All Told

As I waited for the phone to ring, I wondered what psychic hotline I worked for. The newspaper ad I’d responded to hadn’t specified. A tiny classified in The Orlando Sentinel said only, ‘Work from Home. Networking America is Hiring Psychics,’ with a phone number to call.

​

“You’re psychic, right?” my husband joked upon finding the classified buried in the Help Wanted section. Telling bad jokes was his best quality. He could always find himself funny, even as he attended court-ordered, anger management counseling.

​

“I’m as psychic as anybody else,” I’d replied, tired of telemarketing from a cramped cubicle. Most people I cold-called hung up before I had a chance to explain what I was selling, almost like they were psychic and knew they didn’t need whatever it was. I hated every minute of it, but Darrin insisted I work at the massive call center. No need to drive separately, he told me. The building was in the same industrial park as his own telemarketing company. No need to eat lunch with coworkers, he told me. I’d walk across the parking lot and eat with him. No need to wear make-up any longer, he told me. Makeup just meant I was trying to impress other guys, despite my wedding ring and pregnant belly. No need to aspire to anything more in life, he may as well have told me. It was good enough for him, and, since he told me repeatedly he was a better person than I was, it was definitely good enough for me.

​

“You need to get this job,” Darrin told me. “You’re going to have to stay home and take care of my son soon.”

​

I’d rehearsed what I would say to my possibly-psychic-themselves interviewer: “The cards revealed I would be successful in new business ventures today.” I’d won a game of solitaire just that morning. “I’ve had premonitions since I was a young child.” I’d always known my mother would tell me I was doing anything, and everything, wrong. “The stars indicate I should pursue this opportunity.” Darrin had drawn a star in the newspaper margin beside the ad. The signs were everywhere.

​

I dialed the number with crossed fingers. Fortunately, the woman who answered didn’t need convincing of my psychic abilities, just my address so she could mail the contract and any paychecks I earned. The pay was $10 an hour, and all I had to do was keep callers on the line for as long as possible. That’s what she told me. What she didn’t tell me was most calls lasted about fifteen minutes and paid a scant $2.50.

​

“You better know what you’re doing! That last girl didn’t even know what I was calling about,” the very first caller told me. “I’ve been to real psychics before, so I can tell.”

​

“You’re calling about a man. No…, money. Wait…, mom? I’m sensing a lot of M’s from you. It’s all a bit jumbled.” It was a shot in the dark, but I was pretty sure I knew what I was doing; I reasoned that most problems fit into one of those categories. “Tell me which one you’d like to concentrate on today.” I earned five dollars musing over her impending marriage to a man who made decent money but already had a kid, which would make her a step-mom.

​

A month later I sat across the dining room table from a problem M of my own and argued that I knew what I was doing, even as she told me I was doing it wrong.

​

“I’m just giving them advice,” I tried to convince my mother. I wished someone had given me advice before I had gotten married. And, by someone, I meant someone other than her. None of that play-the-hand-you’re dealt, you-can-change-him bullshit. Yet here I was, holding out hope he would change, which meant I probably wasn’t the best person to be offering advice on the subject of men. I wasn’t much better at money or mothers either.

​

“Call it what you want, but it’s still a lie, and you’re going to hell if you don’t quit,” she retorted. “You don’t know what you’re doing, and these people need real help.”

​

“We all do,” I sighed. “I’m just trying to get them to see the signs.”

 

To say I hadn’t seen the signs would be a lie. The signs had been everywhere. I’d seen them written across the inside of my eyelids at night: “WARNING: CONTROL FREAK.” I ignored them. My mother was a control freak too, and she had told me the key to marriage was gently coaxing a man toward the choices you wanted him to make while convincing him it was his idea. That’s what she told me she’d done with her husbands, although I knew deep down it wasn’t true. The only convincing she’d ever done was to get me to move out at sixteen. She’d told me she couldn’t afford me any longer after she broke her foot and lost her job. It was time for me to figure out what I was doing. Five years later, I was still figuring it out.

