Separate Ways

The signs are unmistakable. 

It's a muggy November day, a Sunday, and rather than blowing leaves or hanging security lights or smoking meat in the backyard, my neighbor Kevin is loading a pickup truck.  His face is grim and tight and he strides back and forth with armful after armful of possessions, haphazardly tossing them into the truck bed with angry, disjointed motions.  There's no sign of Sharon, his wife, and no yapping little Maltese at his heels. This, I realize, is a husband on his way out.

You work too hard, Kevin, I call to him as I unload groceries.

Seems so, he tells me, That's why I'm getting a divorce.

And even though I instinctively knew it, to have it put out there, hanging in the humid air, stops me in my tracks.  I tell him I'm sorry to hear it but he just shrugs.

They've lived next door for the last five or so years and while I don't know them well, I have gotten used to them being there.  He's a worker bee - spending every free evening and weekend hour building or puttering with home improvement projects.  Landscaping and a fire pit for the back yard, repairs to the fence, cutting and stacking wood for the fireplace, planting roses and trimming trees, installing an awning over the patio. I find myself remembering how my second husband always managed to have a half dozen projects in the works - anything to put some distance between us and drink unobserved - and begin to wonder if what I've been assuming was industry might've been avoidance.  A house, two cars in the driveway and a little dog don't make a home and all too often love is fleeting if not pitifully inadequate against the inevitable storms.  You can love unreservedly - often without even working very hard at it - but it takes real effort to live with someone, to adapt and compromise and sacrifice and bend.  I've learned that not all of us are cut out for a lifetime of togetherness and harder still, not all of us should try.

When divorce was a scandal, couples stayed together whether they should've or not.  No surrender.

Now that it's common as dirt, people give up without a second thought.  No resistance.

I'm glad that we're past the illusions but sometimes I wonder if the whole concept isn't obsolete.

His belongings neatly and securely lashed in the cargo bed, Kevin's shiny and well cared for pickup truck eases out of the driveway and down the street.   In the front window of the house he leaves behind, a curtain stirs and then is still.