The Fourth Apartment

I may have missed the deadline for the 750-word challenge with this, my first submission, but it was fun parsing it down from the original 1100. Let me know if it works.

*****

"I love you."

Hearing Sally, I smile from the hallway of our greenbelt apartment. It had been an uphill journey--hell, it was climbing El Capitan freestyle for the last month--but marriage to my only love was recovering.

This was our fourth apartment. We'd met after my high school graduation, Sally starting her senior year and I earning better-than-lumber-mill money driving delivery truck 60 hours a week. The curvy blonde daughter of a successful lawyer, everyone recognized Sally was far above my station. Surprisingly she was clingy and grateful on dates while I was amazed and intoxicated. After months of makeout sessions in the Chevelle we slept together; my first (not hers as she'd been seduced by one of her monied neighbor's sons previously) and vanilla compared to later sex but jaw-dropping to me. A well-read dreamer, I placed Sally on my first-love pedestal as we spent every free hour together. Took her to the prom (damn that pre-prom photo still looks pathetic,) celebrated her thespian roles and put up with her catty friends.

Starting community college, Sally found a rustic studio apartment and moved in her cat, four boston ferns, new wicker furniture and me.

We grew closer as Sally explored business management, inhaling classes and exhaling top-drawer reports, projects and awed professors. After two wonderful years we moved to our next apartment in the university city upstate; a Victorian second-floor walkup across from campus. I found a better driving job while she dominated her computer systems major. We were young, in love and lust, bulletproof. Though our apartment life together was a few hours each night and maybe half a day on weekends it was just us and the cat. Often desperately jealous of her classes --really those well-dressed, smart-talking college men--I kept it to myself because Sally never offered more than conversation to fellow students.

We married spring of her junior year in front of half of our hometown. That summer the cat and ferns rode with us to a furnished white, window-air-conditioner, pool-in-the-back apartment in San Diego for Sally's executive-level summer internship she'd won. I found summer work, though part-time, and we visited Balboa Park or the beach weekends for the first six weeks. Not weekday evenings--she went to work early and came home after 8 most nights--but I trusted Sally and our love.

Then she practically disappeared for the last month. I fretted over her phone calls, client meetings and have-to-get-done trips "to the office." My inexperience chalked it up to career enthusiasm, though my jealousy grew as "our" time decreased.

Back for her final year at university. Our fourth apartment was a small but pleasantly appointed third-floor with a view of oldtown. Sally deemed it adorable though she was wistful and non-communicative for the first month back; school and seeing old friends brought her back to me and our lovelife.

By Thanksgiving she'd confessed her summer "infatuation" with a young driven executive-to-be named Lynn. I read it as a steamy affair. Angry, numb, heartbroken, yet I was committed to keeping Sally, the center of my dreams and the only woman I'd ever slept with. "I don't know what came over me," she repeated, "I screwed up, but I'm where I belong now." Contrite and sorrowful, she promised lessons learned and fidelity forever while I practiced sharing my waking hours with fear and jealousy.

We'd put up our meager decorations Saturday morning before Christmas with a small tree I'd cut while driving between towns. I'd just stopped vacuuming the scattered needles when I heard...

****

"I love you." Surprised Sally hadn't come around the corner to hug me, I entered the tiny kitchen to see her eyes wide, face white and hands trembling as she spoke into her phone. "I do love you. Don't worry, I have to be with you now, not him. I'll call," then she quickly hung up.

Tears streaming, Sally looked into my eyes for the last time, then to the floor.

"Sean, I am so sorry, you'll hate me, but I'm leaving," she mumbled brokenly, pushing past me for the bedroom, "I'm leaving now, I'm so very sorry, but I have to do this" she continued while dragging out suitcases.

I thought of everything to say, yet there was nothing to say. The handicapped guy on the first floor was happy to get the ferns and the cat enjoyed leaving our 4th apartment where we both had watched my childhood dreams of romance and love drive away.