RD + VB - #fridayflash

Vic was proofreading advertorial crap for a business supplement in the Weekly Herald.

It was stinking boring.

She circled typos and grammatical glitches and she tapped her red pen on the desk and wondered if she was really drooling or just felt like it.

She finished one story, drew a dramatic ‘V’ with a flourish on the top of the page and picked up another one.

This one was about Drysdale’s Drycleaning.

Her boredom sat up smartly and started marching.

“Oooh,” she thought, and began to read.

“2009 wasn’t the easiest year for Fiona Drysdale and the staff of Drysdale’s Drycleaning. The sudden death of Fiona’s husband, Ray, was a shock to say the least.”

Vic stared at the story, shocked as blue blazes.

“Wha?” she said out loud.

Her breath whooshed out of her in one surprised push and she swayed slightly in her leather chair. Her heart drummed in her chest and she felt dizzy, faint, sick, hot, cold, everything, she felt everything, and all at crazed once.

Ray was dead. Ray was dead? 

When did he die? She scanned through the story. Six months ago.

Dead. For six months. And she didn’t know. How could she not know?

She e-mailed Donny Cruickshank, the ad rep. “Ray Drysdale died? How did he die? I just read the story in Business Today... I didn’t know he was dead. What happened?”

The answer came back fast. “Heart attack. Dropped dead in the store. It was big news – where the hell were you?”

Vic didn’t know. She thought about it, then flipped through her calendar.

The Dominican. She had been on vacation with her new boyfriend in Puerto Plata that week.

Still.

You’d think she would have heard something about it.

It was a small town, for pete’s sake. Didn’t anybody gossip anymore?

Vic needed to cry. She picked up her purse and went to the ladies room, trying to look normal, trying not to wobble, or fall down.

Ray was gone, Ray was gone, he was dead. He was actually dead.

She stumbled into an empty stall and sat down hard on the toilet, the words repeating themselves over and over, unencumbered sobs retching out of her like shards of sharp metal.

“Ray,” she whimpered.

The last time she saw him was in the back of his store. He tried to kiss her. She tried to say no.

She said, “I can’t. I’m seeing someone now.”

“Come on, Vic,” he said. “Once more. We’re so good at this dance, you and me.”

“I can’t.”

He sighed. “Why’dja come here then.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. To say good-bye, I guess. Maybe to say thanks. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe if things were different. But they’re not.”

He didn’t say anything, just stood there, staring at the ground, his arms crossed against his chest.

“You’re married,” she said.

He looked up angrily. “I know that, Vic, for crissakes. Tell me something I goddamned well don’t know.”

She was nervous. She was sad. She was still so attracted to him.

“You’re married,” she said. “And I don’t think you really know that at all.”

It was the last time she saw him. The last time they talked. He didn’t e-mail her anymore and she didn’t e-mail him. Her new boyfriend was taking up all her thinking time and it wasn’t long before she stopped giving Ray as much as a single thought.

But dead.

She couldn’t believe it.

There would be no public grieving for her. No funeral. No sympathy cards. No “I’m sorrys” whispered by understanding co-workers. Nobody ever knew about her and Ray. Nobody suspected she might give a rat’s ass when he kicked it.

She hugged herself in the washroom stall, staring at the graffiti-scratched door in front of her. “Hark the Herald, bitches sing, glory to the ding-a-ling” somebody had written. She wondered what the hell that meant.

Somebody else had drawn a heart with their initials on it: CE + DW. She had no idea who either person was.

She closed her eyes.

Vic never thought she was the kind of woman who would carry on with a married man. She never knew why she did it. She figured that if someone hurt you bad enough that it was a way of getting back. Or maybe she was just going through a lonely patch when they met and she found it hard to say no to him. Or maybe she was just morally bankrupt with no redeeming qualities.

She sobbed, hanging her head low.

She was no good, no good, no good at all.

And Ray was dead.

She thought of the night on the back of his motorcycle.

They’d been to see a movie and afterwards they smoked a joint in the parking lot, giggling like schoolchildren. She climbed on the back of his bike and they took the long way home, down a long deserted secondary highway, rippled with curves and hills. The warm summer air streamed across her body on the high parts; in the valleys, the air was funereal cold and grave-damp. She remembered thinking, a deer could run out and we’d be dead, just like that, dead in the blink of an eye. But I am ready, she thought. I can die right now, without regret, because I am alive. I have never been this alive.

She stretched her arms wide into the rushing wind and threw her head back and shouted obscenities to the stars, hugging his strong body with her steely thighs.