Page 72 of Chasing the Other Woman

He has the decency to look uncomfortable. “He left abruptly, Sam. That’s all I know.”

For two years, I knew where Brooks was every hour of the day. In the truck. In the warehouse. At some sponsor thing. In bed beside me, even when the distance between our bodies felt wider than any highway. Even when I left, I knew vaguely where he was.

Now he's somewhere beyond my knowing.

And I hate how much that bothers me.

“He didn’t tell you when he’d be back?”

“No.”

“Right.”

I turn before Hershel can offer one of his rock-and-roll sermons. I'm not sure I can withstand a comparison between my marriage and an Iron Maiden song right now.

Outside The Funnel Cloud, Muncie keeps trying to put itself back together. Pickup beds fill with splintered boards. A church group stacks bottled water beneath a canopy. Someone has spray-painted HOT MEALS on a sheet of plywood and propped it near the road.

Life goes on in the rudest possible way.

Brooks told me the choice was mine now.

If I want a life separate from his, he’ll let me have it. If I want to stay here, build something here, be someone without his name attached to mine, he’ll support that too.

It sounded decent when he said it.

And yet, it felt awful.

For so long, he held on too tight. He took my seat. My field. My say. He made love feel like a locked door with him standing on the other side, telling me it was for my own good.

Now he has finally opened his hand.

And all I can do is stare at the space he left.

By late afternoon, storm chasers start drifting in as the day stretches toward evening. They come in sunburned and wired, carrying laptops and road grime. Half of them are helping with cleanup. The other half are pretending they aren’t already thinking about the next system.

That’s storm season for you. One town is still sweeping glass out of the gutters while the sky starts warming up for the next performance.

A guy at the end of the bar has a radar loop pulled up on his tablet. Two others huddle over a paper map spread across a table sticky with spilled beer.

“Dryline’s sharpening,” someone says.

“Cap breaks tomorrow, maybe earlier if we get enough surface heating.”

“Models are messy.”

“They’re always messy. What else is new?"

I wipe down the same section of counter three times and try not to listen.

I fail immediately.

The system is still west, still more promise than threat, but I feel it anyway. That little lift under my skin. The part of me that wakes before the radar does. Storm season electricity, humming in the walls, in the backs of people’s voices, in the way every chaser in the room keeps glancing toward the televisions.

Once, Brooks and I would have been shoulder to shoulder by now.

He would have leaned over my shoulder, and said, “Tell me what you see, Sammy Girl.”

And I would have told him. Better yet, he would have actually listened.