Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth Page A

anybody anywhere. The man is obviously just about dead. I called the doctor and the doctor hauled him over to the hospital. They put him in a cot and they said no doubt the man was dying, the good Lord knows he should be dead by now. What do you want to do with him? they said.
    And I said, He’s not mine. What do you want to do with him?
    We aren’t really in the business of caring for people in this dying way, they said.
    We cure people, they said.
    Apparently you don’t, I said and pointed at him.
    He’s barely moving now. He gets his lunch, his snack, and in the evening I go out to the plaza. I find my son playing kick-stick and I say, Somewhere your father may be lying there like that at this very hour and you better hope someone’s better than you are at bringing him a bowl of soup. Or I say, Let this be a lesson, son, about the cold heart, that a man could be left behind like this. Or I say, This is what becomes of a man who walks out on his family.
    And my son says, How do you know that man has a family?
    Every man has a family, I say, and there’s only one reason a man leaves and that’s for another woman.
    And he says, Then where’s the woman?
    And I say, No woman stays with a man who left.
     
    Chapter Twelve
    Myers should leave her. That thought had formed in his mind. Her motives didn’t matter. If this was the wife he’d got, he should just go, let her follow that man off a cliff.
    But then one day Gray got on a bus and left. That’s how the matter had ended.
    Myers had watched it happen. Or, to be accurate, he watched her watch it happen, or watched her not be able to bring herself to watch it happen, watched her hide her face as the bus pulled away, actually roll her face to the wall, as if Gray was headed to war, as if Gray was the one who was her husband and was headed to a terrible war, a wrong war, one that we were losing, one that we could never hope to win, that a soldier could never hope to return from, every last man downed, grenaded or gassed, that’s what she looked like when Gray got on the bus and that’s what Myers, watching, wished was happening. What a tragedy. Oh woe.
    How it happened was they all walked down to the station and only one of them bought a ticket and boarded a bus. The man leaves town with only a briefcase? Without even a sack of snacks for the ride? Yes, it’s a little weird but who cares, there he went—the skeleton line for Syracuse, the bus backing up, Myers’s wife weeping or being weepyish off to the side. At one point Gray looked out the window. Myers saw it: Gray seeing a woman, her head ducked against the wall, saw him study her momentarily—a woman making a minor spectacle of herself—before the bus dragged Gray away.
    She walked away from the bus station, Myers behind. It was drizzly and her hair drew down her back. He couldn’t see her face. She was just the figure in front of him and it fell to him to follow her, fallen woman, wet wife, low wife. And as for himself he had no picture in his mind, no image of himself heading down the street, a seedy undercover man in nightlight, no. He was absent, withdrawn. That was two years three months ago.
    They walked back to the apartment and took up their lives. How else could it have wound up other than everyone back in their starting positions? Everyone back behind their pushcarts or rearranging their giftware, one of them keeping an eye out for any more anomalies and almost-affairs.
    He kept expecting it to go back to like before, but it was never like before. “Before” wasn’t like before. Even the early days took on a dark cast. She was an alien creature, this petulant, sad-mouthed thing.
    After Gray rode away she came to a standstill. It took a near month because she was moving so fast, going around and around like a dropping kite, and what was Myers supposed to do other than worm behind her like the tail? But she slowed and slowed and finally did stop. And in the long pause before the fighting started