Killer Move

Stephanie and I met at college in Pennsylvania. We were not an obvious fit, and it was a while before we noticed each other. She came from money, kind of: she came from a place where it had once been, at any rate. Her father had been the CEO of some big-deal corporation that got fucked by the last recession, at which point he lost everything and his pile of stock options became worthless. He did not take it well. He drank. He fucked up. He eventually came back to the land of the living, but broken right down the middle. Some people can be happy making do, living some new and smaller story. This guy could not, and Stephanie had gone from having everything money could buy to being reminded every single day of what it did not, by a man who’d become one of the living dead. Meanwhile my own dad kept selling people paint, and the store made enough for the family to get by, but never a whole lot more than that.

Eventually our paths crossed at a party in our sophomore year. It was a slow build, unusual at a time and place where people hooked up at a moment’s notice and forgot each other twice as quickly. Initially we annoyed the hell out of each other, in fact, and we were too young to realize what this likely meant. Finally, drunk to hell at another kegfest in a beat-up house mutual friends shared on the edge of town, we got it.

We watched the dawn together from the backyard, shivering under the same blanket, holding hands. We walked back into town in gray light, and when it came time to part and go back to our separate houses I let her keep the blanket. She had it for a long time. She laid it on the bed on our wedding night, in fact. Maybe she still has it, though I have no idea where it would be.

We were together after that. In our final year Steph’s dad left her mom and Stephanie—left everything, in fact. He went out one day and never came back. Yes, people really do that. Six weeks later it was her birthday. The one thing her father had kept up after he stopped making much pretense at caring about anything else was Stephanie’s birthday. Throughout her teens he’d always make something big of it, and even in the first two years at college he and her mom would drive up from Virginia and they’d take her out somewhere for dinner and there’d be some significant gift, and although this became compromised in Steph’s mind as she came to realize that his largesse meant the household finances would be hurting for months afterward, it marked the day and was part of the turning of each year. It was her dad’s love for her made concrete. I was there on the second of these, and you could tell the guy was in a bad place, but you could also see the love he had for her. It glowed.

But now he was gone. There had been no calls in the intervening six weeks, no note, no e-mail, nothing—to either Stephanie or her mom. The guy just bugged out, disconnected the line, went 404. I spent the week leading up to the day knowing Steph still believed that, come her birthday, something would happen and this bad, sad dream would end. That there’d be a card in the mail, a gift—cheap, trivial, it didn’t matter to her—maybe even that she’d be sitting in the window of the house she shared with four other girls and see his car pull up outside.

The day came.

There was no card. There was no gift.

She sat in the window, and he did not come.

I wasn’t with her. We were both working through college, barely scraping by. At that point I had a submenial job helping clear out the basement of a local factory, and the guy wouldn’t let me take the evening off. There were plenty of other assholes, he knew, who’d be happy to step into my shoes. I couldn’t afford to lose the job, and Steph knew it and wouldn’t have let me. I’d given her my gift that afternoon—an inexpensive necklace and a new copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a book she loved—but had to leave her after that.

I got off work at one in the morning and walked back into town as quickly as I could. It was January and beyond cold. I’d talked to the other girls in the house and they’d said they were going to throw her a party, but either it hadn’t happened or she’d declined to take part. There was only one light on in her house, and it was Steph’s. Her room was on street level, had this big window in front. I stood outside and saw her at her desk. She had fallen asleep with her head on her arms. She was dressed in the best clothes she had.

She’d waited, and he hadn’t come.

I was young and didn’t understand a whole lot about the world, but I knew that this was dark and bad and wrong and could not stand. I stood there for ten minutes, too cold to shiver, not knowing what to do.

Then I turned back and walked home. I entered a silent house and looked around for what I could find. I knew it wasn’t going to be much, or anything like enough, but it was all I had and all I could do.