Should Have Known Better

“I’m depressed,” I said. “I’m . . . angry. But I don’t need this kind of help. I can get through this myself.” I held the card out, but Kerry folded it back up in my hand.

“Just keep it,” she said. “Just keep it.”

When Kerry and I got to my mother’s house, there was a compact car with one of those magnetic signs over the top that said PIZZA sitting right out front.

“Looks like someone’s having pizza for dinner tonight,” Kerry joked as I got out of her car.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, noticing that there was a man, a black man, sitting in the front seat. I thought it was odd for my mother to be ordering pizza; I didn’t remember her being a pizza eater and I was confident she was going to try to serve

those lima beans again, but there were no other cars out in the street and the car was parked right in front of her house. Her car wasn’t in the driveway. “Hey, thanks for lunch. It was a great idea.” I closed the door and bent down to talk to Kerry through the open window.

“I enjoyed it, too. Maybe we can do it again.”

“That sounds great.”

“And don’t forget about HHNFH.”

“Got it right here in my back pocket,” I pointed out, tapping my pocket.

I waved at Kerry driving off and turned to see the man getting out of the pizza delivery car.

He had a pizza box in one hand and an envelope in the other.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Hope so,” he answered, smiling kindly. “Are you Dawn Johnson?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised that he knew my name. “But I didn’t order pizza.”

The man tossed the pizza box onto the hood of his car and it slid over a little bit like it was just an empty cardboard box.

He handed me the envelope.

“You’ve been served.”

“I what?” I asked with the envelope in my hand. “Served? But I . . .” I read for the first time a name that would stay with me for a very long time: Terri D. Loomis Law. “What’s this?” I looked back up to talk to the pizza deliveryman, but he was already pulling off, leaving me in the street holding the envelope.

I went into the house and sat down at the dining room table to read the letter inside of the envelope. I didn’t even close the front door. My purse was still on my shoulder. I read.

It was a petition for divorce. Reginald was citing “irreconcilable differences.” Somewhere in the pages it said there was a “conflict of personality” and “constant bickering.” He wanted to split our possessions, excluding the house, which was in his name, down the middle and full custody of the children—Cheyenne Loren and Reginald Brian. He cited that I was losing my job and had recently been arrested for a DUI and failed a drug test.

I dropped the paper. My head was spinning. My neck felt clammy.

These words, these ideas had been floating around for days, but everyone made it seem like a “divorce” would be my idea. I wasn’t prepared for it to be Reginald’s. His estrangement was obvious. I didn’t think he’d want a paper to prove it. And not so fast. This was happening too fast. How could he be sure? Not sure that he wanted to be with Sasha, but that he wanted to leave me? And take my children? I couldn’t let him take my children. If he left, it had to be alone. He couldn’t have them.

I looked at the papers. Let my arms fall to my sides and just sat there and looked at them. The silence in the empty house became deafening. My ears rang. I felt the pain, the burning, empty, tiring pain rushing back to me. I looked at the china cabinet.

“Nothing? Nothing in here?” I cried, shuffling around my mother’s old carafes in the bottom cabinet. There were no bottles left. My mother must’ve thrown them out. One of the carafes rolled out to the floor and then another as I rummaged through. “Nothing. Nothing!”

I saw sunlight rolling in across the living room floor. The front door was open.

A carafe rolled and hit my mother’s foot.

“What’s this?” She walked quickly into the dining room. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t find it!” I explained, but I don’t know what I was talking about. Right then it was the liquor, but there was something else.

“No, not a drink. You don’t need that,” she said. “I threw it all out. No more. I should’ve done it before when your father died. It’s gone now. It’s all gone now.”