They were at Denny’s.

He wore a hoodie and sunglasses.

She was nervous around him

“So, thanks for meeting with me,” Erin said.

“You said it was important. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to let you know that he proposed to me.”

Gerry looked up from the menu. “You said no, right?”

“I said yes.”

He leaned in. “You’re kidding me, right?”

She leaned in too. “I’m engaged, Gerry.”

He reached across the table and grabbed her hand. “To Chupacabra?”

“What?” She snatched her hand back, but he held on for a moment longer. She noticed the scabs on his arm.

He finally let go.

“He’s gross.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what you think about him. I’m getting married. Not now, and not soon, but it will happen.”

Gerry grabbed the menu again. She could tell he was angry. There was something else off about him.

“I want the house. And I want Joy,” he said quietly.

His hands trembled. His head jerked slightly. She had never seen him like this. Maybe he had not fully recovered from his hospital stay. The nurse wouldn’t give her information because they weren’t married anymore.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I want the house. Did I stutter? He takes you to fancy restaurants and drives a Mercedes. You’ll never be there anyway.”

“You stalk us?”

“Could be I was a little curious,” he said.

“You’re fucking high.”

At first, she meant it metaphorically. Then she reconsidered.

“I want Joy because you’re going to be gallivanting all over the place. She deserves a stable home.”

She studied him. He drank, but not much. He never did drugs.

Still, something was clearly wrong.

“Are you actually high?” she asked.

“No. Why do you ask?”

He looked drawn, unhealthy.

He kept licking his lips.

“You tell me you’re getting married less than six months after our divorce. Yeah, I feel a little weird. But I am perfectly normal. Why do I seem weird?”

“You’re not getting the house, and you’re certainly not getting Joy. Everything was settled in the divorce.”

“You’re not going to sleep with him there. Ever.”

“Are you threatening me?”

He raised his hands. “Just having a conversation with my wife.”

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, heavy with finality.

So that was that. The divorce was done.

Erin walked up the driveway with the mail tucked under her arm.

The house, two stories of white stucco and dark wood trim, stood apart in the scrubby landscape.

Pepper trailed her as she called Gerry.

“Hello?”

“So, dude, it’s official. We’re no longer married.”

“How do you feel about that?” he asked, his voice hushed.

She sorted through the mail, considering. “I’m fine. You?”

Erin pictured him in front of a computer, poor office minion.

In the kitchen she half-listened to his grievances, made a blah-blah hand puppet, and microwaved Pepper’s food.

“Is this what you want?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what I want?”

She pulled Pepper’s food from the microwave and set it on the floor. He went to town.

She stood there and asked again, “What do you mean, what I want?”

“I can’t talk now,” he said. “But is this what you want?”

Gerry never could talk. Not even when no one else was around. Typical.

“I didn’t want you to sleep with someone else. You did. I didn’t want a divorce. You did. I have a check here from your mother. Should I forward it to your PO box?”

“Yes, please. I’ll tell her to change the address.” He paused. “What are you doing now?”

“I just fed Pepper. We went for a walk.”

“How is Pepper?”

“He’s fat and happy.”

“And you?”

“I’m fat and happy.”

“You are not.”

“I’m not fat? Thanks…”

“You’re not happy.”

Erin put the phone down. He always went for the soft spot. Fuck him. ‘He doesn’t get to know what I am anymore.’

She picked it back up.

“For your information, there’s this state called Moving On. I live in it now. It’s on the Internet. I meet other people.”

“Who have you been meeting?”

She watched Pepper slop up his food. “I have this other life. And as far as being fine, I’m very fine. I wish you knew how fine I felt.”

“Is a booty call out of the question?”

Erin considered. At that moment, it was. “Call me later with that question,” she said. “And your daughter wants to hear about her stepmother.”

“I’m not marrying anyone…”

She hung up.

Talking to Gerry was like talking to a child. Barely formed thoughts and sentences. Come to think of it, that was an insult to children.

Pepper ate without a care in the world.

“Why are men so retarded?” she asked.

