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ON the morning of his dad’s funeral, Tim wants to go surfing. His board is in his dad’s garage so we go to the house and no one is there.

“Everything feels weird,” he says, “and we’re displaced. I’m not used to being back out west.”

“That makes everything weirder too,” I say.

“I need to get in the ocean,” he says.

I’m sad for him and I need a coffee so I can be a better listener. I’m pretty useless right now, slumping against this car draped in a nylon cover. I nod at him and reach out so we can hug and afterwards he squeezes past me to grab the lightning bug-yellow surfboard leaning against the concrete wall.

“Whose car is this?”

“Mine now, I guess,” he shrugs and says.

“What is it?”

“Just an old BMW that he never fixed up. It’s been in here forever.”

Tim is walking towards me now holding the surfboard up over his head. He grabs some bungee cords so he can tie the board to the top of our rental car. It’s seven o’clock in the morning out here and we haven’t had breakfast yet and my Eastern Standard Time body still thinks it’s ten. My stomach growls so loudly it hurts.

“Was that you?” he asks.

“Sorry,” I say, shaking my head.

“Nah. It’s cute,” he says, getting on one knee in front of the car and clipping the little hooks inside the grill.

I roll my eyes at him but I love it and he knows it. I ask him if he wants me to help and he says no just talk to me, keep me company. And when he gets the board all tied down and secure, he drives us to the beach.

I’ve only been out to California twice. Once with my dad and brother the summer I graduated from high school and then two years ago right after Tim and I got married. We flew from Kentucky to California so Tim could spend some time with his dad. So Tim got a big cup of Sumatra and waited for his dad at the coffee shop. And when his dad showed up, he told Tim he missed him and he wanted to have a better relationship with him. But eventually he started to blame Tim for a lot of the shit he pulled when Tim was a kid.

And when that was over, we went straight to the airport to change our tickets so we could leave early. Tim was quiet for awhile and then after the plane took off and we leveled out, he looked past me out of the window I was sitting next to and said fuck that to no one and we held hands.


• • •


At the beach, I find a spot and put my towel down and watch Tim walk into the water with his board. I go into my bag to get an apple and take a big bite before putting it down on the towel. I get a chocolate chip granola bar out too and set it next to me. I pull out my book and tuck my free hand back into the sleeve of my hooded sweatshirt to stay warm. While the book is closed and heavy in my lap, I keep my sunglassed-eyes on my husband until he’s a blue t-shirt-stripey-board-shorts speck in between waves.

We have one surfboard back at our place in Kentucky. Tim brought it with him when he moved. It’s a talisman at the end of our long hallway. Sometimes I touch it on the way to our bedroom because it’s always cool.

I am suddenly homesick thinking about it and we’ve only been in California for a day. I get lost in my book for a while. I started re-reading Dharma Bums a couple of days ago. I was reading when Tim called from work and told me his dad had died. Afterwards, I took my pen and wrote crookedly in the margins. Tim’s dad died. So sad. Now what? I folded the corner of the page down, making a little prayer flag.

More people start showing up at the beach now. I close the book and put it back in my bag and take a drink of the cold, cold ice water from my green bottle. I check my phone for messages and the time. We’d better head out soon so we have time to go to the hotel and shower and get dressed for the funeral. I search the ocean for Tim but that’s no use because all the surfers look alike from here.

Eventually I notice Tim’s gait as he comes out of the water. I watch him smooth his wet hair down. He walks toward me and I go into my bag for a towel and hand it to him when he’s in front of me.

“Hey. I don’t think I’m gonna go to the funeral,” he says, taking the towel.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Why did we come all the way out here then? Do you want me to talk you into it? I don’t know what to do right now,” I say, standing up so I’m not straining my neck to look at him.

“I don’t need you to talk me into anything. I changed my mind. I’ll go to the cemetery tomorrow or before we leave,” he says.

“I think you should go, Tim. I think you’ll regret it if you don’t go,” I say, shaking my head at him. I’m starting to feel gross.

“Are you ready? Let’s go,” he says, walking back towards the parking lot. I bend down to pick up the bag and my towel but Tim turns around and picks up the bag for me and starts walking back towards the car again. I hold the towel away from me until I get to a spot where there aren’t a lot of people and then I look away and shake it out and shake it out.

My dad is a preacher so he married Tim and me in the living room of my parents’ place. We’d gotten the marriage license the day before and we put on a Bob Marley album and took our shoes off. I got the flowers out of the vase my mom had on the kitchen table, a handful of lilacs and two white daisies. Tim had just come from work at the bakery and he was wearing a grey t-shirt with a blue truck on it. I was in my pajamas. It was the first time I’d been married. It was Tim’s second.

The first time he got married, he was nineteen and in Las Vegas with his high school sweetheart. She told him she wanted to see what it felt like. They were married for six weeks until she said she wanted to get it annulled. She said she didn’t think it was right that they got married for no reason. Tim said he thought there was a reason. He said he thought they got married because they loved each other. Tim said she laughed when he said that. And when she left for work that night, Tim said he cried because it hurt his feelings so much that she’d laughed at him. Hadn’t said anything. Just laughed. But he waited until she was gone to cry because she’d never seen him cry and he didn’t want her to. He looked up annulments and found that you had to have a specific reason to get a marriage annulled. There had to be fraud or the person had to be married to someone else or underage at the time and none of that applied.

