“The Difficulty of Endings”: Read by Jennifer Vande Zande and Jeff Vande Zande
Pulling up along side of him, Karen watched his arms and the tool work against the ice. She pushed the button and her window slid down. She wondered what the hell he was doing clearing his ex-wife’s sidewalk.
He worked up a headstone-sized chunk and flipped it into the yard, making an exhausted noise. Then, he turned toward her sitting in the idling car.
They studied each other for a moment. His face was what a sigh would look like. This was new to her.
He looked down at the icy sidewalk and then back at her. “It snowed,” he said. “Then the forecast called for rain. She always thinks the rain will melt all the snow. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it isn’t enough, and then it turns to this mess.”
She shifted into park, waited for him to say something else. He stood, holding the ice chopper, looking at her and catching his breath. His face shined with sweat.
“I don’t get this,” she said. “Why?”
“Someone could slip,” he said. “The city gives fines, too.”
“So?”
A car with nothing but a grumbling glasspack gunned down the street, fishtailing on the icy road.
“Nothing changes,” he said, watching the car. “People always treated this street like some kind of speedway. I never wanted the boys playing in the front yard.”
“Things change,” Karen said. “At least they should.”
He turned toward her. “This doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It’s not worth –”
“What am I supposed to be thinking?”
He looked her in the eye. “Not anything bad.”
She looked up at the treetops above the houses. They were bare, stark, emptied. Waiting. “You should have told me. If you still–”
“I should have,” he said. He lifted the chopper slightly and let its blade fall against the cement.
She’d seen him working the same chopper against the ice on the sidewalk in front of her house. She liked watching him through her picture window. He was steady. “I’m not sure I can do this,” she said. She held her hand to the heat blowing from the vent.
“I haven’t come here before,” he said. His fingers moved on the chopper handle. He looked down at the blade. “That’s a lie.”
“Jim?” The night before they’d had sex as they did on Wednesday nights. She’d enjoyed it like coffee. Hot, caffeinated, something worth rising for. She loved coffee and the idea of it every morning. He slept afterwards, and she watched a show that always made her laugh. The writing was good. Good characters. He often said that he liked that she watched television late into the night. He said he enjoyed being woken by her laughing – something good in the darkness. He liked the idea of her awake next to him while he slept.
He pointed. “I sometimes park at the church over there in the evening. I walk by the house and think about her and the boys inside.”
Karen smoothed her fingers over her cheeks, brushing the tears toward her lobes.
He still wasn’t looking at her. “There was a time when the idea of us – of our divorcing – kept me up at night. I never wanted it. Neither of us did.”
She gripped the wheel, as though bracing to collide with something.
Jim looked at her. “It’s only that even after everything – the bitterness and everything – I still feel–”
“You son of a bitch,” she whispered.
He looked down again. “I just think of her here sometimes with the boys. I know what goes into that – even just keeping up with the house. It wears you down.” He looked up at her. “She’s like a kid herself most of the time. I just feel sorry for her.”
The tears came again. “It sounds like more than that.” She hated that he wasn’t saying anything about his love for her and what they’d had together for over a year. He was always so steady.
“It’s not more. But, I can’t say that she’s gone for me, either. I’ll always want good things for her. I won’t leave her altogether.”
She stared ahead into the icy road. “I don’t think I can make that work,” she said. The words felt like something she should say.
“I hope you can,” he said.
Another car came down the street, going too fast for the conditions. It turned into the driveway and then stopped abruptly in the snow and ice that the city plows had banked up.
His ex-wife was home. Stuck.
She shifted into reverse and then forward. She did it again. The car didn’t move.
Karen looked over her shoulder. Jim’s ex was looking towards them. Karen shifted into drive. “You do what you have to do, Jim.”
“I’ll see you at home?” he asked.
Karen pressed the gas. He called her name, and she breathed in hard against her runny nose.
She was leaving his old neighborhood in a direction she didn’t know. They always came from the other direction when they picked up the boys every other weekend. Looking in the rearview mirror, she watched Jim walking toward his ex’s car.
She imagined trying to talk with him about this later. She didn’t want words.
Gunning the gas, she turned her wheel sharply, wedging her bumper and grill into a snow bank. Recovering from the small jolt of the collision, she waited to see what he would do.
About the author:
Jeff Vande Zande teaches English at Delta College in Midland, MI. His stories have been collected in a full-length collection, Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press). Individual stories have appeared in Coe Review, Existere, Iron Horse Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and Word Riot. He has two novels: Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press) and Landscape with Fragmented Figures (Bottom Dog Press). In 2010, Whistling Shade Press will release his novella, Threatened Species and Other Stories. He maintains a website at www.jeffvandezande.com.
This is one painful story, exquisitely put together.