Frankly, Caryn was not much to look at and she was at least 200 pounds overweight.

Still, Joe loved her. At least as much as he had ever loved any woman.

She had taken care of him almost since he went on disability from a work related incident that was, for the most part, his fault.

Joe was dating Diane at the time of the accident and he wasn’t home from the hospital two weeks, when he woke up that Sunday morning and found her dead in bed next to him.

“If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no fucking luck at all,” he told his friends, by way of explanation.

Diane had a heart attack, brought on early in life by a pack-a-day cigarette habit, and similar indulgences in Vodka and illicit drugs.

Two days later, Caryn agreed to drive Joe to Diane’s funeral in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and she stayed with him ever since.

She stayed with him during the addiction to the prescription pain killers.

She stayed with him through the second DUI.

She stayed with him during the prison stint, which resulted in part from Joe telling the Judge that he was pretty full of himself “for a man wearing a fuckin’ dress to work everyday.”

For staying with him, he loved her. At least as much as he had ever loved any woman.

In this context, he wondered why they had to argue so much.

He hadn’t been awake 15 minutes and she started on him as he sat at the breakfast table.

“When are you going to stop with the pills?”

“Its just a couple of fucking Percosets, so leave me alone, bitch.”

He popped a handful of pills in his mouth and washed it down with some Pepsi out of a can. The Pepsi was dosed with a liberal amount of Captain Morgan.

He decided to try a diversion.

“I need you to take me to the CVS today.” He hadn’t bothered to renew his driver’s license since the incarceration.

Technically his bloodstream had not been clean enough to legally operate a motor vehicle in the Garden State for the last two decades, maybe longer.

“What do you need from the CVS that you can’t get from the Walmart across the street?”

“Or, by CVS, do you mean liquor store?”

If they had this conversation once, they had it two or three times per week.

He wondered how he got stuck with such an ugly surly woman, both inside and out.

“If we didn’t fight, we wouldn’t have any fucking relationship at all,” he told his friends, by way of explanation.

“Last night we even had a fight during sex.”

She had been on top of him, all 350 pounds of her, like the rodeo bull riding the cowboy.

He made the mistake of closing his eyes as he made it to the bell, and she started beating him about the head with her fists.

“You fucking asshole,” she screamed, “don’t you be fantasizing about other women while you’re in bed with me.”

He was snapped back to the present with more rhetoric.

“I’m not taking you to the CVS.”
“I’m not going to be your enabler.”
“I’m not going to be the cause of your drinking.”

He took another sip from the Pepsi can and contemplated the most spiteful statement he could think to deliver next, and there it was:

“Are you as stoopid as you are ugly?”

He regretted the words almost before he finished saying them, and even before Caryn started sobbing.

###

2015 Kirt Van Buren