Veronica Shore
It Was In Me and That Was Wrong
We were driving, my dad and me.
“Your mother once asked me for a divorce, did you know that?”
I shook my head and crossed my legs, leaning toward the window.
“Right after I quit my office job—we were driving home and when I told her I quit she told me she wanted a divorce.”
We were on the highway, a man in a ‘90s Saturn driving along next to us with his dog asleep in the back of his car. The woman in the rearview mirror had a long cigarette between her fingers. I saw her knuckles were white and her hands were dappling around the steering wheel, and none of her windows were rolled down so the car was full of smoke.
“When I proposed to your mother she took her ring off in front of her parents, did you know?”
“I didn’t know.”
The gas was getting low and I took our silence opportunistically to tell him to stop.
“I just want to get out of Jersey first,” he said
“Yeah—fuck Jersey.”
My dad rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. I would breathe in the second-hand smoke more willingly then.
“How’s school?” he asked.
“Normal.”
“And what does that mean?”
“We need to stop for gas.”
“If I stop now then I won’t be able to get back on the fucking highway.” But he took a hard right off the highway into a no-name suburb of Newark.
The town was quiet. We pulled into a gas station and The Man asked my dad to open his gas cap and then started filling up the car.
My dad looked at me: “This is why I didn’t want to get gas in fucking Jersey.”
I went to ask for the bathroom key, and there was a woman in front of me holding a long cigarette. I looked out the window from over her shoulder and saw my dad and The Man laughing and pushing each other. He looked happy, my dad.
“What do you need?”
The tobacco smoke from the car burned my throat, even then.
“The key to the bathroom. Thank you.”
The mirror in the bathroom was cracked. The sink wouldn’t drain and there were cigarette butts at the bottom. I washed my face in the water and the drops that rolled into my open mouth were sweet and smelled. I stepped on the glass on the floor from the mirror and it was in my soles and it was in me and that was wrong, so I sat there rapping at the bottoms of my shoes with my nails and I was cut up all over walking back to the car.
My dad hugged The Man and invited him into the car. I watched them pull the car in front of me and I got in. He was laughing, The Man.
A woman handed me a long cigarette that burned all the way down as I smoked it to the filter. Her hands were on my dad’s chest and I watched her, hands all over, under his shirt as he stared at me through the rearview mirror and laughed and laughed. The Man in the passenger seat was turned around to face me now—he smiled and blew smoke into my eyes and laughed and laughed. I held my breath. My eyes watered and the woman put her hand on my thigh and my knuckles were white, hands cut up all over, tight around the bathroom key.
Veronica Shore lives in coastal Maine with her family. She is a student of creative writing and English literature; a dedicated thespian, having performed throughout New England; and the winner of Regional Fine Arts awards for fiction. She is a regular contributor to Malasaña.
Malasaña | Hudson, NY| Cargo Collective | Portland, ME | 2021