room. I didn’t move. I didn’t even blink. I just sat there and felt something I hadn’t felt in years: hunger. Not for sex. Not for escape. For something real.
Meanwhile, her boyfriend—or some shitbag playing the part—was manhandling her right there on the ratty couch next to us, grabbing her like a man trying to break a toy he can’t afford. She smiled through it. Tears welling up behind her sunglasses. None of my business, I told myself. But whiskey doesn’t like cowards. I leaned into Steve and said it, half under my breath but loud enough for God to hear: “A woman with a smile like that shouldn’t be with a man like that. She should be with a man like me.” Maybe it was the liquor. Maybe it was the last piece of me still willing to fight. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore.
A few weeks later, Halloween party at the tequila bar. Everybody dressed like assholes. Booze flowing. Music shaking the walls. Death in the air, sweet and familiar. Steve found me halfway through a bottle and waved someone over. “Cindy! Come here!” I turned—and there she was. Little Red Riding Hood. Red lipstick. The smile. Jesus, the smile. She came right up, floating through the drunks like she was made of something better than the rest of us. Steve grinned and said, “James, meet Cindy. Cindy, meet James. He’s someone important to us.” She laughed—God, even her laugh—and said she’d heard about me, seen me around. I muttered something about surviving. Steve, the bastard, wasn’t done. “Tell her what you told me at Timbers,” he said. I looked at him like he’d pulled a gun on me. She just stood there, waiting, that damn smile breaking me in half.
So I said it. Right there. “With a smile like that,” I said, “you shouldn’t be with a man like that. You should be with a man like me.” Her face changed. The smile cracked. Tears welled up. She bolted, running into the crowd like a spooked deer. Good start, asshole.
Later, after the marriage finally gasped its last breath and I staggered into the cold new world of separation, she was there. Waiting. Like the world owed me one last favor before kicking me in the teeth again. She was a decade younger. Wild. Reckless. Alive in a way I had forgotten how to be. She danced on bar tops. She laughed too loud. She could make a dying man believe in resurrection. And somehow—God knows how—she wanted me.
I moved out to Redmond, into a soulless little resort by the river, pretending it was a fresh start when it was just a place to bleed out quietly. One night I brought her home. No plan. No thought. Like gravity pulled us together, and fighting it would’ve been another sad little lie. She asked to shower. I pointed upstairs. I heard the water running and for some stupid, desperate reason, I picked up the phone.
I called my wife. Twenty years of sacrifice, misery, loyalty. I called her. I asked her if I could come home. I asked her if we could sit in the jacuzzi together, just let it all go, just for one night, just be human beings again before the lawyers and the hate and the long, slow death of everything we had ever built. I offered her everything I had left—the little scraps of a man too stupid to stay down.
She listened. And then she said, “You sound like a horny little boy. A pathetic little boy.” And she hung up. That was it. Twenty goddamn years and all I was to her was a punchline. A joke. A mistake she wished she could erase.
Upstairs, the shower stopped running.
I set the phone down. Walked up those stairs. Walked into something warm and living and real. No promises. No lies. Just two broken people grabbing onto each other in the wreckage. That night, for the first time in years, I remembered what it felt like to be wanted. To be seen. To be touched like you were something more than a paycheck and a punching bag.
There was no going back after that. No rescue mission. No second chances. Whatever part of me had once believed in miracles had died on that phone call. And good riddance. Some ghosts aren’t worth haunting.