 

Darrin told me he could help me figure it out, and, even though I wasn’t convinced, I didn’t think I could do any worse with him than I’d be doing without him recently. Maybe what I needed was just to get away. If I could get far enough away, then I could leave behind all the things I’d been unable to figure out: a creepy boss, an oversexed roommate, an immature ex-boyfriend, and a codependent mother who relied heavily upon me whenever she was in between husbands. That’s when she was a frequent guest at my dining room table, where she liked to point out that life was too hard for me to keep doing it wrong. It was a mother’s job to set me straight, she told me, not to be my friend.

 

My boss could have been a friend, except for he’d never missed an opportunity to hit on me. He had told me I could use his washer and dryer on several occasions, but I’d always politely declined. Then, when he left on a weekend business trip, he put a key to his apartment in an envelope at the office “just in case” I changed my mind.  I figured it couldn’t hurt because he wasn’t even there. My mother had told me many times about being attacked at a laundry mat when she was nineteen, and the story was always in the back of my mind whenever I went to one. Besides, the coin-operated machines weren’t cheap, and it would be nice to watch cable TV rather than clothes tumbling in a dryer.

 

I followed the handwritten directions and found the complex with no problem, thinking it was a kind gesture to entrust me with everything he owned while he was out of town. That is, after all, what he told me it was.

He had covered the apartment in sticky notes. “Eat me,” on a bowl of fruit. “Drink me,” on a bottle of wine. “Dry with me,” on a towel he’d placed on the kitchen counter for reasons beyond my comprehension. “Sit on me,” as if a sofa weren’t self-explanatory. I put the key back and pretended I’d never used it.

 

As if that weren’t enough, my roommate also hit on me. Her mother was a lesbian, and she thought it might be genetic. Marcy knew she definitely liked boys, but, she told me, possibly also girls. Marcy played “Sex and Candy” on repeat, clearly aware the song could have been written about her by a group who’d also decided to name themselves after her. Marcy dripped sex and candy. Away from our apartment, she dripped sex and candy all over the boys who flocked around her platform heels, bell-bottoms, and bikini-tops, especially on our spring break trip to Panama City Beach. In our apartment, Marcy dripped sex and candy all over the living room. She sprawled out on the furniture in tank tops and tiny cut-offs and nothing else.

 

Marcy thought we were good enough friends that we should share our things. She loaned me her lace-up boots and borrowed my ex-boyfriend. It wasn’t a fair trade. He was the one, I told myself. The one I believed I would marry someday when he finally outgrew video games and pot. The one whose parents I adored and spent holidays with because my own family never got together for things like that. The one who had taken me to meet his grandparents halfway across the country and carved our initials into a tree and eternity. The one who had broken my heart.

 

“I just need to figure things out, find out if I can live alone. Be a man. You know, without help from you or anybody.” That’s what he told me… right before he moved into a house with three other guys and discovered eight balls and forties.

 

Then I met Darrin. He and Marcy were coworkers and went out a couple of times before Marcy invited me to hang out with them. She told me they were just friends, but she said he was nice and I’d like him if I gave him a chance. She didn’t tell me she was pawning him off on me so she could start dating my ex. I should have seen the signs. They were probably everywhere.

 

By the time I realized my error, it was too late. By then, I needed to get away just to figure things out.

 

Darrin told me he needed to get away too, but he already had things figured out. He told me he was older and wiser: twenty-eight. He told me he lived with his mom, but only because she asked him to when she moved to Alabama. She didn’t need his help any longer though, and he was ready to get away.

 

I met his mother over breakfast one morning as I’d begun to spend most of my time at his place. Actually, her place. I liked her. We went shopping and used her store discount. She was a manager at one of the big department stores that carried a little bit of everything. She told me I could use her discount anytime I wanted. She had three sons, but no daughters, and she told me she had always wanted a daughter. I liked what she told me, and she seemed like a good person to spend future holidays with.

