Terrible Omens: Happiness is the Other Way

Terrible Omens

Happiness is the Other Way

Copyright ©2018 Thinktorium, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote selected passages in a review.

Thinktorium

PO Box 901

Raleigh, NC 27602-0901

www.thinktoriumbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-937258-21-4 (ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-1-937258-20-7 (paperback)

LCCN: 2018964795 (paperback)

Cover Design by M. Jay Allport

Certain elements of the cover design obtained with license from VectorStock.com.

Song lyric credit: Mould, B. (2016). Voices in My Head (Bob Mould). On Patch the Sky. Durham, NC: Merge Records.

Terrible Omens: Happiness is the Other Way is a work of creative nonfiction. The names and identifying characteristics of the individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Alane Gray

Table of Contents

Proem

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

I decide to listen to the voices in my head

Strange hallucinations I avoid

The people and the places, the living and the dead

Can I find some truth within the noise?

-Bob Mould

Proem

What you are about to read is mostly true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent (as well as the guilty) but the stories, themselves, have been told exactly as I experienced them. Let’s be very clear—this is my version of things. That’s not anything nefarious; it’s just the nature of the human experience. It’s plagued by the confines of perspective. Sometimes I think it’s our lack of omnipotence that makes life really interesting.

This whole thing started as a single journal entry. I called it my Reluctant Divorcé’s Grimoire—which is kind of funny now that it’s done. As it turns out, I was not really reluctant at all. Stupid, maybe, but definitely not reluctant. As for the grimoire part...that’s a story for some other day. It all seemed to make sense in the beginning, but as the project really started to take shape, I realized that the real story is less about what came after and more about what happened in the moment. It’s about all of the things that were happening right in front of my face that I couldn’t process until much later.

Now that it’s done, I’m still not sure what this book is, exactly. What came out of my head is what my arts school choreography instructor would probably have categorized as a shameless self-masturbatory work. I got that feedback a lot back then. I wasn’t exactly prepared for that kind of critique at 16, but I hold no grudges today. Looking back, he was right about it most of the time.

The process of writing this book was treacherous. To do it right, I had to delve into the depths of my experience and shine light on things that I have never told another soul. I had to take a long and honest look at myself, too, which might have been the hardest part of the whole thing. Luckily, for you, my story has been edited for time and boring content. There were so many things that happened and so many ridiculous details that there just wasn’t room for them all, and after a point, it just became too much, anyway.

One of my biggest fears with this project was that the finished product would sound too much like exactly what it was—the journal entries of a situationally borderline mind—or worse—the hormone-fueled ravings of a marginally literate teenage girl that reads like: I hate this. I am sad. He was mean. She’s a bitch. This outfit makes me look fat… and so on. I hope I’ve managed to avoid that, but I am sure that some of it’s in there. For that, I am sorry. It probably couldn’t be helped.

Nevertheless, here it is, my accounting of fifteen odd years during the prime of my adult life. Now that it’s done, it’s done.

— Alane Gray

Chapter 1

It was like something snapped. The last fiber of a fraying invisible rope let go. It was over. I had wanted it, denied it, dreamed about it, avoided it, screamed it, retracted it, wished for it, and it was finally here.

I didn’t even have to say it. He said it. I can’t do this anymore. After all of the fighting and crying in the name of eternal love, that was it. He uttered those five words and changed everything.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. It had been over for a long time. It was undeniable, like a dead animal in the wall of an old house. It had a stench. Friends would come over and try to be polite. They didn’t want to embarrass us by pointing it out, but you could see it on their faces. They smelled it. They knew exactly what it was.

Our marriage started out the way many of them do. We were madly and passionately in love. We never wanted to be away from each other. We were making our future together—a marriage, a business, a family. We were going to have everything we thought we could possibly want. To be honest, it was kind of disgusting. It was that nauseating, romance novel kind of love.

We were certain it was meant to be, too. In the beginning, we even mused about how perfect it was and how lucky we were (and how sad everybody else must have been). The air around us smelled sweeter. The colors we saw in the sky were more intense. It was like the light of the world emanated from the space between us. We were special. We were chosen. Chosen for what, exactly, we didn’t know, but it was something. We were certain of that. To sum it up, ours was the kind relationship that makes you puke if you look directly at it for too long.

