West
Virginia in My Head
By
Jane
Kenealy
I am an
ex-reference librarian, occasional bakery clerk, and novice web designer. I
began my first novel when I was seven, but had to abandon the project when I
lost my pencil.
He came home, and went upstairs
in silence. No “good night”. No “I’m going to bed.” As usual, nothing. I sat in my chair and watched him go up the
steps, my legs curled up toward my body, my arms cradling my stomach. I had confronted him a week ago about the
other woman, and he had sworn that he would end it. But then he had gone out again that very
night, and every night thereafter. This
whole past week had been one of silences from him, and reading relationship
rescue books for me. Things were not
going well.
I
looked at the cover of the latest chirpy “you can fix it if you try” book that
I had gotten from the library, and felt myself giving up, at least for the
night. I crept up the stairs to bed,
quietly, each step careful to avoid the old house creaks. I didn’t want to disturb him. He got up earlier than I. He was snoring already, just slightly. I carefully crawled into my side of the bed.
His cell phone lay on his dresser,
mocking me. West Virginia stirred, and I
heard Nanny’s voice in my head. “How
long are you going to go on like this, child?.”
“Not long,” I thought. “Not long
at all.” “Then get up out of that bed
and DO SOMETHING.” I obeyed, and slid my
legs back out from under the sheets. I
reached for the cell and walked back downstairs, making the right at the bottom
to go into the dining room. I thumbed
the machine on, and hit the menu choice for “Outgoing Calls”. He had called Her five minutes after leaving
home that night.
Nanny was wide awake now. “He ate your food and then called his
hoore?” Her remembered twang turned the
noun into some sort of medieval epithet.
“He ate your food and then called his hoore with your dinner in his
belly?” Somehow that made it all worse:
the ultimate insult.
Nanny picked up a cast iron frying
pan, and I picked up the cell phone that I had dropped. We went back up the stairs together.
I stood in the doorway, looking at
the huddle of sheets that was my lying, cheating husband. I hefted the phone in my hand, wanting to
throw it at him, longing to scream unforgivable unforgettable devastatingly
wounding things just this once. My heart
was banging in my ears, barely drowning out Nanny’s rumbles of rage. “Heck, that little thing isn’t going to teach
him anything. You need a good frying
pan. Here. Take mine.
Now that will get his attention.
Do some damage. Show him you mean
business.”
“All that will do is get me
arrested.” I pictured the squib in the
next day’s Times-News police blotter: “Angry librarian attacks husband with
kitchen appliance.” The Times-News
always got things a little off-kilter.
Not good. I would end up shamed when
I was not the one who had done anything to be ashamed of. Peter, the bastard, would become an automatic
object of pity and concern. “So
sad. Who knew she was so crazy. What he must have put up with,” the populace
would cluck. He would love it.
“Shut up, Nanny,” I told the voice
in my head. “There’s got to be a better
way. One that will shame him. One that will remove him.” “One that will teach him good!” Nanny piped
up. “No, Nan. I’m not interested in him learning
anything. I just want him gone.”
I turned and slid back downstairs,
the phone still in my hand. “Knowledge
is powe,” I remembered from the posters at work. This time I went through each text message,
scanning it, then forwarding it to my work email. Logging the days and times and numbers of the
regular calls on the back of an old envelope.
Rummaging through his contacts list, and writing down Her phone
number. I worried momentarily that he
would notice that I had been messing in his phone, but remembered that for all
his pride in his technological know-how, he was really just a child performing
simple monkey tricks when it came to electronics. He could barely handle his email or find a
document once he had saved it. I was the
technogeek of the family.
Guilt began to pick at me. I was invading his privacy. Dewey and a century of librarians waggled
their collective fingers at me. I told
them to shut up too.
I sat back in my chair again, brain
spinning. What to do? How? What? The guilt thing rose up
again. How could I think of doing
something to my husband? Maybe I really
was crazy. I had my dead grandmother
screaming in my head. Was that normal? Then I looked again at the stream of daily
messages to Her. I slid the plain gold
band off my finger for the first time in twenty-eight years. “I divorce thee,” I whispered to it. “I divorce thee. I divorce thee.” I placed the ring carefully on the table by
my chair. It had meant something to
me. But women in my family just plain
did not divorce. There had to be another
way......
Copyright 2012 © Jane
Kenealy
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