My Unsentimental Education

a second divorce seems both harder and easier. Easier because you realize how quickly the promise, the covenant, dissolves. Harder because you resist serialized failure.
I’ve always agreed with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, paraphrased here for modernity: soul problems vanish if your bank account is empty. I checked it. No more empty than usual. I’d sometimes get a few thousand extra dollars, money from the small press, or university grants, and I’d put the extra money on credit card balances—like floodwater, I thought, rising no matter how fast I dug trenches. But what would I tell my dad and stepmother as, husbandless, I drove them around in a truck with bad brakes? Then I realized that Chet had left me in my own car, the registration and promissory note in my name. But a few minutes before I was supposed to go meet my dad and his wife at the airport, Chet pulled into the driveway, smiling and waving, no clue I knew he’d been missing.
I had the drive to the airport to probe the mystery.
He blew up, panicked. I’d called his supervisor’s office?
I said, “You gave me the number. I’ve called before. How was I to know this was different? Where were you?” He’d been camping, he said. He felt like a pent-up animal in Greensboro. He’d rented time on a fishing charter boat too, and he knew I’d object. “Like I’m on an allowance.” I said, “You did this alone?” I pictured Chet with a mistress who fished. We were speeding to the airport. He said, “Yes.” Then a line so familiar I once heard it in a movie: “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.” I never found out, and I never will, where Chet went. Maybe camping. Maybe gambling. One of Chet’s brothers had a gambling jones. Another had just been arrested for soliciting a prostitute.
At the airport, Chet and I acted happy, greeting my dad and his wife. I felt like I had in the ER in Utah, this visit another crisis Chet and I would weather. In a relaxed moment, I told my dad and his wife that Chet and I were on a tight budget—paying off expenses, Chet’s work just picking up—and they were shocked because they’d thought that, after the rigmarole of a PhD, and a book award that had warranted a feature story in the Salt Lake Tribune, I’d be paid like a real doctor, not like Dr. Monroe, Department of English.
Sunday night at seven p.m., the big phone that was a fax machine rang, and Chet’s supervisor asked to see Chet the next day in the office, a hundred miles south, and when Chet came home, he told me the supervisor had lectured Chet for putting the supervisor in a difficult position, and the supervisor wasn’t interested in mitigating details like there wasn’t another woman, just the peaceful ocean versus an ongoing marital squabble about how to spend money. Chet was fired. It was my fault, he said, for meddling. Then my sister phoned and said my dad had enjoyed the visit, Chet especially, but that I’d seemed tense.
Sally told us about someone who needed part-time help painting houses. Chet would come home, spattered, passive, and work on jigsaw puzzles, one of his TVs on nearby, a cable extender from RadioShack snaking across the floor. I told his mother by phone that he was painting houses, that he’d fixed the truck brakes and master cylinder. I’d helped, pressing and releasing the pedal as he’d yelled my name. “He’s as handy as a pocket on a shirt,” I said, a jaunty phrase I’d picked up from Ginna. Chet’s mother went silent. Then she said, “He was the brightest of my boys. I expected more for him.” The My School Years checklist for boys, I thought: Doctor, Banker, Fireman, Policeman, Farmer, Pilot. I thought of this list again as I sat on the porch with Hiram, who didn’t have children, and he told me one of Wyatt’s sons had never latched onto a job. “If you don’t get something steady lined up in your thirties, you’ll flounder for the rest of your life.”
One Sunday, I was across town with the truck because the Subaru was full of Chet’s office supplies from Georgia, also housepainter’s gear, and I was buying bulk groceries.
As I neared the last stoplight, a four-lane intersecting with a six-lane, the stoplight was yellow, then red, and my brakes vanished—defunct, gone for good. I picked up speed as I flew past semitrucks like barges with their blaring horns, cars with bleating horns. I got to the other side, yanking the hand brake, turned into a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, but I couldn’t stop, donut customers jumping out of my way as I circled the building too fast, exited, and rolled down the street into a gas station and up onto a curb, into weeds and trash, just missing a Dumpster. I called Chet. I was leaving the truck here and wouldn’t drive it again until a real mechanic fixed the brakes, I said. Chet was watching football, he said. I said: “You’ve lost your mind. Come get me right now.” If a woman who’s walked away from a truck listing on a curb, now half-sobbing into a phone, seems odd, like a gas station clerk might stare, no. I was in the low-rent part of town.
Hiram drove over with Chet, and they hitched our truck to Hiram’s and towed it to a place called the Brake Guys. Hiram drove me there to pick it up and tried to pay the bill, $69. “No way,” I said. Hiram smiled. I paid with a credit card. The owner said, “Thank you. You and your father have a nice day.” Inexplicably, Hiram and I were familiar, fond, but we conveyed this in a veiled way, talking in generalities about life’s changing demands.
Sally and I talked about cooking, housekeeping. But not often now, awkward since I saw her daily. She’d asked me to