Separated

There’s a bottle of bourbon and a denim sky with my name on it. Been waiting all day for this, 7:30 PM, right after “AFTERNOON SNACK” and “MOVIE.” People say making schedules in times like these helps but, frankly, I feel like I’m only helping myself become an alcoholic.

I push my front door open, glancing down at my red-socked feet as they bleed along the porch’s concrete. And then I smell the smoke. Fucking cigarettes. There’s a rustling of fabric as a chubby body shifts in a chair across from me. My geriatric, white neighbor. I know him vaguely as Joseph Lehman from some mistakenly-delivered mail and that’s all I care to know. I avoid him every chance I get. He still has three faded “Make America Great Again” stickers peeling like sunburnt, pink skin on his doorframe. A new sign for 2020 in the shared front yard of our duplex: TRUMP/PENCE- KEEP AMERICA GREAT.

“Sorry,” I mutter, shuffling back towards my still-open door. The bottle of Four Roses strikes the screen.

“I don’t need quiet,” he says, blowing a tunnel of smoke away from me. “You can sit too. Don’t worry, we’re more than six feet apart,” he adds with a laugh.

“I can’t take the smoke, sorry,” I repeat. “Allergies.” I tap the bridge of my nose.

“Got it.” He stabs his cigarette into the battered, tin ashtray beside him. It falls into a skinny zigzag of white paper and ash. More than three-quarters wasted. “Be nice if you stay,” Joseph says. “I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone since this started. Just the lady at the Food Lion. I was staying inside for a while, but I just couldn’t take it anymore.” He laughs again but, this time, it shakes along his tongue. “You know, the flu kills more people every year but we’re not allowed to go anywhere. Have to wear masks to the grocery store. Can’t really go anywhere else. I need a haircut!” He exclaims, rubbing at a string of greasy, white hair. “I don’t know about you but it’s all pretty ridiculous, in my opinion.”

“No, it’s not ridiculous! Do you know how many people have died already?! In just a few months?! This is a serious situation but certain people just don’t get it! Do you want to be on lockdown forever? Well, that’s what’s going to happen the longer idiots keep going out!” I snap at him. I rip the cap off of the bottle and collapse in my stiff, green vinyl beach chair with a sigh. Got to hurry up and pour myself a drink. A splash of amber in my glass. A shot of fire down my throat. The broken stems of plastic pierce my flannel shirt.

“You working from home then?” Joseph asks.

“Laid off,” I tell him, pouring another glass. “Three weeks ago.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, me too,” I hiss.

“What you drinking?”

I hold the bottle up in the air, the cluster of three, cheap red roses blooming in his face.

“I’ve got some better stuff inside… If you want…”

I shake my head and hand at the same time.

“Girls don’t usually drink straight liquor,” Joseph mansplains.

“Well, I’m not a girl. I’m a woman.”

“What’s your name?”

“Cora. Cory,” I reply.

“You’re a pretty girl,” he says, not acknowledging what I’ve said at all. His green eyes swallow up my brown ones. “Look a bit like my wife, aside from the different hairdo.” He waves a hand towards my twists.

I roll my eyes into my glass. “You said you haven’t talked to anyone in a while, but how about her then? Don’t you talk with your wife every day? She lives here with you, right?” He must be grabbing at straws for conversation now. Of course his wife wouldn’t look anything like me, never mind having a similar hairstyle.

He ignores my question, runs two palms down the fronts of his pants legs and disappears inside his house. When I see him again there’s a coffee cup in his hand and a smile hanging between his cheeks like a wrinkled hammock. “Try this.” He pushes the cup in my direction, his palm brushing the rungs of metal which keep us separated. “It’s top-shelf.”

I have the feeling there might be a thin stream of poison floating through whatever this is he wants to give me. “I’m okay.” I take a sip of my Four Roses instead. “I’ve got plenty.”

He shrugs, curling up like a pill bug in his chair. “Well, you’re missing out, Cory.” He pours the liquid past his chapped lips, swallows, draws the cup away and wipes an errant golden bead off of his white stubble.

One second. Two. Three.

And then another chug.

Four seconds. Five. Six.

I guess there was no poison.

“How old are you?” Joseph asks me.

“Thirty-two. You?”

“Seventy-four.”

We gaze at each other as if the numbers are tickets in a lottery and one of us will win.

“So, no husband, Cory? No kids?”

“No, and I don’t want any kids. All I need is my work.” The words are darts on my tongue. “Well, needed now, I guess.”

Joseph gives me a neutral grunt. “We never had kids either. Wanted them, but we couldn’t.” His voice fades away like the smoke from his cigarette.

The bourbon skims the top of my head, kissing it peach. It’s a beautiful cloud. My lashes shut, open, shut, open.

Joseph takes another swig of his drink then says, “Look.” Plucks his phone out of his pants pocket and swipes back and forth. He comes up like a toy with strings for joints, walks over to the metal between us and offers me the phone. “I don’t have the virus. Don’t worry. Just look. You can wash your hands right after if you’re worried.”

I smirk but humor him by walking over, my own joints equally unsteady under the heavy spell of liquor. “What’s this? Fake news or something?” I laugh.

“My wife,” he says, handing over the phone. “I mean, I still consider her my wife. She died about three years ago, just before you moved in.” He presses the phone into my palm. The finger on his left hand is still robed in gold.

The woman in the picture has skin an even darker shade than mine. A crimson lipstick-smile. Shoulder-length curls. A mole above her upper lip and a mélange of wrinkles below her eyes. She is wearing a white dress and gripping Joseph’s shoulder as if he is the earth that holds her in place.

“She’s beautiful,” I whisper.

“Looks like you, doesn’t she?” Suddenly he goes red, grabbing the phone out of my hand and shoving it back in his pocket. He stares right at me. “I mean, not because you’re both… It’s just the way your nose curves and the shape of your eyes. Reminds me of her.”

I give him a shard of a smile.

“Love of my life,” he says. “I can’t think of anyone else.” He touches the ring on his finger. “I know it’s stupid but, if I take this off, I feel like my whole hand will fall off. And then my arm, my legs, my body, all of me. Because she is me. Know what I mean? So I’ve got to keep her here. You ever love anyone like that?”

“No,” I murmur. “Not really.”

Another grunt. “Anyway, don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Some days I just get so angry that she’s gone and then I stay angry. Thought it might be good to get something out.”

All of the liquor inside of me drowns me. My own versions of sadness and anger wash through my veins instead of coming up. “Well,” I say finally. “I guess it’s just that this lockdown is making everyone go a little crazy. That’s all.”

“Guess so.” His eyes laser into me. The sun is setting. He totters away towards his front door. “Well, I’ve got a frozen pizza with my name on it,” Joseph says, nodding into the warm glow of his kitchen. “But maybe we can do this again tomorrow. Was nice meeting you after all these years, Cory.”

“Nice meeting you,” I breathe into the air as he vanishes.

My screen door is still open. My TV is still on. A familiar voice is calling out to me to run back inside. I lean into my vinyl chair, cold and plasticky and inhuman, and I stroke at its arms until all of the green skin warms up.