American Innovations: Stories Read Free Page A

need to think it means something it doesn’t, though it would mean something nice to have it again, I think to myself, as I find an appealing empty table in the back corner of a Peruvian chicken joint, where I order french fries. Some people save their marriages—not that our marriage needs saving, not that it’s in danger, one can’t be seduced by the semantically empty loss of a ring, I remind myself—by having adventures together. We could pull a heist. Me and Boo. Boo and … well, we’d have some Bonnie and Clyde–type name, just between ourselves. We could heist a UPS truck full of iPhones. On a rural delivery route. The guns wouldn’t need to be real, definitely not. We could then move to another country. An expensive and cold one where no one comes looking and where people leave their doors unlocked because wealth is distributed so equitably. This is not my kind of daydream, I think. This is not my sort of reverie. It is someone else’s. Maybe that’s fine. I was never a Walter Mitty myself. Though I consistently fell in love with and envied that type. But a Walter Mitty can’t be married to a Walter Mitty. It doesn’t work. There is a maximum allowance of one Walter Mitty per household. That’s just how it goes.
    *   *   *
    “Why is your phone off? Where were you?”
    I guess hours have passed. Boo is back home. It’s dark out.
    “I got scared,” I say. “I was getting scary phone calls. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
    There’s opened mail on the table.
    Boo says, “Look, I know there’s something important that you haven’t told me.”
    My body seems to switch climates. It must be the unbreathing raincoat.
    “I know you’re scared,” he is saying. “I know you’re scared of lots of things. I don’t want to catch you out. I’m tired of catching out. I don’t want to be a catcher-outer. I just want to be told. Just tell me the thing that you’ve been hiding from me. This could be a good day for us. You could tell me, and then I will feel like I can begin to trust you more again, because I’ll know you can tell me things even when it is scary and difficult to tell.”
    I see that along with the mail, there is a shoebox full of my papers on the table. “I was just out,” I hear myself saying. Is this something to do with the guy calling for delivery? “I was just lonely in the house, and spooked, and so I went out,” I go on. “I had a salad. I guess various things happen in a day. I guess one can always share more. But I can’t think of anything I would call a secret.”
    There is a long pause now. As if, I’m thinking, I’d made an awkward, outsize observation, like calling him the Loch Ness monster, or a unicorn. He is my unicorn, though. I forgot that I used to say that; that’s how I felt falling in love with him, as if I’d found a creature of myth. He was less practical then, more dreamy. He had an old belt with a little pony on it; the pony was always upside down.
    “Please,” he says. “I’m asking as nicely as I can. Don’t you have something you want to say to me?”
    “I went out and looked for the ring,” I say. “I wanted to tell you that. I didn’t find the ring. But I did look for it. We should just buy another one.”
    “A severance check arrived for you,” he says. “Actually, I’ve found three of your severance checks.”
    “That’s odd,” I am saying.
    “None of them have been cashed, of course.”
    The unicorn suddenly has a lot to say. Why couldn’t I just tell him that I was fired? he is saying. Or he is saying something like that. I really and truly and genuinely don’t know what he is talking about. I am saying that I said I resigned because I did resign. I really do remember using that word, “tender,” in offering my resignation. And there’s been a lot of misdirected mail lately, I say. Even misdirected calls. I have been meaning to mention that to him.
    He is saying that lots of people lie, but why do I tell lies that