 

Then Darrin told me he loved me, right before he joked I was too young to know what love was. Maybe he was right. All I knew about love was that it let you down, which was a lesson my mother had first taught me and my ex-boyfriend had reiterated. Maybe the fact that love let you down was really all there was to know about it. Love was just a word and so I told Darrin I loved him too.

 

“I’ll rescue you,” Darrin told me. He thought I was looking for a fairy tale ending and told me he wanted to give it to me. “I’ll be your knight in shining armor and we’ll ride off into the sunset on my white horse.” I wasn’t sure why he was proud of that dullish-white, squat Nissan, but he was, and I didn’t see the harm in letting him play at chivalry. When the lease was up on mine and Marcy’s apartment, Darrin told me to put my stuff in storage and move in with him. His mom seconded the motion, seeing as how I practically lived there anyway. I told him I didn’t love the idea.

 

He suggested Florida, which sounded more like the getting away I was hoping for. He told me he had it all figured out, and he could go back to the job he’d had before. I put my stuff in storage and ceded control of my future to Darrin. He told me we’d take the pick-up to Florida for a weekend to find an apartment. It’d all seemed very exciting; I’d lived in Florida when I was younger and loved the smell of salt water and citrus groves.

 

We never even looked at apartments on that trip. As he got out to pump gas, Darrin tossed his wallet onto the seat beside me. He had laughed at my identification when I’d shown it at a nightclub door, but it wasn’t a bad photo, and I’d been rather offended by his amusement. Darrin hadn’t been carded then so I picked up his wallet to examine his driver’s license photo and see if it was somehow better than mine. His photo was fine, but the date of birth listed meant he was a year older than he’d told me. One measly year seemed like an incredibly trivial thing to lie about, and I asked him light-heartedly why he’d bothered. He told me he was angry I’d opened his wallet, invaded his privacy, and broken his trust.

 

Broken trust was the reason I soon spent my days on the phone answering questions from women about whether or not their lives were going to improve. Occasionally a man would call, but, more often than not, it was women who sought solace from the unqualified stranger they’d been connected to by an automated system.

 

“I see you speaking to your husband. It’s about a woman. You think they’re too friendly with each other,” Katarina, my psychic alter-ego, cooed into the phone. She was me, but better, because she had things figured out, like the fact that a soothing tone of voice was key, as was rephrasing whatever the person on the other end of the line said.

​

"Yes,” the woman told Katarina. “It’s happened before. He promised it would never happen again!” The woman was upset, and now Katarina and I were too. How many times had we heard that same promise that it would never happen again?

​

“He’s lied to you many times. I can’t tell if what I see is past or present, but his words are different from his actions. He has lost your trust.” Katarina had figured out it was important to state the obvious, because sometimes obvious wasn’t as obvious as it should have been. “You too have developed a sight about these things. His betrayal has opened your eyes to the truth.” She knew it was also important to point out that sometimes we’re willfully oblivious to the obvious. The signs were always everywhere.

​

“Yes,” the woman agreed. “I felt like he was lying to me. It’s like the words were a different color coming out of his mouth or something. Like green or something. Does that sound weird?” She coughed a smoker’s cough into the phone for several moments before Katarina could respond.

​

Katarina then validated the woman’s newfound psychic abilities with the assumption that her husband also smoked. Darrin did. “Lies often take the form of foul, green smoke. They hope to escape your grasp before you catch them. You’re wise to this.” That’s what Katarina told her.

​

The woman agreed and hung up. I wondered for a moment if Katarina had pushed the woman in the right direction. Her suspicions about her cheating husband seemed correct, but what if Katarina was wrong? What if the husband had changed? What if maybe, just maybe, people could change if you gave them long enough? What if Darrin just needed more time?