Pepper didn’t respond, except in her head. He lifted up. “That’s rude. Men aren’t mentally disabled. You’re a simple person with a high school education, and they see you as a fool and use you. You probably need some life skills or something.”

He went back to his food.

She pondered that.

Sure, she didn’t have an education. Plenty of people didn’t. She was overweight. Perhaps still pretty?

The thoughts irritated her. She felt flushed. Embarrassed, or horny, or both. A hot flash? Fuck.

She set Pepper’s dish in the sink and wiped her hands on her sweats. The kitchen felt too bright. Too exposed. The counter was cluttered with unopened mail. The fridge was bare except for magnets holding family photos.

Her breath and pulse quickened. She recognized it immediately. A minor panic attack.

She’d had them since Gerry left. Not full-blown, just enough to make her feel untethered, like gravity had roiled up into her chest.

She moved without deciding to. Past the counter, past the fridge, toward the French doors. It wasn’t a thought so much as a pull.

Erin paused, hand on the handle.

For reasons she couldn’t fully explain, it reminded her of that scene in Titus, where Jessica Lange delivered her lines to the emperor, then turned, without warning, to the camera and addressed the audience. Cold. Dark. Exposed.

That was her art.

It said what she couldn’t.

She opened the door.

The sun had dropped behind the house, throwing the backyard into shadow. The sky was overcast and the air was still.

Earthquake weather.

Erin stepped outside, barefoot on the concrete, and scanned the space.

Her art was the only thing that could calm her. That, and a bottle of wine.

The yard looked like an open-air gallery of unfinished dreams.

Sculptures stood where patio furniture should have been. Half-formed bodies. Ideas abandoned mid-thought.

Erin reached out and traced the nearest sculpture, a contoured torso. No arms. No head. Incomplete, but still standing.

Each piece was meant to be the goddess Eris holding an apple.

Erin hated explaining why she only sculpted Eris. Even when people knew the myth, they remembered only the buzzwords.

Chaos and destruction.

“To the fairest.” She smiled. She’d understood it even as a girl.

It was rage. Feminine rage.

Eris ignored. Eris slighted. Eris angry.

Her actions started a war she never had to participate in. She stood back and watched the world burn.

Nearby stood a half-dancer frozen mid-movement, caught in the act of becoming. Another was a vixen, brazen and beckoning. And an older figure, crepey arm, hard to do in steel, holding an apple as if about to drop it.

The sculptures began as sketches, then small models made from clay and foam. She bought precut sheets of Corten steel, choosing smaller pieces she could move herself, and shaped them with plasma cutters.

Gerry refused to help. Dick.

Her hands bled sometimes. She would stare at them and pretend it was his blood.

She loved working in a dangerous medium.

Erin thought of her father, who taught her welding. Usually on a bender, he found refuge in the garage, but he taught her patiently, smelling of beer and body odor, genuinely thrilled to pass on his craft.

The sparks shot bright and hot. Blue. Yellow. White. Her father would grunt approval when she solved the puzzle and it came together. Separate pieces would become something whole.

Gerry hated the process. Hated the noise, the smell of burning metal, the hours she spent out there.

He tried to make it feel like a waste.

“How much did you make from your hobby this year? Can we deduct all this shit?”

Over time, the resentment worked both ways. She resented his petty digs. She knew her art threatened him.

It was a part of her life he had no place in, no control over. She’d banished him from it. He was butt-hurt.

Now, standing among the half-formed pieces of art, Erin saw it clearly. She created Eris to let time ravage and change her.

Erin lifted her hand and noticed she was still wearing her wedding ring. She took it off. There was a white band where the sun hadn’t shone in years.

She looked around at the unfinished figures.

She’d stopped where she did on purpose. Protecting herself. Finishing them would mean changing.

And she wasn’t ready yet.

Ding-dong.

The Women arrived. He had no idea what to do with them. He opened the door and pretended he had a clue. “Hello!”

“Hi!” Woman Number 1 said.

“Hi!” Woman Number 2 repeated.