Then one day, it changed. Our perfect relationship succumbed to its own truth. The shine wore off and revealed a big lump of nothing underneath. The intoxicating rush of romance waned and left me with an epic headache and the need to hurl anytime I thought about the choices I had made. We were two completely different people, from two totally different worlds, with two laundry lists of irreconcilable wants and needs. We were strangers when we met, and we were strangers when it ended, and our marriage became nothing more than a contract.

The reality of our incompatibility had always been there. I just wasn’t able to see it through a fog of hormones mixed with copious amounts of affordable merlot. When we met, I was 26 and primed for commitment—still young enough to feel entitled to a fairy tale romance and definitely old enough to feel the pressures of social expectation and biological imperative. Any of my usual fail-safes that might have inspired me to run (as I usually did within the first 3 to 6 months of any given relationship) I ignored. I was feeling The Feelings. I had been waiting my whole life for those feelings. So, what was a little conflict? All of the best stories were about surviving through struggles, heartache, and tears. I mean, you don’t win an Oscar for a role without conflict and oppression. Right? Passion is passion. I never expected it to be easy.

For 20 years before I met Darren, the man who would become my husband, I danced. I don’t mean Dolly-Dinkle’s once-a-year-recital-to-torture-your-parents kind of dance. I mean real dance—the performing arts boarding school, first professional gig at 9 years old, willing to walk around with bloody feet and a perma-bun kind of dance. It certainly wasn’t easy. I loved dance more than anything else in the world. I was certain that romantic love would be the same. In a way, it was. In dance, I learned that pain was good most of the time. I learned that the show goes on regardless of how you feel about your partner that day—put on your makeup, smile, and dance into the wings. The audience doesn’t get to see behind the curtain.

My marriage was much the same. The alarms were sounding, the red flags were waving, the costumes were shredded, and the footlights were busted, but the show went on.

Two years and thirty-three days elapsed between the day Darren and I met and the day we got married. It seemed like I should have had enough time to get clear on exactly what I was getting myself into, but I didn’t. I was too distracted by the rest of my life. We were in chiropractic college. That’s where we met. (To clear up what that means, exactly—I was working toward a Doctorate in Chiropractic. Yes, that’s a real thing. Yes, I am a real doctor. No, it’s not the same thing as massage therapy. Yes, I still have student loans, and no, I did didn’t go there because medical school was too hard for me…and yes, I have a chip on my shoulder about it.) Anyway, classes, tests, dissecting dead people, not to mention clinicals and national boards, consumed most of my energy. In fact, all of the pressure seemed to serve our relationship well. It gave us common goals, and it made us utterly oblivious to our overwhelming isolation. Our lives were driven by an external set of rules, demands, and deadlines. There was very little room for us to disagree and there was definitely no time to fight about it when we did.

To top it off, 30 was looming in the distance for me. I hadn’t expected the idea of turning 30 to freak me out as much as it did. It was like a ghost lurking in the shadows—dark, oppressive, and unstoppable no matter how young I looked or how much moisturizer I used. The biological countdown clock to spinsterhood had started ticking loudly, and I succumbed to it. In the fairytales I read as a kid, I learned that every princess was owed a prince as long as she followed the rules and did everything she was supposed to do on time. If she missed her mark, she was destined to become a wart-faced hag who ate hapless children as a snack. I certainly didn’t want that.

Obviously, I was supposed to get married. Life as a wart-faced hag was not for me. So, in the midst of the upheaval that I had chosen for myself, I did it to fulfill my destiny. Thanks to a preacher and the powers that be at the Allegheny County Courthouse, the contract was executed. The choice had been made, and there was no going back. A year and a half later, school was done, our board exams were passed, and we started off together, as husband and wife, toward the rest of our lives.



In the aftermath of my divorce, I sometimes lose entire days to the grind of self-reflection. The events and the emotions swirl through my head as I struggle to make peace with the outcome. My mind clamors for an inkling of clarity that might let me rest and that might bring me a little peace.

Our marriage certainly wasn’t all bad. There were times, especially in the beginning, that seemed like the fairytale I had been promised. We even joked that we would have a ten-year honeymoon because we were so happy and things were so perfect. Like I said, it was pretty disgusting there for a little while.

