Bye Bye Burdie

He drove. The heater was broken, but at least it was in the right direction: the vents blasted superheated air into the car. The windows were all rolled down partway, to attempt to reach a comfortable middle ground between interior inferno and exterior late November. The CD playing was hers: Devo. Too odd even for him. She was asleep anyway, so he popped it out and put in the Verve Pipe.

They were returning from visiting her mother for Thanksgiving. She'd dumped him the night before, but, like a chump, he'd agreed to take her home. His eyes still hurt from suppressing his tear ducts by brute force. She, having no such inhibitions, still had raccoon eyes as she slept the miles away. Her mother had liked him; mothers always liked him, it was the daughters who were never sure for very long.

She'd cheated on him a few weeks before. But he didn't know that yet. No, now he was just confused, and hurt, and wondering why he couldn't muster the stones to leave her ass in Massachusetts. Hey. Whatever. He had to drive back this way anyway. Up across that majestic bridge into Canada, then later across another, even bigger one. He loved those bridges, though it was certainly dangerous to rubberneck in heavy truck traffic. There was nothing like it, to climb up, up, out over vast blue, the sky and the water meeting in a thin pencil line far below. You got to rise above the noise and confusion, for a few blue moments. And then you got to be in a foreign country, for a while. What could be better?

He looked at her again. Sleeping peacefully. Half of him wanted to kiss her forehead; the other half wanted to carefully unbuckle her belt and push her out of the moving vehicle. Prudence won out. It always did.