Dear Lord, we have a situation, he thought.

Mitzy, the bitter cat, retreated under the sofa.

The Women swept through like a summer storm, ate the appetizers, drank copious amounts of wine, and giggled. A lot.

His roommate Phil said he’d set him up but forgot to mention they were cougars.

“Phil tells us you have a daughter,” Woman Number 1 said.

“Pictures, pictures, pictures,” Woman Number 2 squealed, taking a swallow of wine that spilled down her skimpy red dress.

Gerry went to his leather coffee table, which featured a map of the world. He opened the drawer and found a photo album. He sighed. ‘I don’t want to be doing this.’ He did it anyway, and the Women squealed.

“She’s so beautiful,” Woman Number 1 said about his daughter, Joy.

“Oh my God, you let this one go?” Woman Number 2 said about Erin.

Seated between the Women, Gerry wanted to curl into a ball and cry. He couldn’t. He knew that. And their breasts were so appealingly close.

After they polished off another bottle of wine, he realized Woman Number 1 had her tongue in his ear. Then he realized Woman Number 2 was between his legs, caressing his crotch.

“Things get naughty from here,” Woman Number 2 said, and that’s when it hit him: Phil set him up with prostitutes.

It wasn’t that he was opposed to hookers, but Gerry had been excited by the prospect that women were interested in him as a person. No matter how good-looking he was, Gerry remembered he was a recently divorced man with an eleven-year-old kid.

He should have known you had to pay for sex with those credentials, especially when it came to a three-way.

While Woman Number 2 sucked his cock, Gerry wondered if life had been better or worse when he was with Erin. She could suck a mean cock, but she rarely did. Sex with her was a negotiation she always won. After many years, she simply stopped wanting to do it.

Maybe it was just his cock, even though it was gorgeous. Was she sucking other cocks? Fuck that shit, did she like it?

He felt empty, as if someone had pummeled the life out of him. Someone else was inside his wife now doing things only he used to do.

Now things were done, and she was moving on with bullshit stuff on the Internet.

He fucked Woman Number 1, and it didn’t take long for him to come again.

He longed for a better life, when he had a wife and a daughter, not prostitutes.

He gave the Women his email address, said his cell phone was disconnected, and asked them to leave. They didn’t seem to care one way or the other, putting themselves back together as they exited.

They acted like they were on their way to more fun or, at the very least, paying clients.

Mitzy came out, looking displeased. “You’re the whore.”

It looked like she had something else to say but then stopped. She shook her head and went to the litter box.

Gerry collapsed onto the couch. The apartment was mostly quiet. The modern bachelor’s pad screamed loneliness, everything curated to mask a void.

He sniffed the air, catching traces of perfume mingled with sex.

It clashed with the scent of freshly cut grass and Joy’s bubble-gum shampoo.

The memory made him hyperventilate.

He tried to catch his breath.

The sterile apartment was worlds away from the house he had built with Erin.

Why had he been so restless? So at odds?

Erin and her damned sculptures. Metal so sharp he had nightmares of her honing a piece to perfection, then slitting his throat. She never understood why her art intimidated him.

More to the point, she never asked why.

That home had been filled with the scent of homemade cookies and Joy’s laughter, mingling with Pepper’s excited barks.

Here, the only noises were the distant hum of something and car horns from the street below.

He shifted, the leather creaking beneath him, and glanced around the room, noting the stark, impersonal décor.

As if the apartment were a step above hell.

Gerry wandered to the window, drawn by the shimmering lights. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass, his breath fogging the view.

The twinkling suburban lights couldn’t replace the stars and fireflies he used to watch from his porch.

He missed that. He missed Joy.

God, he missed Erin.

Mitzy padded softly to her favorite spot under the bookshelf. Before tucking herself away, she glared at him. Her disdain was always there. She blamed him. Everyone did.

Gerry tried to cheer himself up.

“Well, that was something,” he said to himself about the three-way.

A smug smile curled at his lips.

But it turned into a beautiful pout.