Three

I'm in the bookstore, near the center, near the back. What's New. Trade paperback. A song comes on the intercom, the radio softly in the background, the one Say Something, I'm Giving Up on You. We hate the song. Me. And her. We change the channel unless we're on the long ever-darkening road back west toward the desert. I'm sorry that I couldn't get to you. I try to block it out, picking up another $20 book that will be $7 three months from now. I breathe hum not quite sing I don't know the low tone almost silently escapes my throat when I hear it... ...the same sound, words, the same funereal rift from one row over, Fiction. And Literature. Hardbacks. A tear at one eye's corner, another soul broken irrevocably apart ten feet away behind the next stack. And I'll, I'll swallow my pride. You're the one that I love. And I'm saying Goodbye. I don't dare look up. Behind me, to the left, the music section, Classical if memory serves, Say something, I'm giving up on you. A female keen so Gregorian in its haunted lift toward heaven, or upward from darkest hell, its plaintive clawing despair grabbing. Growing. I wonder if their daytime minds are locked wide open to a parade of happy images from deep within the vault - joyous roadtrips, embraces and Brookshire's and churches and walks and talks and looking at our emerald lake together and that still, sad unpredictable moon. I wonder if they, are broken. If repair, seems unthinkable. I wonder if they have a reason to live, beyond saving their children the despair that ending their sadness and confusion would bring them. I hope to myself that they do have children out there somewhere. Say something, I'm giving up on you. I hear their voices, three together, three alone, within forty feet in a store in southwest Fort Worth. A primitive, cloying nighttime Celtic fugue. Giving up on a love who abandoned a creative life, or maybe, I catch sight of the hardback young woman, maybe giving up on life itself. Not moving on, as I'd first heard her lyric, but checking out. All or nothing. I had all I needed, before. I'm giving up on YOU. But they aren't. The song's a lie, at least in this bookstore before the cold icy storm sets in. It's not time to move on, and that door behind us, with sunshine leaking around its edges, is nailed shut. From the outside. How could they have felt it all so completely? How could their Other have not? "Thanks for being nice to me." An almost palpable sob, silent, sharp, a punch to the gut washes over that corner of the brightly-lit store. I'm not going to make it, it says. The lyrics end. The book I'm holding, $16.95 plus tax, is ruined. I'll have to buy it now. Ruined. Readable, every word. A story I can't seem to put down. A best seller, it turns out. Fiction. A lie. Three.