River poured milk into the mixture on the stove without another word or glance in my direction, and I sighed, looking up to the ceiling like God could help me.
“Look, if we’re going to be stuck together, we might as well try to get along,” I said, joining him in the kitchen. I grabbed the loaf of bread off the top of the fridge and pulled out six slices — four for him, two for me — and popped the first two in the old toaster on the counter.
River eyed me, but then his brows furrowed once more, and he kept his focus on the gravy.
“You and me, get along?” He shook his head. “When has that ever been the case?”
“So maybe we try something new.” I leaned a hip against the counter, crossing my arms and watching him salt and pepper the gravy. “God, this stuff looks so nasty,” I said, but couldn’t help the smile that spread on my lips next. “But I’d be lying if I said my stomach isn’t growling at the smell of it.”
Something close to a grunt was the only response I got.
“I remember the first time your dad made this for me,” I said after a moment, trying again for civility. “I think we were fourteen? It was sophomore year, after homecoming. We were drunk, and he was so mad at us.” I chuckled, remembering the way River’s dad had cursed us out the entire way home after picking us up. “But he also couldn’t stop laughing at us. And then he made us this…. this goop,” I said, waving my hand over the gravy. “To soak up the booze,” I mimicked in my deepest voice. “Remember that? And he was telling us how it was a staple meal in the military back in the day, and how his dad had made it for him. And—”
“I don’t really want to go down memory fucking lane, okay?” River slung the ground beef into the gravy mixture he’d made, stirring it a few times before he abandoned it altogether. “Serve yourself.”
He walked away without another word, giving me his back as he retreated into the bathroom.
And I just stood there, shocked silent, wondering what I’d said wrong.
Wondering if it was going to be like this until the snow decided to let me out of this cabin jail cell.
Unsurprisingly, we ate dinner in silence — me practically done with my plate by the time River rejoined me to make his, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke. I hated that he still had that habit, and found the words to tell him so on the tip of my tongue, but I somehow managed to keep them at bay.
If I was going to be stuck with him for God knew how long, I didn’t want to nag him.
I was tired of nagging him.
It was one of the many reasons I’d put him out of his misery and delivered him a divorce.
It seemed so long ago, the conversations that turned into fights that turned into us staring at each other at a complete impasse, knowing this was where we would end. I wanted to get out of this town, see the world, travel, explore. I wanted him to go with me.
He wanted to stay.
It was as simple and as complicated as that.
No matter how I tried to convince him that we could travel and then come back, that we could go see the world and still come see our family here at home, he wouldn’t budge. He loved the small-town life, where I only longed for more.
And we were so young and so stupidly in love that we didn’t think to talk about what we really wanted before we got married.
More than that, what I wanted changed.
When I was eighteen, an engagement ring on my finger and a field of butterflies in my heart, being married to River and living here in Wellhaven was what I wanted. I wanted the house and the yard and the dog and the kids — just like my parents had, and his parents, too.
But something in me shifted around age twenty-three.
Suddenly, more and more of our friends were coming home from college, or from traveling the world. I would look online and see photos of our friends in exotic countries, eating amazing food, seeing amazing sights. I listened to them talk about their time at college, the classes they took, the parties they went to, the sporting events and bars and clubs and travels abroad.
And I realized it then — there was only so much living you could do in a small town.
I can’t explain the thirst that was born in me then. I didn’t just want to get out, I had to get out — just as much as I had to inhale my next breath in order to keep surviving. My dreams were overhauled, and no longer did I envision the house and the kids — at least, not as soon. Instead, I saw River and myself drinking wine in Italy, snorkeling off the coast of Australia, taking a dip in the hot springs in Iceland, hell, even hiking the mountains in Oregon.
I didn’t even consider it, the possibility that River wouldn’t want those same things.
But when I brought it all up to him, you would have thought I’d told him I cheated on him with his best friend.
He wanted nothing to do with it. He wouldn’t entertain the possibility of leaving. He wouldn’t even consider taking a long vacation when I proposed that as a compromise.
He didn’t want to leave Wellhaven. Period.
And that was it. The first little snowflake that balled into another, rolling rolling rolling, until the snowball was so big and heavy, we couldn’t breathe beneath its force.
We lost sight of what once was, what we had wanted, what we had planned.
We lost sight of each other.
Everyone told us it was normal. We were high school sweethearts, married too young to know better. People fall apart. Marriages don’t always last.
But still, that divorce felt like the biggest failure of my life. It felt like everything I thought could exist in this world was no longer possible, like I’d been lying to myself all along.
It crushed me.
And though River showed no emotion, I knew it crushed him, too.
After we ate dinner, I offered to take care of the dishes — mostly because I was getting more and more anxious as each moment ticked by, and I needed something to do. When I finished, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Talking hadn’t worked, and there was no television to turn on for the noise I desperately wished for. It seemed River had decided to live the life of a caveman once I was gone — no Internet, no phone, no TV.
The only sound I was afforded was the storm raging on outside.
The wind whistled, the wood cabin creaked against the weight of it and perhaps the snow, too. It was so dark now that I couldn’t see anything out the window, but I stared out it anyway, absentmindedly petting Moose where he lay curled up on my lap on the couch.
“Can you please do something?” River said after a while, and when I looked over to where he sat at one of the chairs at the folding table, he was glaring at me over the pages of the book in his hand. “You’re driving me nuts with all that sighing.”
I hadn’t even realized I’d sighed at all until he called me out on it, but once he had, I realized it was all I’d been doing since I sat down.
“Well, what am I supposed to do? You don’t have a television. Or Internet. And apparently having a conversation is off the table.”
I could almost hear the grinding of his jaw as he turned his attention back to his book. “I’ve got a whole shelf of books over there.”
“I don’t feel like reading.”
“Well, read, or don’t read, I don’t care. But whatever you do, be quiet about it.”