Free You Don't Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits

writing he picked me up in his Buick LeSabre and we drove around. Sometimes we drove back to his house in Eastpointe, where I met his wife. She was four or five inches taller than Tony and an unusually beautiful and confident woman. Her dark hair and cheerful healthy color reminded me of the old Irish Spring soap commercials. Tony took a lot of sexual pride in her; he couldn’t help showing her off. Her name was Cris, short for Cristina. Her parents on both sides were Italian American, and she regularly visited her grandfather who owned a bakery in Clarkston and spoke almost no English.
    Cris herself used to be a lawyer, for one of the Big Three, which she hated. She gave it up to become a yoga instructor, which is howshe met Tony—he had a bad neck. Motherhood for her was like an excuse to abandon all previous adult restraint, and even though her son was three years old, she still comfort-fed him when he asked for it. “I want booby milk,” he said. Sometimes I had to avert my gaze while she picked up this big talky stir-crazy boy and held him on her lap, pulling back one side of her dress to spill a breast in his mouth. His feet almost reached the floor, and dangled. Her skin was the color of panna cotta. I thought Tony was the kind of guy who would mind if I looked. But I liked Cris—she didn’t take him too seriously.
    Tony was house-proud, too, and talked up his neighborhood to me, even if he blamed himself for leaving the city. His writer’s block was connected in his mind to comfortable living. He didn’t feel like himself in the suburbs, he felt like somebody else. The trouble was his natural feelings included a high percentage of racial rage and violent fear. Which were useful for work but less helpful to family life. He knew practically everybody on his block. Once, while preparing an omelet lunch for us, he ran out of eggs, so we knocked on a neighbor’s door together—really Tony was just showing off. He couldn’t help boasting about his happy-families kind of setup.
    This neighbor was a retired cop whose wife had left him to move in with her parents in Florida. Their three daughters were all grown up and living out east. Her mother had diabetes and her father couldn’t drive or count out pills or shop or cook or change the bedsheets because of forgetfulness issues. The diabetes was what tipped his wife over the edge, but in fact what this guy realized was that their whole marriage for her was just an interruption of her real life. (He told me all this while working his way through a six-pack of Labatts, which he brought over along with the six-pack of eggs when Tony invited him to lunch.) They married instead of going to college. He joined the force.
    “I guess we were too young,” he said.
    And fifty years later she decided she wanted to spend her last days with these people, her parents, who she preferred to him anyway. He didn’t even blame her particularly but he missed the kids. They never wanted to fly home to Detroit; they preferred Florida.
    His name was Mel Hauser and Tony said, “Marny here is about to move into a house on Johanna Street. I thought maybe you could give him some advice.”
    “Does he have a gun?”
    Mel wore a fishing vest and camouflage pants; his head was balding and grizzled, and even in this mostly smooth state not particularly clean. There were liver spots on it and scabs of dry skin. But his manner was straightforward and attractive.
    I said, yes, I bought a shotgun from Walmart, on the drive up from Baton Rouge.
    “Don’t let the first time you fire it be the first time you need it. Have you played around with it any?”
    “No.”
    “I tell you what. Sometimes I hang out at the academy on Linwood Street. A lot of retired cops still use the canteen. There’s a shooting range there, and if you want, I’ll book you in. Where do you keep it? Have you got a license?”
    “In my car. No.”
    “I can help you out with that, too.”
    Then Cris came in with the kid