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It was a Friday. I remember because Chris and I had such a good week together I was trying to come up with something special we could do over the weekend. Nothing too huge because I had no energy left after building a baby for eight months on top of dealing with all the stress of our relationship. And nothing too fancy because by the time I reached the last month of my pregnancy, all I could fit into were some denim overalls I’d picked up at the thrift shop.
But I wanted to do something. Chris had changed so much. He would rub my belly, sing to our little baby. At some point during the past week, he’d stopped referring to Gracie as mine and started using the plural possessive. I couldn’t even pretend to imagine what my husband had gone through. Watching your wife suffer through the devastation of rape, learning to love the child conceived through such violence, swallowing your pride and agreeing to call her daughter your own.
He was trying. God knows how hard he was trying. But beneath the surface, all that stress had to go somewhere. You can’t be as tightly wound as Chris and go through half the turmoil he did without having to bury down some major psychological angst. Angst that would one day find a vent.
Unfortunately, that vent was me.
You’d think after all we’d gone through, life would have given us both an extra dose of perspective. I mean, after you’ve suffered through the disappointment of sterility and the trauma of your wife’s rape and the shame of a marital separation, you’d think that finding your gas tank was only slightly above the quarter-full line wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
Unless you’re Chris.
You should have seen him go at it. Screaming at me, cussing like Peter in the high priest’s garden. For being such a Holy Ghost boy on Sundays, that man could swear like an HBO scriptwriter every other day of the week.
And what gets Chris more upset than when I forget to tell him the gas is low?
Except I did tell him. That’s the thing. Just the day before when I got back from my prenatal appointment. It’s not like Reginald would have cared, but I didn’t like to drive the company car unless it was for work, so I had taken Chris’s to the doctor’s, and when I got back I mentioned the gas was low.
“Ok, just remind me in the morning.”
And that’s what I forgot to do. Apparently even someone like Chris occasionally forgets to check the gauge until it’s running on fumes. Which in his mind means he’s got less than a quarter of a tank. I swear he could have driven halfway to Wenatchee before it ran out, but that wasn’t the issue.
The issue was I hadn’t told him the gas was low. Except I had, just the day before, only he didn’t remember that much. So the entire ordeal was my fault, the fact that he had to change his route, go a few miles out of his way and fill up so that if traffic had been bad he might have been two or even three minutes late to his scheduled drop-off.
And yes, that’s the inciting event that did our marriage in, that sealed the lid on the coffin of our relationship.
Because he was so upset he wasn’t thinking clearly. Because with all the stress he’d been under with the pregnancy and the separation and everything else, Chris’s store of self-control was now as empty as his gas tank had been.
He yelled.
He threw one of the dishes.
He ripped up the newest book I’d started reading.
And then he hit me.