The Cleaver

Five years of marriage, a gravel driveway in Ohio, and the brutal, messy anatomy of a collapse.

Photo by Chris Chow on Unsplash

I can’t even remember what she was wearing that day, or what the weather was like outside. My mother tells me it was a Tuesday because that was the night she took the kids, but in my head, the whole afternoon is just blurry.

Elena was standing by our refrigerator — the one with the dent on the lower door from when we moved in — telling me she’d never loved me. Danny was there too. He was leaning against the counter, wearing some faded local high school football hoodie that didn’t fit his beer gut anymore. He just kept his arms crossed, smelling like stale cigarettes, looking around my kitchen like he was checking the plumbing.

I stood there at thirty-five, listening to my wife describe five years, two kids, and a falling-apart split-level outside Akron as a “mistake.” She was talking in this quiet, deliberate voice, the exact same tone she used when she was trying to calm our daughter down during a tantrum. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t look at her face. There was a stray cat we’d started feeding three weeks prior sitting on the counter right next to her toaster, its ears twitching. And on the floor, someone had dropped a dish towel with a faded blue stripe. It was just lying there on the linoleum, half-folded. I just kept staring at that blue stripe. I couldn’t look anywhere else.

I wasn’t some brainy guy. I ran a logistics warehouse.

I could catch inventory errors that cost the company thousands. But when Elena showed up at some church speed-dating thing my mother begged me to go to, I just wanted to get out of that basement. I was thirty, sleeping in my parents’ converted basement, and my mom was leaving those pamphlets about “purposeful solitude” next to my cereal bowl.

Elena laughed a lot. It was loud, sometimes too loud, but she was good with her hands. On our second date, my old Civic stalled in the rain on Route 18, and she didn’t care about her hair getting wet — she just reached into the engine bay and fixed a clogged fuel line. Her hands got totally black with grease. I don’t remember exactly what she did to the car, but I remember she looked at me and grinned. I think about her hands a lot.

Three weeks later, she was ordering wedding invitations. By the time we went to the courthouse, she was already pregnant.

My mother counted on her fingers one night while passing the potatoes at dinner.

I saw her do it, and she saw me see her, and we both just kept chewing. I never accused Elena. I was too scared of her leaving and having to move my mattress back into my dad’s house. I told myself babies come early all the time. Bodies are weird.

The real trouble started with her Target trips. Elena didn’t go back to work after our son was born, which was fine, but she’d disappear for four, five hours at a time. She had this coffee mug my mother bought her that said “World’s Okayest Mom” on it, and she’d leave it everywhere — on the stairs, on the dryer — with half-inch rings of dried coffee at the bottom.

“You know what Sabrina’s husband drives?” she said one night. We were watching some rerun on TV, and I hadn’t even said anything. “A Tesla. You know what I got? I got you, Marcus.”

I just nodded and went back to folding the laundry. My father told me once in the garage, while we were fixing a lawnmower, that I wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to find another woman easily, so I should just be grateful for what I had. I think I hated him for saying it, but I still go to his place every time the mower breaks down.

Then she went to that music festival out of state. I knew Danny was there. I found his name on a confirmation email she left open on our desktop, but I paid for her ticket anyway. I don’t really know why I did it. I think I thought that if I didn’t make a scene, she’d eventually come back wanting to be with me. But I don’t know. When she came back, she didn’t even wash her clothes before she told me.

“I was with him,” she said, pulling a pink Nalgene water bottle out of her duffel bag. “We’ve been talking the whole time, honestly.”

I hit her. I don’t really want to write about this part. The whole thing lasted maybe a second. I remember her head hitting the pantry doorframe, and then I remember standing by the sink about ten minutes later with no real memory of the minutes in between. My palm felt hot and it was trembling. I looked at the little red mark my wedding ring had left on her cheekbone and my stomach just turned. I went into the bathroom and threw up until my ribs hurt. I was terrified of what I’d done.

She ran to her parents’ house. I drove over there at midnight, sat on their porch like a dog, and wrote a three-page apology on a yellow legal pad. I slid it under their door. She came home two days later, and I gave her my second credit card just to make the silence stop.

I went crazy for a couple of days after she finally packed the three black trash bags and moved into Danny’s place down the street. My head felt like it was full of wet sand. I went out to the garage, pulled the gasoline can off the shelf, and grabbed the heavy meat cleaver my mother gave us as a housewarming gift. I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to smash something of his.

I was sitting on my motorcycle when the side door clicked. My daughter came running out. She was five, wearing those dinosaur pajamas she refused to take off even in the middle of August. Her hair was a matted nest, and she was crying because she couldn’t find her favorite blanket.

“Daddy?” she said, out of breath. “Where are we going? Are we going somewhere?”

I looked at her, then at the five-gallon tank of unleaded next to my leg. I sat down on the motorcycle seat. I couldn’t stand up anymore. I put the cleaver on the workbench next to a broken plastic princess wand from Halloween and went inside to find her blanket. My son was wailing in his crib because he’d wet himself. I cleaned him up, but I was so frustrated I snapped at him to shut up, and then I spent an hour sitting on the floor feeling like a monster.

About a year after the divorce went through, I ran into them at the Home Depot off Route 18.

I was sitting in my truck, eating a vending-machine ham sandwich that tasted like cardboard, when I saw them walking out. Danny looked awful — bloated, tired — and he completely ignored her while he shoved a ceiling fan box into his tailgate. Elena just stood there in the cold wind, holding a plastic bag with three packs of furnace filters. Her hair looked dry. She was just standing there. I don’t know what she was thinking about. I don’t think she knew either.

Sometimes I miss her laugh. I hate myself for writing that. But it’s true.

Watching Danny slam the truck door, I just felt a stupid kind of pity. I wanted to know what he had that I didn’t, but looking at him, I realized he didn’t have anything. He was just stuck with her now, the same way I had been.

I thought about rolling down my window, but my daughter started kicking the back of my seat because she wanted to go to the park. I put the truck in reverse.

People ask why I didn’t just leave earlier. I usually tell them something about the warehouse lease or the school district, then I go get another beer. The truth is, I don’t know. There’s the mortgage, and the kids, and that sick feeling you get every morning where you think maybe today she’ll look at you the way she did when her hands were covered in grease on Route 18.

I avoid that street entirely now, even if it adds ten minutes to the trip. My son is four, and he still won’t sleep without the hall light on. Last week, he called me “Danny” by accident when I was tucking him in, then got confused and started crying. I just held him until he went to sleep.

Anyway. The house is quiet now. I make them tacos on Tuesdays, and I always burn the shells. I’m going to go fold the laundry now.

Photo by Sandra Seitamaa on Unsplash