​

He told me I ruined the weekend trip to Florida. He seethed the entire time: too much construction on the roads, too much money for a hotel, too much cereal on the continental breakfast, too much foam in his beer, and on and on and on. I tried to find the silver lining, but that only made things worse. He told me he was upset I disagreed with him, contradicted him, belittled him, patronized him, refused to validate him, and on and on and on. He screamed and yelled and ranted and raved, all the while swearing I was too young and selfish and immature to understand his point of view. If I actually loved him, he told me, I wouldn’t cause him to behave like that. My mother had told me similar things when I was younger.

​

On our way back to Alabama, Darrin told me he was taking me to a “special” beach. We ended up on a narrow strip of sand between the vast ocean and an overgrown lot just beyond the seagrass and dunes. He told me we had to find the “perfect” shell for a memento. The search took half an hour. He wrote, “Marry Me!” in the sand and told me it was romantic. He pulled a ring from his pocket and dropped it in the “perfect” shell. He told me he couldn’t get down on one knee or he’d get sand in his shorts. I already knew how romantic he was, he told me, and so I wouldn’t want him to anyway.

​

The ring stuck, and he hit it against another shell to break it open.

I stared in disbelief at the fragments surrounding the ring he’d bought a long time ago for someone else. He had told me about her once. He’d told me she was a bitch who’d only pretended to love him and that’s why he’d left her. I wiped my runny nose on my shirt sleeve and wondered what it would be like to be abandoned on a secluded beach with nowhere to go and no one to call. Aubrielle, my last good friend, had figured things out and moved away months before; meanwhile, my life was in boxes and my two-weeks-notice had already been turned in. We were going to get married and live happily ever after, or so he told me.

​

I wished I had called Miss Cleo to ask if any of that were true.

 "Call me now for your free reading," Miss Cleo’s thick, Jamaican accent demanded from the television infomercial. "The cards can reveal things that you will never see by yourself!" Miss Cleo was royalty by way of celebrity, and she beckoned to the tarot cards from her carved wooden throne. I thought she must own turbans in every color.

​

I didn’t own any turbans, and I wasn’t royalty or celebrity, just a young mom hanging out in a half-empty house with a brand new baby and a blonde wig. Darrin told me we couldn’t afford furniture for the rooms, nor did we need it since we never had company. He told me I didn’t need new clothes for the same reasons, and so my work attire consisted of maternity wear, his old sweats and, occasionally, the blonde wig.

​

The wig reminded me of a time when I’d thought I had things figured out, and it reminded me of Aubrielle. We’d bought wigs years ago on a girl’s night out, which confused the waitress when we took them off halfway through our meal. Aubrielle would have been a good name for a psychic. Too bad she wasn’t, because then she could have warned me not to marry Darrin when she’d come down for the wedding. I probably wouldn’t have listened though; I hadn’t wanted to admit that I didn’t know what I was doing.

​

“Dammit, Aubrielle! Why’d you have to get married and move away?” I asked no one. I wasn’t angry at her, just myself for having followed suit, but with less success. She’d married money, moved to Indiana, and lived in luxury. I’d married an asshole, moved to Florida, and lied to people. Was I going to hell, or was I already there?

​

Networking America hadn’t provided a script, or even a list of keywords or phrases. No mentor was assigned to pass on helpful hints. No supervisor listened in the background to evaluate my first few calls. The steps were simple: dial in to the 800-number, wait for the automated system to dispatch a call, answer the phone and tell the person on the other end what they wanted to hear. I added a step for alter-egos and summoned Katarina, who had a Southern drawl and everything figured out.

​

The phone rang.

​

“Yeah uh, I need to know what numbers to play in the lottery?” the woman asked. I wanted to tell her she had a better chance of an airplane falling out of the sky and landing on her, twice, than of winning the lottery. I’d read that statistic a long time ago and the absurdity of it stuck with me, but my caller didn’t care about statistics.

