Vickyby Ashleigh Pederson

Hudson broke up with her when he got together with a doctor named Lola. They had fallen in love at first sight, he explained, and she was an excellent surgeon.

Big surprise, Vicky thought. Someone who can stitch her own wounds.

They were sitting in their living room, belongings unpacked: books lined evenly on shelves, pots and pans hanging on hooks. She had looked away from him and the supreme order of their belongings. From the living room window she could see the beech trees that lined the city block, their roots submerged beneath iron grates. Hudson drummed his fingers on the armrest of a crisply striped easy chair, looking sad and a little guilty but, Vicky thought, resolved. He was ready to stash her away like his paperclips and highlighters, his thumbtacks and rubber bands.

And a name like Lola.

She had thought of her mother, married now to her seventh husband, a soft florist named Roy. He had thinning red hair and hips like rising mounds of dough. Over the years, Maya’s husbands had increased exponentially in both ugliness and kindness. Teddy, Vicky’s father, was her first and best looking husband. Devilishly handsome, she had once said. He was also the most disappointing. A month or two before Vicky was born, while Maya was shopping for a second-hand baby crib, he had robbed a Palomino liquor store in the white light of an early Saturday afternoon. Vicky had met him only once. She tried hard to forget he existed at all.

“Move on with your life,” her mother was fond of saying, back when Vicky remembered he existed, and remembered with frequency.

“Like you?” Vicky had once spat back. She herself was fond of using her mother’s life—her mistakes—like baseballs, winding and pitching and aiming for arms and ankles. Hard enough to bruise.

“Yes, actually,” Maya had said. “Exactly like me.”

Hudson offered to help her pack. They labeled the boxes with masking tape and neat black letters. She talked the new landlady into a cheaper rent than the advertisement claimed, on account of the fact that it was the off-season and on account of the fact that she was moving under special circumstances. She had used the word “tragic”, though mostly for effect.

“Men,” the landlady had huffed. Her eye brows were penciled red and hairless. They arched like Cathedral doorways over drooping, watery eyes. “Love ‘em and leave you, every time.”

“Well, technically I left him,” Vicky said, glancing up from the lease agreement. She disliked being so brusquely lumped into the loved-and-deserted category.

“What’s the difference?” the landlady had said, and her smooth eyebrows, incapable of altering expression, told Vicky there was none.

 

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