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Twenty minutes after she’d seen her husband pull out of the driveway for the night shift, Lisa watched Harold pull in. Stained by the memory of Jack’s blue, pigeon-shittied Ford Fiesta, Harold’s red Accord seemed opulent, even a little sexy. Lisa studied the reflection of her curls in the window and recomposed them, then met Harold outside. She lept into his arms and they kissed intensely, a little anxiously.

“Home has been so strange without you,” she said.

“Really? I feel it gets stranger with me,” he replied, and hung his blazer up. In his white suit and light blue paisley shirt, he seemed a foreigner to the drabness of the house. Lisa wore simple black dress. As he followed her into the kitchen, his gaze trailed to where the dress hugged her form the most.

“You’re the kind of stranger I like,” she said. “Better than the one I live with. I made mojitos!” she said, looking back for a moment. “I did it with the white rum from the St. Paddie’s Day party Marsha had.”

“Which one’s Marsha again?” Harold inquired. “The one with the fake tits, or is that Maria?” They reached the kitchen.

“No, that’s Marsha,” Lisa said as she put a sprig of mint in both glasses. “Maria’s the one with the VCR.”

“Breast implants won’t let you skip the commercials,” Harold responded. Lisa giggled. “These look darling,” he added. He took a sip of his drink and smiled.

“Bridget, the Latina girl who also works lunch, she told me how to make ‘em,” Lisa replied. “Pretty easy way to get drunk and feel like you’re outside of the town bubble.” She took a sip herself. “You know they’re from Cuba?”

“Yep. I went to Cuba once, had a good few there myself,” Harold said. “By the way, how’s the old man?” He gulped the rest of his glass.

“He’s alright,” she said, and took a smaller sip. The sprig of mint bobbed like a fishing lure.

Jack had been working the night shift as a nearby Exxon gas station attendant for about ten months. Lisa worked the lunch shift at Monty’s Diner and would often come home to a silent, slumbering husband. The two of them had no idea how long their situation would last, and although Lisa cared deeply for Jack, her increasing frustration with their marriage — paired with a single failed attempt at passing on that frustration to a new generation — seemingly instead gave birth to Harold, an author with about ten books on store shelves, and very few copies on personal shelves.

“And he doesn’t have a clue?” Harold asked, reddened eyes slipping into Lisa’s. She put her hand on his. Her ring finger felt uncannily free as their hands coalesced.

“I wouldn’t let him,” she said. “I love you both in different ways.”

“Then he certainly won’t catch us in California.” He pulled out two perforated tickets with marks like mechanical snake bites. “Two round trips to San Francisco, Lisa. This summer.”

Her eyes glittered. “Oh, Harold,” she swooned, “How… will we just… oh, Harold, I love you.”

Lisa stood up and swallowed the rest of her drink. Her dress was a bit more sheer than Harold had remembered it being. She said something seductive in tone — Harold’s attention was distracted by the more translucent zones of her clothing.

As she drifted into the master bathroom to remove her makeup, Harold went to the bathroom to relieve himself. The room itself was connected to the living room and study by a short corridor. A chill drifted down the hall and under the restroom door. The clothes drying on their rack wavered occasionally with a gasp of deep evening air, and as he left the restroom, a lightbulb above him flickered.

Harold approached the doorless threshold of the study. Lisa’s desk, her real estate training material arranged neatly upon it, stood across from her husband’s escritoire, a hand-me-down from his grandfather which Jack had refused to sell. There was little atop its polished surface exempting a few torn-open insurance letters and the daily town rag. The door to the backyard hung open like a snapped jaw, and Harold stared out it. The room was cold, cuttingly so, and just as slowly as the door budged open to let in a gulp of frigid air, it fell backward and slammed shut. The latch slid tight, and the room was silent. Harold thought of the airlocks in outer space movies.

“What was that?” Lisa’s voice resounded from the bathroom at the other end of the house.

“Went out for a cigarette,” he yelled back.

Paranoid goosebumps rose along Harold’s arms. He started sifting through Jack’s mail. Something was weird. GEICO, Bank of America, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Blockbuster, National Rifle Association — he opened that one.

“Congratulations from the Mine Bank Hunt Club on your new Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm firearm!”

Lisa’s siren voice called out Harold’s name, muffled by the layers of walls and empty space between them.

The letter shook in his hands. He put it back in its envelope, replacing the messages as he had found them. Harold pulled a military-issue flashlight out of one of the escritoire’s drawers — he’d known where it was — and stepped out the backdoor. He looked to the driveway — only Harold’s red Accord, no pigeon-shittied blue Ford Fiesta.

Harold shined the flashlight around the back of the house, searching the bushes and crevices by the back door patio. Something shimmered in the light. A pair of black leather shoes sat obscured by the bushes.

His name came again. Harold! Like an anxious mother standing over a dinner going cold. The wind nudged the door an inch more, and Harold could only stare out into the dark, suburban expanse. His car waited in the driveway, and the streets resembled barren raceways. He stood mute, a pebble caught in his throat, and breathed. He had to decide. Harold had been proud of very little this year. Very unfulfilled. Maybe that was what guided him onward, maybe it wasn’t. Harold softly slid the door shut and went to Lisa’s bedroom.

“Harold, do you know how steep the streets are in San Francisco?” Lisa asked around the bend, presumably donned in her nighty. “If it snowed in the summer, we could ski down them.”

Harold walked past the master bathroom, its door ajar, lights off. His heart beat. He stood outside the bedroom.

“Lisa,” he said hushedly, his voice tight as though strangled, “let’s talk in the bathroom.”

“What?” she called. Either she couldn’t hear him or she didn’t understand.

Harold entered the bedroom. She was dressed in a frilly blue nightgown, her blond hair let down over her shoulders.

“I said we should — ” The closet doors swung open.

Jack, his muscled form immense, towered before the illicit couple, framed by the slatted wooden doors. Harold felt the cold touch of the Smith & Wesson pistol brush against his temple. It quivered in Jack’s hands. The husband’s whole upper body trembled.

“You bastard, you fucking prick,” he boomed, “I’ll blow your goddamn head open, you fucking — ”

Lisa had fallen in shock on the end of the king bed, rivulets of tears streaking down her face. “Jack, please, please,” she gasped, “please.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jack hollered, unflinching, gaze still cemented in place on Harold. “Don’t beg me, just get this ratshit dandy shitball out of my house, or I will smack the goddamned shit out of you.”

Harold stood still. Time stood still. The doors hasn’t closed — they’d been broken off their hinges. Harold realized Jack wasn’t wearing shoes; just socks.

“Jack,” Harold started, taking a step forward, “please, let’s — ”

The gun went off. The room was warm. Blood trickled down Harold’s right shoulder and soaked through his blue paisley shirt.

“Get out!” Jack screamed, his rage framed by the bulging blue veins along his face.

Lisa jumped at Jack, knocking the pistol from his hands. Jack took a swing, and a cry went out. Harold didn’t see the rest. He had run to the phone in the kitchen. Shivering, he dialed 911. Blood pooled between two of the linoleum tiles below him.

“Hello? Yes, I’ve been shot. Yes, come quick, please, there’s an armed man in the bedroom, yes.”

Five minutes past midnight, the air was blurry with the blue and red lights of squad cars filling the streets.