​

“Oh, honey, I’m afraid the stars aren’t aligned with your lucky numbers!” Katarina was prepared to explain her “lucky numbers” involved a birthday or anniversary if pressed. Everyone’s always did, but she didn’t ask. “The cards say this lottery isn’t meant for you. They say to spend the money on something more personal. The cards say there is something you need.”

​

“Oh,” she said, “I kind of need the money since I think I’m pregnant.” She paused for a moment as it dawned on her she’d called a psychic. “Am I pregnant?” she asked.

​

"A baby is making its presence known to me,” Katarina replied softly. “But it doesn’t know its parents’ names yet. Someone is pregnant, but whether you or someone close to you, I can’t be sure. I see a vision of a positive pregnancy test lying on a counter. It might be a bathroom counter, or perhaps a counter in a doctor’s office.” By the time she hung up, Katarina had convinced the woman to use her ticket money to buy a pregnancy test instead.

           

After that call, I went to check on my own baby in the bedroom next door. He was sleeping soundly, blissfully unaware of the multiple personalities his parents had. He didn’t know his parents’ names yet either, but the police in our previous neighborhood did.

​

“Does he know you’re pregnant?” One of the responding officers had asked. Neither of them looked convinced of the fact themselves. I had been mostly skin-and-bones, underweight and borderline anemic for the better part of my life. Pregnancy sickness wasn’t helping.

​

“Yes,” I eyed them wearily. “I’m four months. We’ve already been to the doctor twice.” Darrin wasn’t the sort to let me go alone; he claimed there were would-be murderers waiting in every parking lot and, without him there to protect me, I’d never make it home alive.   

     

Darrin had wanted pizza for dinner that night in the old neighborhood, and we’d picked it up on the way home from a long day of telemarketing. The smell of greasy cardboard made me feel sick, and I rolled down my window for fresh air. Darrin told me everything made me sick, and it was all just in my head. We went inside. He told me I’d feel better after I ate. I ate a slice and did feel better, for about five minutes. Then I threw up. He told me the baby must not be his, because no child of his would ever reject pizza. He laughed loudly from the living room.

​

I closed and locked the bathroom door and lay down on the linoleum, too sick to be amused by his dumb jokes. He demanded I open it. No one was going to lock him out of any room in his apartment, he told me. I begged him to leave me alone.

​

"I’m sick,” I said. “Just eat your pizza and let me hang my head over the toilet in peace.” Instead, he finished off a few beers and smashed his two hundred and fifty pound body through the door, ripping it from its hinges.

​

“Give me back my grandmother’s opals right now, you stupid, fucking bitch!” he raged. “You don’t deserve to wear them!” The earrings had been a wedding present from his mother, and he expected me to wear them at all times.

 

I pressed myself against the bathtub and fumbled with the opal studs, too stunned to get them out of my ears before he flew at me. I threw my hands up to protect myself. He grabbed hold of my hair and yanked me to my feet, hurling me into the hallway with a sweep of his arm. He knocked me flat and lunged forward, sitting heavily on top of my stomach and snatching an earring from a lobe with a hand that still held a clump of my hair.

​

“Where’s my grandmother’s opal?” he cried, looking suddenly concerned and crestfallen. The other earring had mercifully fallen out, and he went back into the bathroom in search of it. I pulled myself up and raced for the phone, barely dialing before he grabbed the receiver.

​

“What did you do?” he asked as the blood drained from his face. He breathed cautiously into the phone, “Hello?”

​

“9-1-1,” came the response, loud enough for me to hear over the hush that had fallen. “What’s your emergency?

​

“No emergency,” he told the operator. “There’s no emergency. I dialed by accident.”

​

“I need the police,” I screamed from the other side of the room before running out towards the parking lot. He followed soon after, and I prepared to scream again while praying someone would hear. I didn’t have to. He jumped in his pickup and screeched away.

