I had met Dana almost a year earlier when a friend (or had it just been an acquaintance? I couldn’t remember) introduced us at a bar. We had been together almost a year now, most of it tenuous. I had recently been toying with the possibility that Dana and I might not actually like each other very much. Every time I thought of her I was flooded with misery and dread, like a torpedoed submarine in the Sea of Bad Decisions. It had something to do with my inability to make her anything but angry.
When she pulled up in her green SUV I was smoking my fifth or sixth cigarette. I saw her blonde hair through the windshield when she was still halfway down the block. It hadn’t taken her long. Just under an hour, and that included getting dressed and gathering her purse and keys, then getting the car out of the garage.
I got in the passenger side and she pulled back out onto the dark streets.
“You made really good time,” I said. “Guess there wasn’t really traffic, what with it being this late and all.”
She turned and looked at me, wide-eyed. I involuntarily touched my face, feeling for dried food or drool.
“What?” I asked.
“Are you fucking serious?” she screamed.
Most of our recent conversations began with her saying those exact words.