Needless to say, our honeymoon didn’t make it for ten years. Real life hit us quickly, and we both suffered as a result. At the time, I was convinced that a good marriage demanded a little suffering to make it stronger, like suffering was a display of love, and my willingness to suffer was directly proportional to the amount of love I had to give. For love to be real and to last, I would have to fight for it. We fought so hard that our love should have been rock solid. It wasn’t. Most of the time, it existed as a black hole in the murky nether region between passionate love-fucking and unbearable suffering.

It’s curious… If I had known what the future had in store for us, would I have still said yes? If I had paid better attention in the beginning, would my decision have been the same?

I’m sad to say—probably so. There were too many hormones involved, not to mention my waning youth and general stupidity.

Okay, then…if I had known the future at any point, would I have stayed as long as I did? The answer to this question is also—probably so.

What I need to understand is why? Why did I stay as long as I did? Why was I unable, or worse—unwilling, to accept the inevitability of our marital decomposition as it was happening? Why didn’t I do something about it? And, now that it’s done, why am I so unwilling to move on.

Like I said before, my marriage kicked the bucket, but honestly, it was on life support from the beginning. I know for sure that it had completely flatlined by year nine. The alarm bells were sounding, the codes were being called. We ignored them. Eventually, we shut the entire warning system down. Those alarms can be so annoying, after all. When our marriage gasped its final breath, we were oblivious. We paid no to attention to it. Instead of respectfully covering it with a sheet and wheeling it off to the morgue, we ignored it and let it rot right under our noses.

That means a full postmortem is in order, no matter how ridiculous or painful it is.

Upon further examination… I was 26 when I met Darren. He was 24. I turned 28 the day before I married him. I had never been particularly concerned with external pressures to bind myself to a man or to create a family before then. I was never bothered by maternal instincts until suddenly, one day, I was acutely aware of time. I was suddenly aware of my lack of legacy. Suddenly, I wanted to belong to something or someone in a way that had never been necessary for me before. As these imperatives started to worm their way through my psyche, Darren appeared, and that was all it took. Everything clicked into place like a thick set of beer goggles at last call, and that was it.

Our marriage wasn’t my destiny. Our introduction wasn’t cosmically ordained. There was nothing inherently supernatural about it. Darren was nothing special. He could have been almost anybody with half a brain, a full set of teeth, and working genitalia. Sometimes Free Will has its drawbacks. I chose Darren all by myself. I chose him over all other potential breeding mates despite all of the things that should have scared me away.

That explains how it started. It’s much harder to explain the 15 years that followed.



Why did I stay in it as long as I did? Maybe I believed in his basic decency. Maybe I thought he had potential. Maybe I was just afraid of the unknown. Maybe it was a distorted sense of loyalty. Maybe it was the mountain of debt we had created. Maybe I thought I’d win a prize for suffering the longest? (Ah, the coveted World’s Longest Sufferer award. What an honor.) Maybe I was just stubborn and unwilling to admit that I was wrong about one of the biggest life decisions I had ever made. (I do hate being wrong.) Maybe I felt pressured by an unseen patriarchal social construct. I was supposed to be educated, successful, married, and childbearing no matter what I actually wanted out my life.

Truthfully, it seems like it was a little bit of all of it. Ultimately, however, I believe it was the vow that really sealed it. I stayed because I took a vow.

I took The Vow.

I know that the whole my word is my bond thing is pretty melodramatic, but it is true for me. If I say the words, specifically those words, then I have taken The Vow. For me, it was a covenant with a power much bigger than one small human. It wasn’t just because I took The Vow in a church in front of God and everybody as my grandmother used to say. It wasn’t just because I had entered into a legally binding marital agreement or had been issued an official license or anything. It wasn’t because I spent a bunch of money we didn’t have on a party for Darren’s friends and family to publicly celebrate it. Nope, it was simpler than that. I took The Vow. I made the big promise. I had never made that promise to anyone before. I had sworn to myself that when the day came that I made that promise, I was going to keep it. It was a one-shot deal. One and done. No backsies.

But everything dies eventually—even marriages.

Sometimes, the end is a natural progression like going to sleep and just never waking up. Other times, you have to blow the whole thing up and salt the earth behind you to kill it. Sometimes that isn’t even enough. The ghost of my marriage still haunts me. It screams in the back of my brain with a single wraithlike wail stuck in a repeating loop.

