Veer by Ryan Mattern

Veer | Ryan Mattern

On another of these compulsive drives, she is thinking of his teeth. They were by far his most prominent feature. So big they made the letter B sound like F. She had never had that thought before. But now every fleeting thing was fair game for investigation. The air trapped between his teeth and upper lip when he said bright or Bellevue, every word a smile. She had the time now and so chose to reconstruct him completely, believing it her duty, an arena in which she felt she had been floundering. Hindu women, she read, threw themselves on a pyre when their husbands died. The first thing she had done was buy an ounce of pot, for the first time since college. 

There’s the sign. The Sheriff’s Department had adopted the highway in his name. Some restitution. They had also sent her a neatly folded flag which apparently the Governor had saluted on the day following the accident. She put it in the hall closet next to the guest towels and the old Wi-Fi router they couldn’t figure out how to properly return. She didn’t know the Governor. Certainly, she hadn’t voted for him. His salute felt the same as everyone’s condolences. Ornaments hung on a tree watered with her grief. But it was the expectation of her service—to weep, to join support groups, to pin a ribbon to her shirt, to start a foundation—that made her dream of exile. 

***

“They’ll fry me for this,” she says, buttoning her jeans on the edge of some other man’s bed.

“No one’s asking anything,” he says. 

“I’m supposed to be grieving.” 

“Maybe you are. A bereaved one-night stand.”

“You never know,” she says. “I might require the full protocol.”

“I’ll keep my phone on me.”

A calico cat slinks into the bedroom and butts its head against her ankle bone. She hadn’t noticed it last night. 

“My roommate,” he says. “A rescue.”

“Aren’t you a good Christian.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” he says. “Just wanted a partner.”

She falls back onto the bed and taps her fingers on her thigh, beckoning the cat. 

“Can I hide out here today?”

“You can stay as long as you want. Take a shower maybe. Let’s go see about breakfast,” he says and makes a clicking noise. She doesn’t know if he means her or the cat. 

She lies there and pets it for a moment, careful not to ask for its name. 

***

The house is littered with every animation of dying flowers, the dead earth stink of them. It amazed her the things for which she was instantly off the hook. The high school had given her the rest of the year off with pay. She could eat ice cream for breakfast and drink black coffee while watching the evening news. Ignore phone calls for days, make them at odd hours. 

She missed the way things were but ached for something else to change. Perhaps she would give credence to every inane idea that came to be. She thought maybe she would like to be a sommelier, hauling home two boxes of buy-six-bottles-get-six-free from the Safeway. She spent a few weeks lost in her study of wine, the days long but somehow occurring mostly irrespective of her. She kept a log, the Pinot Noirs with a nose of wet manure, the Muscadets like licking a seashell. 

If she bathed or if she brushed her hair were of no consequence to anyone who might have an opinion on the matter. The freedom was almost as astonishing as the lump sum life insurance. She wondered if she should buy a parcel of land to rehabilitate spent racehorses or maybe learn what cryptocurrency was. She could download a dating app and witness with amazement the circus of mostly nice men appearing at her doorstep willing to indulge in the abatement of her loneliness or boredom. She could play at being a wife when the old fancy struck, cooking eggplant parmesan, which had always been a knockout, or waking hours before her sex-stunned guest to run his jeans through the wash. She watched a tutorial on how to deepthroat and bought a yoga mat on Amazon. 

***

She found she could say whatever she wanted to now and it was a realization that was as liberating as it was terrifying. A widow is supposed to have some insight, but she rarely knew what she was supposed to be saying. A coterie of dead men’s left-behinds assaulted her phone with texts and emails and voice messages about what she should be doing to claw through the funk of the day or, worse, asking for advice on what they ought to do themselves. All the hearts going out to her, being entangled in so many thoughts and prayers. It made her feel like a fraud. Is life supposed to end when the one you’re doing it with bows out early? It was a yes/no question and the act of carrying on felt like a declination. 

***

It takes her months to get to the cemetery. The finality of his name in stone, the bookending numbers. End of Watch. A fraying pinwheel someone left on the Fourth of July. A few challenge coins from the fire department and neighboring police departments. An unopened can of Grizzly Wintergreen. 

She sits Indian-style right on top of him and waits for something to happen. She thinks a breeze might give her the chills, a bird could caw something familiar. What if a stranger emerged from the Quonset hut turned flower shop and relayed a story about him, one she had never heard before? Or what if it was she who had passed on and gone to hell and this was her punishment, a rush of chatter and concern and then, in keeping with everyone else’s tragedies and attention spans, aloneness without end? But it’s none of that. No flood of memories. No shafts of light banding through the springtime clouds. Not even a roly-poly climbing up her leg. Nothing out of place or even happenstance. No evidence of anything beyond the evident. Her broken heart, which is just something we say and mostly feel well below, and the apprehension she feels about walking back to the car.

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