On Friday, Janet told her husband she was going to Pennsylvania, which was where her mother and father lived in a Victorian clapboard that was a rundown ode to mining days. She and Malcolm visited there twice a year in weeklong increments, once at Christmas and once around Independence Day. In their nineteen years of marriage, they’d only made an extra visit once, after her father’s heart attack two years ago in May.

Janet never visited her parents alone. Malcolm had become adept at blunting her mother’s questions about why Janet had stopped teaching, which was to paint full time but she was too afraid to say so. Janet’s mother had mastered the fine art of expressing disappointment with a single tongue cluck.

When Janet informed Malcolm of her plans before he left for work, he didn’t bother to pull his face from between pages of the business section. As an adjunct economics professor at a local private college, market trends thrilled him. Some nights, he mumbled in his sleep about surplus and supply and demand.

Noises assaulted her. The crunching of his breakfast cereal, the steady slurp of coffee down his throat, the page turning. Their breakfast routine’s monotony sank into her like nausea.

“That sounds like a good idea, honey.” That was all he said. Crunch. Crunch. Gulp.

In a perverse way, she almost wanted him to see the abnormality in her plans. But she reasoned with herself. It was February, nine-degree-snow-trudge weather. She didn’t drive in the snow, which was also why Malcolm didn’t question her when she told him she was going by bus.

She had always wanted to travel on a Greyhound, and she reminded herself of this as she retrieved her suitcase from the attic later that morning after he left. She had bought it for their honeymoon eighteen years earlier. Then, they’d been enough in love to stay at a dive motel two miles from the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon called the Green Lantern and pretend like the stray pubic hair they found in the sheets didn’t matter.

There had been a bed that folded into the wall, and for a quarter, it shook so hard her teeth jarred together. She’d gotten drunk on Blue River Brew. So had Malcolm, and he’d accidentally chipped her front tooth with his beer bottle when he broke into an impromptu version of “The Star Spangled Banner” that involved wild hand gesticulations.

When she opened the suitcase, she smelled mildew and the days before they had moved to Massachusetts, when they camped in a canvas tent once a year near the Sinepuxent Bay in Maryland. There had always been sand. Between her toes, in her hair. Mosquitoes sapping her blood on bared shoulders, upper thighs, knees. She hadn’t complained.

She packed with meticulous ease. Already, she had emptied the dishwasher and labeled the leftovers in the refrigerator. The turkey noodle soup had to be eaten by Monday, the apple cobbler by Sunday. Janet had grown up in a poor household where her mother mended holes because they couldn’t afford replacements. She’d even taken on other families’ laundry and mending for spare money when she finished her shift at the sock factory. Years of scrimping left Janet with a lifelong need to avoid waste. She saved quart containers and cut the mold from cheese, eating it because she couldn’t throw it into the garbage can.

Malcolm called the compulsion her Ode to Poorhouse Living. He’d been an only child, a late-in-life gift for his parents. They had the money to put him through college and grad school, and she doubted he’d ever had to wear a ten cent shirt from Hamish’s Outgrown Goodies. After an argument, he’d once thrown away her entire collection of packing peanuts. She found the empty cardboard box in the basement with a post-it note attached. You don’t need to save everything! The exclamation point still irritated. That he didn’t understand her or attempt it had once surprised her, disappointed her even.

The suitcase snapped in a metallic click. Green numbers on her alarm clock read 9:15. Covers on the bed twisted in a messy c. She’d never gone this long without making the bed. Maybe she would leave it.

Janet gripped the suitcase handle and hefted it from the floor. Its weight drooped her back, hunched her over like the old woman of her future, the old woman who would have been. She wanted to throw it down the steps, nick the oak floorboards Malcolm waxed twice a year. He’d always been glad they spent that last bit of their savings on the wooden staircase.

Before she went down, she took off her shoes, the suitcase thump-thump-thumping behind her. If she’d had a pack of cigarettes, she might have smoked them on the landing while she watched out the slice of window near the front door. But she hadn’t had a smoke in twenty years or more, not since her mother caught her sneaking a puff in the backyard with Katie-Anne Bickerdyce.

So she waited for her ride, trying not to notice things like their wedding picture in the hall, Malcolm’s suit jacket hanging off the door knob of the front closet, his black loafers ten inches from her left foot. Janet could detach her mind and let it spin out. She’d learned that early in her marriage.

The taxi came for her fifteen minutes later, a green rectangle that skidded on a patch of black ice and narrowly avoided colliding with their mailbox. Janet opened the door and stepped into the snow-reflected sunshine. The suitcase handle bit into her fingers and pulled her shoulder socket toward the ground. Behind her, the front door closed with a barely audible snap. She could discern the rent-a-cab’s driver, a gangly silhouette with a puff of curly hair and black eyes that floated in the windshield as they watched her approach. Her reflection appeared in the side window, distorted.

As she slipped inside the car, she tossed one glance back at her house. She didn’t picture herself there inside it any more. She tucked her chin down and directed her eyes to the sliver of her driver’s face visible in the rearview mirror. Brown eyes, muddy dark and capped with a messy mono-brow, blinked at her.

“Where’re you headed?” His voice seeped into her pores, scratchy with too many cigarettes.

“The city.”

Somewhere between the brick-building smattered drive from home to the bus stop downtown, she decided she wouldn’t use the rocks inside her suitcase. She asked the driver to drop her at the bus terminal and left it in the backseat of the rent-a-cab. The driver was either too stupid or too greedy to notice. Different ideas skittered through her mind as she stood outside the inner city terminal, watching travelers through the window. Shopping bags, car seats, and crying kids filled the rows of plastic orange seats.

Last night she’d dreamt she was drowning, water in her lungs, her fingers clawing through a liquid strangle. According to the posting inside the building, the bus would arrive in another few minutes. Her eyes scanned the cement slabs as she watched her feet. Cigarette butts, a McDonald’s wrapper, a dirtied wad of blue gum.

She walked half a block away, hands linked together in a tight clasp. A man in a quilted black coat passed her, meeting her gaze before she turned her face to the street. Cars passed: a red Honda, a green Nissan with a white door. Then the grinding sound of the bus and the high squeal of its brakes. Closer, closer, its hiss mingling with the apologies inside her head.

***

Laura Hirneisen lives in southeastern PA. Her recent poetry and prose appears in several journals, including Blueline, 2River View, Monkeybicycle, Convergence, and Pisgah Review. Read her blog.