Fortunately, the alternator in my 1984 Dodge Ram is easy to access, otherwise I’d have to take it to a garage to get it replaced. I really can’t afford a car repair this month; I’ve barely worked. This weighs heavily on my mind as I roll over in bed and try to tune out the sound of my wife, who is sitting outside the bedroom window in the driveway of our Hollywood apartment smoking cigarettes and drinking cans of beer from our red and white Playmate. I hear the lid scrape open and shut each time she pulls out another can. I try to keep count, as if the roundtrips to the cooler were sheep, but I keep seeing my truck out on the street, the hood up, my head sunk in the engine bay as I struggle with the stubborn alternator bolt.

My tossing and turning disturbs our cat Emma curled up at the foot of the bed, trying to sleep. Every time I wake her, she stands up, turns in a bewildered circle, and then curls back into a ball. Sometimes she stretches. I keep expecting her to abandon the bed altogether for one of her undisturbed spots, but she’s toughing it out. I want to sleep, too, but my wife won’t stop fidgeting in the squeaky folding lawn chair she’s sitting in. When I’d tried to get her to come to bed, she’d said “I don’t feel like going to bed.” I heard “with you” although I don’t think she said that exactly. This is not like her at all. Retreating outside to be alone with a Playmate full of beer is more my thing. I sometimes do it even when we have people over. The lid scrapes open and shut one more time. My worries about the Ram take me back to all the problems I had with my red Chevy step side, the truck I had when my wife and I met. It was forever breaking down, leaving me stranded all over town. That was the case that night in Austin. It had gotten me to the party, but it wouldn’t take me home. Outfitted in a Mae West-looking costume complete with a big bird-seed bra, a feather boa and red-sequined Chuck Taylor high tops that reminded me of the ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz, my wife–before she was my wife–had just belted out a rousing sing-a-gram to my friend Chet, the birthday boy, and was trying to rush off so she wouldn’t be late to her next appointment. I was sitting alone on the dark porch steps swigging beer from a long neck and trying to figure out what to do about the broken-down Chevy. She stumbled over me, and I caught her before she went tumbling down the stairs.

For a moment she lay sprawled across my lap with an expectant look on her face, as if she might burst into song, an encore maybe of the sing-a-gram she’d just delivered. She didn’t. Instead, she got back on her feet and apologized profusely. “No problem,” I told her, “People often stumble over me. I’m kind of invisible.”  She laughed at that, and then asked if she could have a swig from the long neck I had somehow managed to hang onto as I caught her fall. “Whew, thanks!” she said, breathlessly, returning the bottle to me, “So sorry for falling on you. I gotta run to a surprise party.” “Which way you headed?” I asked her, “My truck won’t start. I could use a ride home.”

She spent that night with me in my loft in the apartment where the only bathroom was downstairs in my roommate’s bedroom. I kept an apple juice bottle next to my bed to pee in at night, so I didn’t have to disturb my roommate. Later, she told people that was what made her fall for me, that apple juice pee bottle. I guess it was the bohemian-ness of it that attracted her.

My dead alternator shoves its way back into my thoughts, so I roll over one more time and finally drift off to sleep, thinking about car engine parts. I sleep fitfully, dreaming some weird Wizard of Oz reversal dream where I’m dropped into a Kansas cornfield by the same twister that swept Dorothy into Oz. I try to escape but with every step I take, the Kansas horizon retreats farther away. I wake to sunlight pouring in through the sheet we used as a curtain. My wife isn’t in bed beside me. I jerk the sheet all the way back to see if she’s still sitting outside, but the lawn chair is empty. The Playmate is gaping open, and birds are picking at crumbs from an empty bag of Tostitos. She must have gotten hungry sometime in the night. I call her name and get no response. I listen for movement in the apartment, rustling, anything. When all I hear is the wind-up alarm clock ticking its last ticks before it winds down, I know she’s gone.

I had tried to ignore the signs that had been there for months. She’d taken up smoking with the male co-worker who gave her lifts home sometimes. She started hanging out with another co-worker, Josie, and with Billy and Patrick, a gay couple she’d met through work. One night they invited her to a party at a house in the Hollywood Hills. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want her to go alone, so I tagged along. The house had a spectacular view of L.A., and the host—some Hollywood talent manager I was never introduced to–was generous with the liquor. My wife got drunk on Cape Codders and ended up skinny dipping with her new friends.

There were other signs: when she got sick of having to rely on rides all the time, she insisted on buying herself a brand-new car, which we couldn’t afford, but I couldn’t stop her. She was mostly supporting us and had been for a while, my Hollywood ambitions having progressed no further than background work. And then there was the night I found her soaking in a bath after she came home late. I’d been at our neighbor’s place, hanging out killing time until she got home. She told me she’d gone for drinks with Josie, but I found out sometime later when we ran into him at the car dealership that she’d fucked the ex-cop-turned-lawyer friend of Josie that night. The same dude who drove a red Corvette and had asked her to drive up the coast with him a month before. “Absolutely not,” I’d told her when she asked me if I thought that was okay. “He just wants to get in your pants.” I thought the matter was settled.

