Shaggy Dog by Robin Crane

When he asked for a divorce my husband was strangely lucid. The past month though, he'd gotten obsessive about his fitness, mostly his abs. Protein powder and picking fights with customers at the working class grocery store he worked at and trying to insert himself into the social media orbit of his customers at the hipster upper middle class restaurant he was a server at. There was a black mother and daughter having a pleasant evening out and he was their server. I hear they were both attractive.  He looked up their non-profit's website and in the "contact us" function, he left some thoughts about a white boy's sensitivities, like what it’s like to be a chill white guy who wants to be accepted by black people.  At this point I thought,  “I am  in hell right now.” 

He wouldn't talk to me at home. At the bar we spent almost every night at, but in shifts, toward the end, our mutual male friends would ask me questions that showed they knew things were worse than I did.

When I was driving east towards Michigan, I took pictures of myself along the way and took one of myself in Idaho and then he told all our mutual friends I'd settled in Idaho.

I like to drink in dives, like the lowest of low dives. I don't feel like a tourist. My mom was an authentic drinker, as were her best boyfriends -- she met one of her boyfriends, even, outside a dive, when he used to panhandle there. When I was driving away from my husband to Michigan I stopped at the bar in a Denny’s-like local family restaurant in a not unpleasantly manure-smelling town in North Dakota. The old, loud conservative guy there thought he could spook me by pretending to the bartender that I was his girlfriend, and then by speaking like a bigot. You can’t spook me, though. I can see through you like you are clearer than the ghost of a fly. But I am starving. Will you buy me a patty melt?