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5
Annie
When Mark and I were first together, long, lovely Sunday mornings at a pancake house, or stretched out on the couch reading the Sunday paper together over OJ and bacon, or tumbled back into bed, half making out, half sleeping, like puppies cuddling together – those were the things my fantasies revolved around. Actual mornings I then dreamed of for the rest of the week.
Then Mark graduated and went into his internships and residencies and I went undercover with the first wave of high school deaths from fentanyl. Things changed. Not all at once. But gradually. Mark was always gone, always on shift, and he was exhausted when he was home.
Eventually I really was gone all the time, it wasn't just what it felt like. I was living somewhere else, leading a different life, making love, or more honestly, having sex, with another man.
We went on with our routine, fell back into our rhythms when we were both home. But as I became burned out and couldn't admit it, having a long leisurely breakfast at a pancake house made me want to scream. And if Mark was across the breakfast table from me, at home in our apartment, he was reading out a medical book, not reading me snippets of the Washington Post.
Now that I was back, not even of my own accord, but sent back, I had no idea what that would mean for us. Add to that, sometimes I thought I was clean and the craving was psychological, other times it felt like I was going through the longest withdrawal ever.
Into that mix Mark decided to throw a long, slow Sunday morning.
"Would you like coffee?" The waitress wanted to give somebody at the table coffee. Mark's a diet coke kind of guy. I figured they didn’t run to liquid morphine so I ordered tea. Because coffee sometimes was worse than nothing.
"Let me tell you the specials," the waitress went on. She was a bottle redhead, with varicose veins, a walking cliché and she wanted to talk, though it seemed to be on autopilot.
"We know what we want," Mark said. His voice was edgy. The instant we sat down I'd gone through the menu, picked out what I wanted, put it back down, and stared out the window.
That made Mark mad. Now he was mad at everybody.
"We have a Spanish omelet that – "
Mark actually reached out and took the laminated card out of her hands. She stopped and stared at him. So did I.
"I said, we know what we want. I realize this job is mind-numbing, but try not to include us in that."
"Mark!" It takes a lot to shake me but he'd just done it. "I'm sorry," I told the waitress, who made her next mistake.
"Honey, you don't have to apologize for him." She said, sounding like a waitress from some sitcom rather than a real person.
At the same time Mark said, "I do not need you to apologize for me."
Great, now he'd embarrassed me twice. "Go fuck yourself," I told him to his face.
Mark didn't even blink. "I might as well. It's not like you're doing it since you got back. I wish you hadn't even come back."
"You and me both," I shot back, hurt for no reason I could think of. I wished the same thing on an hourly basis.
"Oh, that's just perfect," Mark said, at the same time the waitress said, "I'm going to have to ask you both to leave."
Across from us, the mother of a toddler who was clearly screaming about his sippy cup or some other appalling incident and couldn't possibly hear us over his racket even if we shouted, was glaring at us with the affronted fury of a protective mother who has nothing to protect her gruesome offspring from other than someone's use of profanity.
"Great," I said to the waitress, and shot my own look at the mother. "At least I'll be able to hear myself think again."
Of course he apologized on the drive home. And of course I was there, in the car, though my first thought had been to run like hell.
We'd driven halfway home before he ran a hand through his hair, which was longer and shaggier than I remembered. He didn't look like a medical resident as much as he looked like somebody who’d stumbled in from the street and was given a job in a hospital. Mark has always been a filtered water, farmer's market, fresh-caught salmon and organic turkey breast kind of guy, when he's not doing the whole Sunday morning short stack with a side of bacon to go with his side of bacon. But when I thought about it, the refrigerator had been filled with takeout packets of ketchup, several items past expiration date and actively turning color, and takeout boxes containing what seemed to be science experiments. I thought he'd been surviving on popcorn, spaghetti, toast and Cheerios like some undergrad.
"It's not easy," he said, glancing over at me and then back at the road.
"Nothing that matters is."
He made a sound in his throat. "That's glib, and it sounds like your father."
I swallowed my automatic reply. This time it might have been, Yeah? Well my dad doesn't like you, either. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "What isn't easy?"