“Sweet Chevette,” I joked when I met him, not entirely coincidentally as it turned out, in the service area waiting room of the Glendale Chevy dealership where my wife had gone to pick out a new car. “A real babe magnet,” I went on, clueless that he had in fact already driven my wife up the coast. He laughed, maybe politely or maybe because he thought it was funny, I’ll never know, and said, “Yep, serves me well.” I shook his hand and bid him a friendly farewell before he grinned the shit-eatingest grin I’d ever seen and pulled his perfect little red Prince Corvette out of the service bay and sped away onto Brand Blvd. We drove off the lot in a Hot Wheels blue Camaro the salesmen offered to let us drive home to see if it would fit in our garage because my wife’s wishful thinking had convinced her we could afford it. Turned out we were able to save face when it didn’t fit. She settled on a red Prism. At least it was new—and it was hers. I hoped it would satisfy her.

Later that night, after a couple of bottles of wine, my wife confessed, out of guilt, I guess, or maybe to lord it over me, I don’t know. “Where?”  I asked, “Where did you do it? His place? Or is he married too? Some cheap motel in the Valley? Or did he take you some place nice?” She didn’t answer and she stonewalled me from then on, even as I relentlessly hounded her for details about the hook up. I needed to know.

Emma crowds my ankles, meowing, as I wander around our apartment in a numb daze looking for my absent wife. No surprise when I find her suitcase and most of the clothes in her closet gone. I stop in my tracks, though, when I come across our only framed wedding photo, still proudly on display in the living room.  Most of our wedding photos were ruined by shadow, the hired photographer having neglected to use a flash under the wedding tent. The one we framed was the best of the salvageable ones, taken outside the tent in bright sunlight by my wife’s mother. When I lift the photo from its perch for a closer look, I notice the undisturbed dust print left on the shelf. The photo hasn’t been touched in a long while. She used to show it to people every chance she got, just like she shared the pee bottle story. In the beginning, I guess. How did the beginning turn into the end so fast? I choke back an unexpected sob as I recall the night I found her in the bathtub, soaking in the sex she’d just had. I was clueless. She’d been such a loyal wife, as if fidelity was in her DNA. On my first birthday after we got together, she gave herself to me as a present, wrapped from the neck down in toilet paper. She looked like a mummy than a birthday gift, but it was touching gesture. She cried when I unwrapped her, just as she’d cried while reciting the wedding vows. The bubbly sing-a-gram girl who’d fallen over me on a porch step and for me over a pee bottle, had transformed right before my eyes, and I’d failed to notice. She was a different woman now than the twenty-year-old girl I’d married seven years before. I choke back tears and grip the photo so tight with both hands that the frame breaks, fracturing the glass into little daggers, one of them slicing a small cut into my finger. “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck!”  Only a little blood beads up from the cut, but tears gush out of me as if I’ve severed a tear duct. The whole photo album of our marriage spirals across my mind like a kaleidoscope of heartbreak, a fresh sob accompanying each flashing image until I start laughing, laughing through my sobs. It finally occurs to me why my wife wouldn’t tell me where the ex-cop took her that night–they did it in his car. His red Corvette. Somewhere along a dark stretch of PCH, maybe at Broome Beach where we’d once done it in the back of the Ram when we still had the camper shell after the move from Texas. We’d listened to the surf crash against the rocks all that night. We felt like we’d arrived. Or maybe he found a dark street right here in our neighborhood. It must have been tricky in that Corvette.

I see the two of them wriggling in the passenger seat, my wife trying to figure out what to do with her legs as she straddles him, him fumbling with his fly, trying to pull it out and get it in. It’s painful to imagine and yet I can’t stop myself. I am about to see it through to their awkward climax when frantic cat yowling snaps me back into the present. I hadn’t noticed that Emma had disappeared, and now she’s perched on the windowsill of the screenless window we leave open for her, crunching a live bird in her mouth. Dammit! I rush to her to try and free the bird and save its life, but by the time I pry it from Emma’s mouth, the bird is bleeding, and its wings are crushed. Emma leaps up onto my shoulder and tries to retrieve the bird, her claws digging into my skin. I drop the bird out the open window and slam it shut before she can spring after it. She yowls and paws furiously at the closed window. I can see the poor bird flopping around desperately on the ground, unable to fly, and even though I imagine rushing it to a vet, I know it’s too late. Besides, my truck won’t start.

I go to the kitchen and open a can of cat food, hoping the sound will distract Emma from pursuing the bird. I spoon some food onto a plate and set the plate on the counter. Emma is there in an instant. She leaps up onto the counter and laps up the food, her bushy tail sweeping back and forth across my bare arm. I stare out the kitchen window into the empty garage where my wife parks her car, listening to Emma eat and purr like a machine, the bird now a distant memory.

– Tim Hanson