Free Before He Finds Her by Michael Kardos

We’ll protect you—always, always, always.”

5
    September 20, 1991
    Before that amazing and utterly accidental late-morning moment seven years back when Allison Anne Pembroke stepped out of the elevator and into the third floor of Monmouth Regional Hospital, Ramsey’s entire life had added up to nothing, 0 + 0 + 0 = 0, the equation of a loser whose existence was as aimless as it was pointless. Flash forward a year, and the two of them were still together, and not just together but a whole new equation with a sum far greater than anything he’d ever imagined himself contributing to. In quiet moments he’d fall into the habit of asking himself the obvious.
    What if we hadn’t met? What then?
    He’d imagine the alternatives when falling asleep at night, and on interstates, and while fueling up. The scenes he imagined always led to the same conclusion: He’d be dead. Beer bottle to the head, knife to the gut, maybe a high-speed chase. Or he would’ve woken up one gray day and said enough already and used his belt to rig up a nice noose. Or something less dramatic—illness, since Lord knows he didn’t take care of himself when he was on his own. Surely he’d have died as he had lived: angry and alone, underwhelmed and underwhelming, unwilling to give of himself to another or see the beauty in anything or anybody. He’d have left the world a little worse off than he had found it. That would have been his legacy. His tombstone would have read, Here lies another shithead.
    Before meeting Allie, he had never been in love or close to it. When he would stop to dwell on the matter as a teenager and young man, this lack of love gnawed at him, so he tried to convince himself that he didn’t give a shit. He had honed this particular skill, not giving a shit, over many years, which served him well much of the time but also made him take risks he knew he shouldn’t. The cars he stole, for instance. You ought to feel a thrill, revving somebody else’s engine and peeling away from the curb. Going through their glove box, looking under the visors. But there was no thrill in it. What he stole, he stole to pay rent and buy food. The fights he got into brought him no satisfaction, either—not when a fight almost always meant a night in some drunk tank that reeked of every human excretion. And it wasn’t as if his fights were ever about anything noble. Nobody was defending anyone’s honor. Typically it was about nothing at all. You get drunk, you get mad, shit happens. It was sad, this life of his, like a mushroom pushing out of the ground after a hard rain, random and poisonous. He actually tried out this metaphor on his friend Eric while lying in the hospital seven years back, hopped up on painkillers. Eric was trying to cheer him up with dirty jokes, but Eric was too religious for the jokes to be dirty enough, and there was no cheering up Ramsey that day, anyway. He had mangled his leg out of his own stupidity, he’d just been canned from the only good job he’d ever had, and he’d been given a summons for taking a drunken swing at a cop.
    A mushroom? Eric had said. What you are is a fool .
    He was absolutely right. And yet a day later, Allie stepped out of the elevator and into Ramsey’s life.
    He didn’t deserve her—especially not then, when anything redeeming about him was hidden under a thick shell of defensiveness, evasion, and straight-up aggression cultivated over many years. But they got together, he and Allie, and they stayed together. She taught him what love meant, how it was the truth that made all other truths possible. She came along at the exact right moment and saved his life in every way that a life could be saved. So for her, he did that singular thing that human beings almost never did no matter how much they might want to, and never, ever for another person.
    For her, he changed.
    The door swung open as he was reaching with the key. The surprises revealed themselves gradually. The late-afternoon