Half an hour later, with a couple of glasses of wine in him and a beer-and-a-half in me, we both loosened up a bit. The two of us had sat at my kitchen table–the dining room table hadn’t been delivered yet–talking about the kind of nonsense any two guys having dinner together might: sports, the economy, the vagaries of middle age, and all the other topics that exist mostly to fill unwanted silences, before eventually circ...

Dedicated to A. Wherever you are now, I hope life has brought you only joy and love. === I puttered around, unpacking my kitchen, but my mind wasn’t on locating the box with the cast-iron skillet or which cabinet the spices should go in. Nor was it occupied by the subject that had taken up most of my waking hours for the past six months, namely the end of my marriage. No, it kept returning, again and again, to the man re-...

I didn’t find Gail there, in the room where our marriage had ended. Oh, it limped along for a little while after that–her desperate pleas to reconcile and the various legal nonsense kept it on life support for months–but there was no marriage there anymore. For a time, we lived as two roommates, albeit roommates who occasionally shared a bed for a quick hatefuck, but that’s not a marriage, is it? I took a quick peek insid...