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I look up at him then back at the papers. I don’t know if I can form words. It’s like the time Madison told me she was pregnant. I sat there for ten minutes trying to formulate a reply, but I couldn’t. I don’t even know why I couldn’t reply to her then.
Maybe because she was giving me a blow job at the time and I thought to myself, who tells you they’re pregnant in the middle of a blow job?
Madison does. She has impeccable timing like that.
Blinking rapidly, I hand the papers to Brantley, still rendered speechless. I mean, what the fuck?
Brantley snorts, reading through it. That’s more than I did. I just scanned the title and freaked the fuck out.
Swallowing back the lump rising in my throat, my heart continues to pound. I’m sure I’m having a heart attack. Rapid heartbeat, sweating… I think I feel some left arm pain too.
No, wait, that was Brantley. He punched me.
“Dude, what the fuck is this? Mad filed for divorce?”
Scrubbing my hands down my face, I stare at him. “I don’t know.”
He waves at my phone in my pocket. “Well… call her.”
Digging my phone out, I swipe the screen and select her name. Guess what?
Yep. Straight to voice mail.
“Voice mail,” I tell Brantley holding up the phone, and his brow pulls together. Brantley’s been my best friend for twenty years. He knows Madison as well I do. Hell, he’s our son’s godparent.
Oh right, did I mention we have kids together?
Yeah, two. Callan and Noah. Callan’s almost seven and Noah’s three. Makes this even more bizarre. I’m a good dad. Okay, I work a lot but I provide a comfortable life for them, one where Madison only works because she wants to.
So why?
“Okay, let’s think here,” Brantley begins, pacing the floor, his boots making a scuffing noise from the thick layer of dust. “Have you guys been fighting?”
I try to think about it. We’ve been married for a while. Of course we fight, but never once has either of us mentioned divorce. That I know of. I know we say some shit in the heat of the moment, and I sometimes lose interest when she’s bitching about random crap, but divorce… what the actual fuck? I think I’d remember the warning signs.
Frustration takes over, and I rip the papers off the counter and stare at them once more. I’m a man of action. I see a problem and I fix it.
“Got any suggestions, guys?” Trey’s staring at his foot just as I’m beginning to take action. The one with the nail through the top of it. He’s bleeding all over the fucking place.
“Yeah, go to the hospital,” Brantley tells him, shaking his head in disbelief at the trail of blood Trey left from the back sliding doors to the kitchen. “Shit, man, it looks like a crime scene in here. How are we gonna get that off the subfloor?”
I don’t know why Brantley’s surprised by this. This is like the third time in two weeks Trey’s hurt himself on a jobsite. He’s the reason we have to carry such high industrial insurance and have the city up our ass over his last mix up when he fell off a roof and broke his ass.
Where was I?
Right. The “what the fuck” moment. I’m having it again.
Action. I need to take action.
“The city will be here at 12:30 for the electrical inspection.” I hand Brantley the inspector’s business card and roll the papers in my hand. “Stay here. I’m going to find out what the hell this is about.”
He nods but doesn’t say anything else.
I jog out of the house to my truck in the driveway. Tossing the papers on the seat next to me, I throw the truck in drive and rip up the gravel road to the main highway. It’s around ten in the morning, and I know once I hit Highway 60 out of Peoria, I’ll run into traffic, but it’s not like I could have stayed at the jobsite and wondered what the hell this meant.
My mind races through memories trying to pinpoint one where she might have hinted to this. Have you ever seen one of those old fashion phone books? You know the ones I’m talking about with the letters on the front of the metal clipboard looking thing. My dad used to have one. You’d take the plastic slider to the letter the person’s name started with and then flip it open and there’d be these cards in it with phone numbers.
That’s me right now. Sliding through memories trying to pinpoint the right one. There had to be a reason. Was this something like that movieMr. and Mrs. Smithwhere she’s not at all who she said she was when we married? Had she been hired to kill me and her only way out was divorce? That’d I’d understand. I mean, good for her for taking the noble way out here. I’d take divorce over being shot in the back any day. I’ll miss the sex, but I’ll get over it eventually. No one wants a hit man for a wife. Think about it.