I tried just about everything to shut it up. I prayed. I meditated. I kept journals, of both the regular and the gratitude variety. I thought positive thoughts. I let a life coach show me my authentic self which was, according to her, a sad, aging Barbie doll who was hamstrung by a distorted need for affirmation from men. (I authentically wanted to punch that tiny wrinkled bitch right in the face…but I digress.) I made vision boards. I even saw a shaman who said he cleansed my aura of parasites, although he was unable to explain to me what they were, why they were there, or where they went once he was done. It was all useless except for the journals (the real ones, not the fake-happiness-until-you-make-it gratitude bullshit, of course.)

So, here’s my story—my expanded autopsy of a rotting corpse of marriage.

Chapter 2

Let's go back to the beginning of the thing that was my marriage to Darren, the person I used to call my husband.

Over the course of his life, Darren Robert Danky had answered to several different names depending on the circumstance or the person he fancied himself to be at the time. Some he chose. Others were bestowed upon him out of fondness or humor. His favorite was his own last name —most specifically, the first syllable of his last name. Since I was never comfortable with being the wife of last name guy or the wife of last name first syllable guy, I always just called him Darren since that’s the way he introduced himself to me from the start.

Darren and I met on our second day of orientation at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. He introduced himself that day as Darren, striking up an awkward conversation as we stood in line. He was an attractive guy. It was obvious that he worked out but wasn’t one of the gym-rat mouth-breathers that I tried hard to avoid. His style was what I considered as mid-90’s regulation frat boy—khaki cargo shorts, a pastel polo shirt, and Bass leather sandals with a large dollop of carefully considered hair gel on top. A dark tribal tattoo band around his ankle made him a wannabe rebel. By today’s standard, it would be considered a pretty lame tattoo at best, but at the time, it was sort of edgy, especially for an otherwise clean-cut college guy. Where I came from, only girls had ankle tattoos, but for some reason, it didn’t bother me. It created just enough visual contradiction to make him interesting.

As far as first impressions went, our first encounter was marginal. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I had more important things on my mind, namely, my first day of gross anatomy lab and the looming reality that I was going to be cutting up an actual dead person. He wasn’t my type at all. I never had much patience for frat boys. I found them uninteresting and shallow. Darren must have sensed this—or maybe I said it to his face, knowing my general demeanor at the time—because he worked really hard to show me how deep he was.

Wherever I was, he would be there, too. He was persistent, to be sure. He would find me at lunch. He found me at the gym. He was in the anatomy lab every time I went in even though he had a completely different lab group that met at a different time. If we hadn’t been in school, I would have thought he was a stalker. Sure enough, little by little, he wore me down. We seemed to be interested in the same things. He clearly cared about me. I don’t know what it was specifically that changed my view of him. Maybe it was the stress, or maybe the embalming fluid fumes in the anatomy lab. Maybe it was just his relentless flattery. I don’t know, exactly. I managed to hold him off for almost three months before I decided to officially go out with him for something more than coffee between classes or a protein bar at the gym. It took another month for us to officially start dating.

As it turned out, Darren really wasn’t that shallow. He wasn’t the same as the sensitive, artistic types I had dated before, but he was certainly more interesting than the arrogant upwardly mobiles that I had accidentally dated after undergrad. (It was a short-lived phase, and a bad one at that.) It wasn’t that there was a great deal of depth to Darren nor did he have a wealth of profound life experience that molded his ambitions. It was more about his desire. He seemed to want to know things. He seemed to want to experience the world and people. He seemed passionate, motivated, and most of all, kind. I think it was my perception of his kindness (and maybe the fumes in the lab) that finally reeled me in.

I might also have been his love of food. I always liked guys who didn’t mind if I ate. Darren didn’t just not mind it, he encouraged it. He was oddly obsessed with eating though you would never know it to look at him. Early on, he decided that he was going to cook for me. To start, he had no real skill in the kitchen, but with his passion for food, a Jeff Smith cookbook and a few quick calls home to his mother, he started to figure it out. He made himself at home in my tiny apartment kitchen and courted me in clouds of garlic and oregano with of splash a red wine every now and then for a little extra kick.

His kitchen effort might have been born as much out of self-preservation as it was out of romance. I considered my refrigerator fully stocked with a head of lettuce, a half-empty bottle of mustard, cream cheese, and a bottle of OJ, with some frozen bagels and a pint of double fudge brownie in the freezer. I didn’t know it was a problem. There was, after all, usually a box of cheese crackers in the cabinet and pizza delivery on speed dial if he got hungry. It’s not that I couldn’t cook, I just had other things on my mind.

