Published in Streetlight Magazine, Issue 29, Spring 2019 and Streetlight Magazine 2019 Anthology (https://www.amazon.com/Streetlight-Magazine-2019-Anthology-Trudy/dp/B08QDNJ2TD)
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Salmonella Summer
I spent four days and nights smashed against a bus window in transit to my first husband’s family reunion half nauseous from breathing in the diesel fumes and the aroma of the chemical toilet a few feet behind us. The vinyl seat stuck to the back of my thighs, as he seeped into my half of the bench I was sharing with him.
He was a big guy, Swedish-Norwegian and a lapsed Mormon. Six months earlier he’d announced it was necessary for him to move out so he could enjoy anonymous sex, drugs, drinking and stay up all night if he wanted. Marriage was cramping his style.
In early May, he stopped by to pick up his mail since he hadn’t changed his address after moving in with my best friend’s estranged husband. “My mom’s holding a family get together the third week of June. She wants all of us come.”
“We’ve been separated so long they aren’t my family any more. Why would she want me there anyway?”
We’d slogged cross-country so I could meet his Mormon dad in Southern California and his agnostic mom outside Seattle the summer after our wedding three years before in 1979. It was a ‘twenty states in twenty-one days’ low budget camping trip that included us nearly drowning in our sleeping bags during an Albuquerque flash flood and illicitly pitching our tent at midnight in a Safeway parking lot in San Francisco.
“My mom really likes you, Annie.” I hadn’t spoken to her in over a year.
“You haven’t told her about us, have you?” He shook his head. “You need to tell her. And I’m not spending a dime for a trip all the way out to Seattle.”
“By the way, you’re looking great. Very slim,” he said.
Since the separation, I’d lost the twenty pounds I’d gained during our marriage from birth control pills and eating the elaborate meals I cooked for us every evening. He’d gained sixty, which proves men will compete at anything. And I’d come to enjoy coming home after work again—not finding a half assembled motorcycle in the dining room or a new/used Firebird in the driveway or him sitting in the dark living room paralyzed by the immensity of the universe.
He showed up the following week with two unlimited Greyhound bus tickets good for 30 days and a promise to pay for everything. I folded. Part of me hoped we could work out our problems away from the everyday distractions of jobs, school, friends, decent food and daily showers.
Suzanne C Martinez 