Crybaby Ranch Read Free

school, choose a career, but I’d forgotten how to make choices for myself. I didn’t even want to. By then I disliked leaving my house; small interruptions in routine disarmed me of coping skills; I was easily rattled and very dependent on Erik.
    I pick up the memory coil again, feed it a large round Czech satin. When I purchased my first jewelry-making supplies and discovered I could create something beautiful, I became stronger bead by bead. It was my first experience of doing something just for me. I should pat myself on the back, because when it does have to do with me personally, I know how to personally fix it. I just need alerting first from life’s little embarrassments. Like smelling my watch in the school hallway. Like almost getting hit by a car while entertaining my husband.
    I even pushed past my fear and began trying to sell my work so I could buy more beads, keep making new pieces. Now two shops here in Findlay, one downtown, one in the mall, sell my necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.
    Â 
    Hours later, dissolved in contentment and forgetting that I’m mad, I holler to Erik still in the living room. “What should we have for dinner?”
    Long pause. I wait, head cocked. Newspaper rustles. Another minute passes.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Big investment on my part for this nonanswer. I try again. “What do you feel like eating?”
    This time I continue choosing beads, guiding them onto a yard-long piece of Acculon. Three beads, four, five.
    â€œWhat do you feel like?” he answers in an uninterested voice.
    Conversation with Erik is like playing catch with someone who keeps all the balls.
    â€œI feel like escargot at a four-star restaurant followed by beef Wellington. Okeydoke?”
    As I finish the necklace, I slide into a daydream in which Erik and I laugh and whisper on a dinner date while sending smoky, low-lidded looks at each other across escargot and glimmering glasses of wine. I touch my tongue to my lips, then lift my eyes to spot the street-corner stranger witnessing our flirtations. He corrects his assumptions of me as a wimpy wife left in the debris of the curbside and tries to come on to me behind Erik’s back.
    I take a break and stretch. That won’t happen. Erik and I don’t date, and the stranger’s assumptions, as I am reading them, are right on the money. My evening holds silence from Erik and tedious noise from the television. I scoot back my stool and walk into the living room.
    â€œErik, I’m leaving.”
    No reaction. “Would you answer me?”
    â€œI don’t believe you asked me a question.” He continues reading.
    I ask one now. “Erik, did you hear me? I’m leaving.”
    Erik lifts his flat eyes from the newspaper to my face.
    I mean to say that I’m going to the grocery store to get things for dinner, but his lack of responsiveness works on me and I blurt, “I’m going to Florida. Back in a week.”

two
    â€œI s there something I’m supposed to take personally about this trip?” Erik asks on the drive to the Toledo airport. I shake my head no. Fifteen miles later he asks, “Do you realize you could have saved yourself a hell of a lot of money on your plane ticket by planning ahead?” I nod yes. Ten miles after that: “Don’t you know that if you’d waited for spring break, you needn’t have used all your personal days from work?” I tip my head side to side and add a shrug.
    All good questions. But for once I have nothing to say in response to him. I think Erik likes it when I’m quiet and slightly miserable. He carries my suitcase to the end of the ticket line and looks me over the way a parent does before sending a child off on the school bus. I hope he likes how this turquoise cotton sweater makes my blue eyes stand out. He kisses me goodbye rather rousingly, and I give a little laugh of pleasure. He frowns down at