Thanks to Darren, we had a full blown three-course meal at least once a week. Every time he came over, he instituted an obligatory stop at the local supermarket. He would descend on my apartment lugging bags of meat, cheese, tomatoes, and herbs. Every evening started with bread for testing the sauce and some red wine. I’m not sure if it was the tomato sauce or the wine, but whatever it was, it worked very well. My stomach was smitten.

With hindsight being as it is, those dinners seem a little suspect to me, now. Darren was too intent on embracing the Italian half of his heritage for starters. He liked to call himself Eye-talian which was kind of humorous when I was studying and only half-listening. It wasn’t until I got to know his parents that I realized he wasn’t really joking around. His passion for food was actually an uncontrollable obsession, and although I thought they were sweet in the beginning, his phone calls to his mother were actually signs of a latent Oedipal complex that I wouldn’t figure out until much, much later.

Of course, there were warning signs. Some of them were right there in front of my face. For example, there was the supermarket bakery bread that he bought every week. It read:

Italian Pain $3.99.

No, it didn’t say Pane Italiano—it said "Italian Pain." It was clearly a translational mistake keyed in by some lackadaisical midwestern grocery worker, but with 20/20 hindsight, it was more like an oracle than a simple oversight. It was an omen stuck unceremoniously on a bag of fresh, crusty, deliciousness. Every week, a warning letter walked right into my kitchen carried in a grocery bag. We even joked about it at the time. I thought it was so amusing…

So, every week, I stuffed my face with Italian Pain. I ate it with the hubris of a D-list horror movie actress who laughs as a creepy old man ominously hisses, You’re all going to die, as she casually walks down the street. She’s always the first bimbo to get laid and the first to get tossed into the wood chipper. Sometimes, there are consequences for such predictable and archetypal arrogance, and in the movies, the point is usually made with a lot of spurting blood.

Had I been able to watch my own movie, I would have known that a wood chipper was in my future. I would have known to run away screaming and to run as far and as fast as I could. Instead, I stood over a pot of simmering marinara blithely anointing my Italian Pain with it and washing it all down with a nice Chianti.

Chapter 3

We had only been dating about three months when Darren asked me to marry him. As far as proposals go, his was lackluster, at best. It wasn’t a grand romantic gesture. It wasn’t well thought out. I’m not sure that he thought about it at all before he popped the question. Honestly, it wasn’t even a question. He just blurted out, Marry me! one night after a particularly athletic romp in the sack.

I was caught off-guard and weirdly flattered. It was the third time I had been asked in my lifetime, but it was the first time I considered it a viable option. I loved him. The sex was good. It seemed like we wanted the same things based on the hours of talking we had done since we met. In that moment, there was no reason I could find to say no. Deep down, I was filled with reservations. Frankly, the notion of marriage to anyone scared the hell out of me, but fear and reservation had been my normal operational state for most of my life. Uncertainty was a familiar feeling, and every other uncertain choice I had made had worked out for me in one way or another. Making such a big decision without a high degree of uncertainty would have seemed abnormal.

So, five seconds after he asked, I said yes.

Three weeks later, Darren took me home for Christmas to meet his family. As we drove East on I-80 toward Pittsburgh, our excitement grew. Darren was practically beside himself with anticipation. He hadn’t taken very many girls home, especially not over a major a holiday, and he had never taken anyone home as his fiancé. I was quite atwitter myself. I was visiting a new city. I was meeting Darren’s family. My expectations were high. An engagement announcement to an Italian family from Pittsburgh at Christmas sounded like something out of a movie. I was certain that it would be wonderful and we would be greeted at the door with a grand hug, a kiss on both cheeks, and a giant plate of cannoli.

Well, sometimes the movies miss the mark a little.

When we arrived at their house, it was cold and overcast with a blanket of gray snow covering the scene. I remember thinking things seemed odd. The muted hue of the snow was different than the bright white snow in Iowa, and Darren said they lived in Pittsburgh but a city skyline was nowhere in sight and the sign we passed as we drove up the hill said: Welcome to Verona.

The house seemed quaint and sentimental on the outside. It was small and had been built brick by brick by his grandfather’s hands. It had white painted wrought iron rails, and Astroturf covered the cement slab breezeway that connected the house to the matching brick garage. The gutters were decorated with white icicle lights, and there was a festive quilt Santa Claus hanging on the door.