So Tim called his mom because one of her friends was a big shot lawyer. She said she’d talk to her friend and she helped Tim pay for a quick divorce. When he told me the story it made me so sad for him. I didn’t like to think about him ever being hurt like that. Whenever I thought about it, it felt like looking into the sun.

The night we got married, we went back to his apartment and had sex on his futon and I told him now that we were married, we would get a real bed. And he said okay . And then he said I love that we got married because we wanted to get married. And then I said I love you more than I love anything else. And we lay there kissing, our knees touching, and we were both warm and twenty-five and not scared of things.


• • •


In the glass elevator of the hotel, an older couple gets on, then gets off, and Tim starts talking.

“We went to the wake last night. I’ve been to the funeral home. I’ve seen him and everything.”

“Do you care what your stepmom thinks? I know you probably don’t, but you also know she’s gonna shit and be the biggest bitch about everything because that’s who she is,” I say.

“I haven’t even thought about her since we saw her last night,” he says and I know he’s telling the truth.

Back in the room, we have quiet and quick comfort sex with most of our clothes still on. Then we take a shower together and put on our nice clothes anyway. I tell Tim we should in case he changes his mind. I stand in the bathroom doorway and watch him tie his tie. He’s wearing his brown three-piece suit that we bought on a whim last year in New York City because he’d never owned a suit before. His bathroom mirror reflection is sad and young.

“I miss your smile,” I say to the top of his head in the mirror. He’s making sure his zipper is zipped.

He looks into the mirror and says thanks for how you’re being with me. And I ask him how I’m being and he says sweet. And I tell him I’m crazy about him. And he smiles and I point and say there it is and put my hand on his face.


• • •


On our first date we walked past a Trader Joe’s and then went inside to wander around. I pointed to a box of frozen fish nuggets.

“Y’know, when I was little I used to be embarrassed about liking nerdy things other people thought were gross.”

“What’s nerdy about fish nuggets? How can food be nerdy?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Be who you are. Let your light shine, Marisa,” he said facetiously, taking hold of my shoulders. He smiled and we both started laughing.

“Let my Tim Light shine?” I said, referring to his luminous God-given last name. We walked over to the alcohol and I plucked a little four-dollar bottle of white wine.

“The Tim Light will gladly guide the way. And I say you can have all of the fucking fish nuggets you want. As a matter of fact—,” he said, turning on his heel. I followed him back to the frozen food section and he grabbed a box of nuggets and I told him he was being crazy and he smiled and smiled and got in one of the cashier lines. He bought the wine too. And as we were walking out I pointed to the bag and told him it was my first present from him.

“And you’re welcome,” he said.

When I went to his apartment that night, I saw that in his bedroom right above his light switch he had written in this room where we practice dying every night and I asked him what that was all about.

“I woke up with it in my head one morning and couldn’t get it out so I wrote it up there to get it out,” he said.

“I really love it.”

“Does it make you sad?”

“Not really. Does it you?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” he said, looking at the wall and then back at my eyes.

We kissed then for the first time. My eyelids heavy, my lips practically aching.


• • •


I want to call my dad and tell him I’m glad he isn’t dead.

But instead, I leave Tim in the car and go inside the liquor store and buy a slim bottle of cheap whiskey and a hard pack of cigarettes. I buy a lighter too. A yellow one with little red stars all over it. Neither of us smoke much anymore but just in case. Tim takes the whiskey bottle from the paper bag and twists the lid off and takes a big sip. And then one more. I push my sunglasses up on my face, ask him which way to the funeral home and pull out of the parking lot. Tim drinks a little and points left, then he says keep going straight and then he tells me to take a right.

The funeral home is crowded and maybe it’s for Tim’s dad or maybe it’s for someone else who died. We don’t know. We sit in the car and I take a quick sip of the whiskey too.

“I guess I’ll go inside, I don’t know,” Tim says looking down and shaking his head.

“I’ll drive away if that’s what you want, but it’s probably not what you want,” I say.

“He was really mean sometimes,” he says.

“I know.”

“Not all the time. But a lot of the time.”

“I know.”

Tim screws the cap back on the bottle and opens his door. I get the keys from the ignition and I get my purse. As we’re walking up the sidewalk, he takes my hand and squeezes it. I can feel the sun, God’s blinding, beating heart of light, through the sleeves of my cardigan sweater. I can feel it around me and I can feel it running through me and I know it’s there even when I can’t see it. It has to be.






ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and the editor of a literary magazine called WhiskeyPaper. Her debut short story collection, Every Kiss A War, is available now through Mojave River Press. Find more at LeesaCrossSmith.com


MORE: Twitter | Website | Whiskey Paper






LF #007 © Leesa Cross-Smith. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, February 2012.

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in this room
where we practice
dying every night

by leesa cross-smith
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