​

I waited in the dark on the sidewalk outside, afraid he would return if I went into the apartment. When the officers arrived they ushered me back in, because, they told me, they needed to see the evidence. Darrin called from a payphone down the street.

​

“Tell him to come back so you can work things out,” one of the cops whispered to me. I did. Darrin hung up. We played that game three more times, and the cops grew tired of waiting.

​

“I don’t think he’s coming back tonight,” they said on their way out the door. But then there he was in the parking lot, pacing around his pickup, waiting for them to leave.

​

“Did you know she was pregnant?” one of the cops asked Darrin.

 

“Of course, I knew,” he told them. “She’s my wife, carrying my baby. I love her. It was all just a big misunderstanding.” They charged him with felony battery of a pregnant woman.

 

He called me from jail the next morning and told me I had to drop the charges.

​

“I’ll get fired,” he told me. “I’ll never be able to get another job and I won’t be able to support us. I won’t be able to support our baby. How can you just sit back and let that happen? You know I’m not like that. You know it won’t happen again. It will never happen again. I didn’t even really hurt you. You’re okay. I love you.” I was overreacting, he told me.

​

What if he was partially right? What if I hadn’t known what I was doing and I couldn’t support a baby on my own? I went to the District Attorney and asked her to reduce the charges to a misdemeanor, but stopped short of asking for them to be dropped completely.

​

“His dad beat him with a frying pan when he was a kid,” I said. “That’s what he told me.” It was the explanation Darrin had offered to me for his repulsive behavior after the first time he’d thrown me across the room and threatened to beat me within an inch of my life. He’d sworn afterwards that he didn’t want to be that man, and that it would never happen again. “He needs counseling, and he needs to stay away from alcohol. He’ll get better if he can just get help.”  That’s what I told her, and I wanted it to be true.

​

She acquiesced: one year of probation, including anger management counseling and no alcohol consumption. Seven months into probation and, although he’d lost his temper several times, he’d at least managed to keep his hands to himself. I still believed there was hope for him, mostly because that’s what he told me. I had given my mother the benefit of the doubt a hundred times before, so why not Darrin? At least he didn’t think every little thing I did was wrong, so surely he deserved as many chances as she did.

​

“I want you to know I’m proud of you,” my mother told me with a smile from across my dining room table. I couldn’t remember her ever saying those words before, and I hated her for saying them then. She was proud of superficial appearances and nothing more: a ranch-style house of terror that looked pretty from the outside, a tyrant husband who hurled obscenities and hammers in the direction of my head, and a six-month-old son who would no doubt grow up thinking women were undeserving of respect. Proud, she told me. Seven marriages now, and she still didn’t have a house in the suburbs, just a single-wide trailer in the country. I was so lucky to have Darrin. That’s what she told me.

​

That’s what Darrin told me too. Soon enough he was off probation, finished with mandatory anger management, and able to crack open an ice cold beer while watching a football game. Finally, he told me, he deserved a relaxing Sunday afternoon because he worked hard. I stayed at home with the baby and did nothing all day, he said.

​

William was in the big bathtub, sitting in just a couple inches of water. He had outgrown the infant one and liked to splash a bit too much for the kitchen sink. I sat on the floor next to the tub, squeaking the rubber ducky and laughing along every time he squealed in delight. William was enthralled with the game and in danger of tipping over backwards each time a fit of laughter overtook him. I leaned over the edge toward him, prepared to intervene.

​

“We’re out of chips!” Darrin yelled from the kitchen. “I’m going to the store!”

​

“There’s an unopened bag in the pantry,” I yelled back.

​

“No, there’s not,” he insisted. “Where are my keys?”

​

“Second shelf,” I yelled again, thinking he’d simply overlooked the chips. “I just saw them this morning.”

​

“I told you we don’t have any!” he roared. I realized too late he must have eaten them all during the first half of the game. “Are you too fucking stupid to understand? Where the hell are my damn keys? I’m going to miss the rest of the game trying to explain to you!”