Darren tried the knob on the side door but it was locked, so he knocked…twice. When Darren’s mother, Charlene, opened the door, she spat out an annoyed hello around the freshly lit cigarette she held between her lips. She looked at me sideways, turned her back and croaked, The refrigerator’s broken. Christmas is ruined. My life sucks, and walked back into the kitchen. So, it wasn’t exactly how I had envisioned it. There were no hugs, no kisses, and definitely no cannolis. It was an inauspicious beginning, to say the least.

Despite the appliance that destroyed Christmas, I was determined to settle in as best I could. I wanted to experience all of it. Darren had grown up here. This was the backdrop for his whole life up to this point. I wanted to know everything about it.

When I crossed the threshold, I entered a tiny smoke-filled cauldron of a living space. To maneuver through most of the rooms, everyone had to turn sideways except for the cat. There was one bathroom on the main level, and the only shower in the house was a spray nozzle over a drain in the cement floor of the basement which had been walled off with 70’s era paneling for privacy. (Yes, I said a wood-paneled shower. At one time there had been a so-called Pittsburgh Potty—seriously, look it up—in the basement, too. By the time I showed up, it was just an open pipe in the floor.) Darren’s childhood bedroom was only slightly bigger than the closet in my first college apartment and had become Charlene’s computer and smoking room in his absence. Generally speaking, there was no privacy. Every breath was audible throughout the entire house, which was about to offer me complete emersion into the Danky family Christmas experience.

Darren’s younger sister by two years, Krystal, stalked around the house like a feral cat, gazing intensely at me from around the corner and then darting off when I looked directly at her. It was hard to remember that she was in college. She was home for the holiday just as we were, and instead of bonding with her over embarrassing stories about her brother, I felt like I needed to lure her out into the open with a treat and let her chase after the light from my laser pointer.

I knew that this was not going to be the warm, joyous occasion I had anticipated. It was clear that I was an interloper whose presence in the house probably caused the refrigerator to break in the first place. At the end of that first night, Darren apologized profusely. He swore that it usually wasn’t like this and that it would be better in the morning after everyone got some sleep. He was sure that once they heard our news and understood that this was the real thing, everything would be perfect.

The next night, it was on. It was finally time to make our big announcement. To make it special, he reserved a table for the two of us and his parents at Vitali’s, an old-school, family-owned Italian restaurant with dark wood and mirrors on the wall and red vinyl covering all of the chairs. It was built precariously on the side of a hill overlooking the Allegheny River and the abandoned steel plants that lined its shores. According to the sign and the plastic-covered menu, it was a viewtiful place to dine. Thanks to the twinkling lights from across the river and the perfect amount of snowfall, that night, it was true.

The hostess seated us in front of the giant window wall that ran along the back of the dining room. From my vantage point, it looked like I could hurl myself over the edge if the evening didn’t go well, but mostly I was hoping that the windows didn’t open. I wasn’t sure what Charlene might be capable of with the right motivation. The four of us sat in awkward silence after we finally got settled in our seats. Charlene and I jockeyed entirely too long for the seat next to Darren before he asked her if he could sit next to me. Charlene sat down across from me glowering like a jilted ex-girlfriend. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t strange.

At long last, our waiter appeared to take our orders. Darren and I ordered wine and Chicken Marsala. Charlene and Earl ordered pasta. Earl also ordered a beer despite Charlene’s comments about how expensive the drinks would be.

As the waiter turned to walk away, Darren said confidently, We have something we want to tell you.

Oh, SHIT… his mother belched out before the word you had fully left his mouth. Forks and spoons clattered on plates, and the restaurant went silent. Our waiter’s stride stuttered as he walked away. If a needle could have scratched across a record, it would have. Are you pregnant? she spat at me with disgust. Every head in the room turned to look to at the show. You’re pregnant, aren’t you?! I saw those books on the bed. Oh… she groaned as though she had been gutted with a knife.

I was completely bewildered. I had no idea what was happening or what to do. The waiter turned back to catch a glimpse of the commotion before hurrying out of the room.

Darren cut in, Ma, no. She’s not pregnant. I asked her to marry me. She said yes.

Oh, shit… she bellowed out again. I can’t sit here and listen to this,