Lucy’s Redhots

She wasn’t 100% sure it was him. Lucy’s Redhots would be a place he would go, that she knew. In the five years they’d been together, he’d stopped there often. It was a castle of bad food. She hated it.

The light was about to change and she’d have to decide whether to keep going or pull over.

Pull over and do what? she thought to herself. Talk to him? Chat? Ask him how he was?

She hadn’t talked to him since she’d gotten married four months before. That was February, this was June. She’d never actually told him she was getting married but she knew he knew. The friend whose job it was to tell him reported back to her that it had been tough going, a very long night, much drinking, crying, threats of suicide. All familiar to her and expected. She was glad she hadn’t been there but ashamed nonetheless.

The light changed to green. Time to decide. She went through the intersection and pulled over. Now she could see him in the rear view mirror and saw that he saw her as well.

She knew he would walk across the street to the car and he did.

“You never told me. I never knew. There was no space between us and you being gone. Why?” He leaned in the passenger side window, his bag of chili dogs from Lucy’s Redhots in his hand. He didn’t look angry, just baffled, puzzled, as if he had been deliberating on this question for weeks.

“I don’t know. I had to go. That’s all. I had to go.” It was so short of an explanation as to be no reason at all. She had no reason. She did what she did.

“I’m sorry,” they both said, so much in the same moment as to be ordained or rehearsed.

“I’m sorry.”

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Written in response to a Write on Edge prompt to write about a ‘space between.’