​

“I haven’t seen them,” I replied, more quietly now. They were probably in the pocket of the pants he had taken off and thrown on the floor last night. That’s where he usually left them, but I was already taking care of a baby and decided he could find them himself for a change. He wasn’t happy with the answer. He had made it across two rooms and into the hallway before I heard him coming. I stood up and spun around in the direction of the open bathroom door at exactly the same time he swooped in.

​

“William’s in the…,” was as far as I got before he grabbed me by the back of my head and slammed me down on my knees. My cheekbone grazed the side of the toilet as I went down.

​

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Mommy’s okay,” I babbled as I regained my breath. The baby in the bathtub had very nearly witnessed the murder of his mother, and still might unless I figured out what I was doing pretty quickly. William looked up in awe at the belligerent father who only now seemed to realize his child was present. He had quit splashing, and the rubber ducky was no longer funny. Darrin stared back at him for a moment and then stormed off without a word, shaking a handful of my hair from his hand as he went.

​

I lifted William from the tub and was thankful he could crawl; I wouldn’t be able to walk on my injured knees for days. It was then that I knew Katarina was coming to an end. It was time to reclaim her as a part of myself, and her next phone call would be her last.

​

“Yes, your home will sell. I see it in the cards,” Katarina told the female caller. So will this one. It was time to get away. The signs said the only thing preventing Darrin’s violent outbursts had been his wariness to violate probation and return to jail.

​

“How long?” the woman pressed. “A month? Will it sell in a month?”

​

She seemed to be in as big of a hurry to get away as I was.

​

“It will sell after a month,” Katarina told her, hoping she remembered the “after” part of that sentence if it was on the market for longer.

​

“Yes, my husband believed it might take time too. I would keep it, but it’s too much to take care of. I need to downsize,” she said. Past-tense, husband ‘believed.” Perhaps she was divorced. Maybe she had young children. Maybe she needed advice from someone who knew what she was going through and could admit they didn’t have it all figured out.

​

“It’s for the best. Your future lies in a different direction from your past,” I told her.         

 

“Yes, it has to now,” the woman on the phone sighed. She spoke for another twenty minutes about how hard dreams were to give up on despite knowing there was no hope of them ever coming true. She was figuring out what she needed to do, and it was time to let go of the past and live her future. It was good advice. I almost thanked her for it.

​

Even though Darrin controlled the bank account, he never kept track of his change after a night of drinking at the bar. I began to take a few dollars from his pants pockets each morning as I picked them up off the floor and hung up his keys. At the rate he drank, it didn’t take me long to scrape together $125 to file for a legal separation. My newly retained divorce attorney told me I also needed a restraining order. He handed me a stack of paperwork to give the Clerk of the Court.

​

“You’ll get this quicker if you walk it through,” he told me. He wasn’t wrong. The police arrived to serve the temporary injunction shortly after Darrin got home from work. I went into William’s bedroom and listened from the doorway as they told Darrin he needed to gather his clothes and leave. They would give him fifteen minutes before they escorted him out.

​

“Your wife says you have family close by,” one of the cops said to Darrin. “I suggest you stay with them.”

​

“Yes, of course, Officer,” Darrin stammered. “But it’s all just a misunderstanding. I haven’t done anything wrong. If you’ll just let me talk to her, we can straighten this all out. She’ll tell you I would never hurt her.”

​

“You’ll have to wait for the hearing,” the officer told him. “You can’t have any contact with her before then. Do you understand?”

​

“I’m not going to bother her,” he told them. “When is the hearing?”

​

“Six weeks,” the officer answered.

​

“Six weeks?!” Darrin echoed.

​

“Six weeks,” the other officer repeated to me as her partner stepped out of the house behind Darrin. “You’ve got six weeks.”

​

“Six weeks,” I nodded back. I had already begun to circle jobs in the classifieds, and this time I intended to figure out exactly who I worked for and what I was getting myself into.