If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Read Free Page A

sneakers? this was a little kids’ party for chrissake and he might be expected to chase a ball in the back yard ), and tried to calm himself down.
    It was okay. It was okay. It was just the goddamned park.
    The swing, he hadn’t seen the swing for seven weeks. Of course. It was the swing. It was okay.
    And then he was breathing again, swallowing whatever fluid it was that had flooded his lungs and face. He put the crook of his elbow to his eyes and shook his head into the bleached smell of his white sleeve.
    Deep inhalation. Slow exhalation. Calm down. He was just a man on the corner who’d dropped some packages. Just a few boxes. Maybe one, the one with the Prom Barbie in it, was dented on the side, but there was nothing fragile in any of these, nothing that couldn’t withstand a little impact. Nothing going horribly wrong here. Nothing which, if someone had seen it, wouldn’t have looked like a simple stumbling. The sidewalks were full of cracks. Maybe he’d caught the toe of a shoe in a crack and dropped the birthday present. Maybe he was an uncle visiting from out of town. Maybe he’d parked down the road from his house because he was planning to surprise the Birthday Girl ( Here I am, just back from a weekend business trip! ) Or maybe he was having trouble with his car, or was leaving enough room on the block for the other partygoers. In any case, he was just a man who’d dropped some packages and who was now bent over to pick them up.
    Everything was fine. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
    And, besides, what was ordinary?
    Everything was ordinary.
    Separation was certainly ordinary , as was divorce. Far stranger domestic situations than these were ordinary . Surely you could knock on any door in any suburb like the one he was walking through and find stories just like his, or much worse stories. He’d heard a joke not long ago:
    An elderly couple comes into a lawyer’s office. They tell him they’ve been married for seventy years, and they want to get a divorce. The lawyer starts the paperwork, but then looks up from his legal pad and says, “Can I ask you a question. Why, after seventy years, do you want to get a divorce now?” to which they answer, “We wanted to wait until the kids were dead.”
    It was funny, no doubt about it. People got married, they got divorced. They got married with all this hoopla. Miles of white satin, bad music, religious pomp, rice tossed all over the church steps. There were cans tied to the bumper of the car. Thousands of dollars worth of food and drink. A whole entourage of old pals in tuxedos and bridesmaids in lacy tents. Mounds of presents. Big, big, sacred promises sealed with hocus-pocus and a lot of waving of the hands, invocations of God and the four winds and the spirits of the ancestors—and then one day one of them just says, “Well, maybe it’s time to move on.”
    Move on!
    Shouldn’t the preacher who married the couple in the first place have to fly back in on a broomstick for that, too—that moving on? Shouldn’t there be some ritual involving a long walk over hot coals while all the guests who’d been at the wedding watched, weeping, throwing stones at your bare backs. Followed by the traditional Burning of the Gifts. Everyone would gather to watch the toaster and blender explode. Followed by the sacrificial drowning of a bridesmaid, the one who’d caught the fucking bouquet?
    The marriage counselor they’d gone to for the first few weeks of the separation, the one Tony Harmon had chosen himself from the list of possibilities Melody had compiled, and now wished he hadn’t (back then he’d assumed that a man would be on his side) had saidto them in that imploring therapy voice, “It seems to me that the two of you have both really changed over these years, that maybe you’ve grown in separate directions, and—”
    “So, we should just go and get a fucking divorce?” Tony had blurted out.
    Immediately, he regretted it. Cursing was one of his