celeste

Her name is Celeste and she drives a green Camry. She has two children and a husband named Roger. The kids – Harry and Mary – are smack dab in the middle of middle school. They’re twins. Celeste has been fighting for weeks, now – no, more like months – this seeping sadness that her life is done, that this is it – Roger, the kids, the green Camry. She’s talked with her best friend Rosetta about this, talked the way women talk about these things, which is to say with a bluntness and honesty that would shock and appall and surprise most men, they acting just the opposite with their friends, unless three-quarters in the tank or having to confess something akin to the issue, like the greasy, unsatisfying roundabout they might’ve had with the whore-y waitress at Hooters named Jinnifer, all the while making it sound like a grand time was had by all. Rosetta told her it might be “time to move on,” but she’s seen other women who’d chosen that route and what they’d moved on to didn’t seem like much. So, worse than feeling sad and depressed, now, she felt stuck. Worse than all that? (Could it even be worse?) This afternoon, completely out of the blue, she would meet Arnold, quite innocently, because it was and because when you’re on your period the last thing, or one of the last things anyone thinks of, except, maybe, a husband, is romance. Messy sex, maybe, hormones being what they can be, but not love. And things would get even worse, because, now, Celeste would soon feel the need to make a decision, one that would affect everyone. But that would be later, today, for a start, then later this week and month. Now, she had to get their dog, Hazard, to the vet. He had worms.