The money ran out and I knew I’d have to go back to work. I knew also that my ex-wife’s lawyer would soon be dunning me for an alimony payment which I didn’t have. I considered full-time employment for about fifteen seconds, and then realized that since I had made the choice to be sorry, I wanted to be sorry full-time.

I went back to painting houses. I painted houses in Oxford, in Taylor, in Toccopola, in Dogtown. I wore paint-spattered clothes and let my hair and beard grow out. I wrote at night, with beer in the cooler on the floor next to the desk. All of my stories came back in. I bought a small postage scale and weighed my own envelopes to the penny and mailed them back out. Nothing, nothing. Nobody wanted my work. Sometimes I wrote all night and staggered out the door the next morning to paint houses. I painted houses for twenty-three days straight and then took the money and retired again. I hit the grocery store first. Forty pounds of leg quarters that I could fry and keep cold in the fridge. Salami and baloney. Cheese. Chili and hot dogs. I got a few brown steaks that were already frozen, perfectly good cheap meat. The rest of the cart I filled up with beer and cigarettes.

They were good days. I slept late and got up and read the newspaper and made coffee and breakfast, then sat down and started writing. Stories, nothing but stories. The last novel had taken me two years, and I wasn’t ready to commit to that kind of time again right away. I could write a story in two days, revise it in a couple of hours, and be ready to start another one. I wrote through the afternoons, stopped for a while to fix something for supper, then went back to writing again. There was nothing I could do but keep going. I had already made all my decisions.

…

7

I thought she looked bad when I saw her. She was coming into a bar with some other people just as I was going out. She saw me and she stopped, so I had to stop, too. The people with her spoke briefly, friends of ours, friends of hers, ex-friends of mine, evidently. People who had been to our house and eaten with us and shared our wine and music. Or maybe they just wanted to get out of the way. I didn’t blame them. The end hadn’t been nice. The end had been nasty. Nasty people and nasty words and phrases and nastiness to make you go puke in the gutter. Me, her: both of us.