This is How You Leave Him
By the time I left Des Moines, I was ragged and raw, nerve-shot and wrung out. Every minute of my life had begun to feel like the seconds in a horror movie right before the horrible thing happens — heart racing, muscles tensed, breath inaccessible. He’d been drinking again, and when he drinks, he rages.
The morning before I left — one rare, clear-eyed morning for him — he considered me silently for a moment, and said, “Why did you get so thin?” He almost looked concerned.
I got so thin because living with a drunken raging maniac sort of kills one’s appetite. “I think it’s the stress,” I said, because it was honest but also somewhat neutral. He didn’t take it up, but he did suggest, seemingly genuinely, that I take the girls and go back home for a few days.
Maybe things had gotten bad enough that even he could tell I needed a break, or maybe he was just tired of yelling, or maybe he just wanted to drink in peace. I didn’t care. The suggestion itself, I knew, was the flash of a subway train door — pay attention and hop on when it gets there, or you might be trapped where you are for a good long while. I hopped, and fast.
I loaded up our daughters and hit I-80 West toward Nebraska with something that almost felt like hope.
