“How fucking dare you,” Ken says. “All I’ve ever done is take care of you. All those days you were a drooling mess, I’d come home and find you passed out on the couch. All these years I worked to keep a roof over your head, and look at this shithole, you barely keep it clean, every damn thing is breaking down while you’re out shopping and spending. I work my goddamned fingers to the bone … You really think I never knew? I’m not an idiot!”

But I am. That’s the unspoken insult. It’s always been there, and I have always pretended I didn’t hear it.

“I know what you keep in there,” Ken says.

“What?” But I know what he means.

His shoulders move with every breath as he pants, in and out, up and down, as his fists open and close. “I know. What you keep. In there. That storage unit. I know. And you’ve never told me about that, so how fucking dare you ride my ass about one single fucking thing. Ever.”

Ken grits out the words through clenched jaws. The veins in his forehead bulge as his face turns a shade of crimson that scares me. He’s always been so fit in the past, but he’s put on weight over the past few months. He’s getting older, past fifty now. Maybe I won’t need that ladder and an accomplice.

“Ken—”

“I do everything for you, Jewelann! I do everything for this fucking family! Do you think I like being on the road all the time? Staying in shitty motels, eating shitty food? Do you?”

“I think you might,” I reply without shouting, although my voice does tremble.

“I’d just loooove to stay at home all day doing fucking nothing. Just like you. Just like my mother. She was a slattern, too.” He yanks my hand upward, shaking it. “Neither one of you deserved a ring like this.”

Ken had only ever spoken of his mother in the same tone you’d use for a saint. I try to pull out of his grip, and he grabs again for the ring, which is stuck on my knuckle and won’t come free. I cry out as the prongs scrape me, and he lets my hand drop.

“You want to change places with me? Huh?” He pokes at the air between us, but I have no doubt he’d be stabbing that finger into me, if I were close enough. “You want that, Jewelann? You want to go out and get a fucking job so I can stay home and keep house?”

“You’re scaring me. Please, calm down.”

He turns away, huffing and puffing and scraping both hands through his hair so that it stands on end. His shoulders hunch. He’s muttering. More curses. Words I can’t make out.

I think I’m watching my husband lose his mind.

“Let’s talk about this,” I plead.

Without turning, he says, “I want out.”

Imagining this doesn’t make it easier to hear. I draw in a breath. “Ken. Please.”