Free The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn

said.
    “Pardon?”
    “He was thirty-nine. I mean, he is thirty-nine.” Juniper scooted by, rubbing her butt on the carpet, a look of great consternation puckering her brow.
    Sylvia could not possibly have sighed louder. It was like a windstorm in a receiver. “Just—just call if you hear anything. Can you do that, dear?”
    “Of course,” I said. “Don’t worry.” I believed myself, too. Here was what I had to go with: He’s fine. He’ll be back. And then everyone will get to be mad instead of worried.
    “Right,” said Sylvia. I turned off the television and sat back down at the sewing machine just in time to hear Rose start to wail.

    I probably should have seen it coming: his departure; my death. Harry came home from work cursing his brother, cursing his mother, cursing clients who kept them in business whom he’d known since he was a boy. This was the way it always started, and if I’d been paying more attention, I might have felt the twinge in my elbow joints, like an arthritic predictor of storms ahead. He was getting antsy. Everything made him jittery. “I’m leaving that place,” he was saying for the millionth time, drinking whiskey out of asippy cup we’d lost all the complicated straws for, his hands spread out on the sticky table, his thumbs tapping. I was doing the dishes, annoyed that he wasn’t offering to help and thinking only of that. This was the night before he left or maybe the night before that. “I gotta get out.”
    “Yeah?” I said, not that nicely. The sink was soppy with cereal bits and not enough suds. I kept forgetting to buy dish soap.
    “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Ever So Fresh is going nowhere. All I’m doing is prolonging the drawn-out demise of what my father created. It’s not—it’s not what I’m meant for.” Harry was staring at the wall. His loosened tie looked dangerously nooselike.
    “Not what you’re meant for, eh?” Here was an attitude I blamed on Sylvia. She had always been convinced her boys were special, destined for greatness. His whole life, because of his charm and good looks and bravado, people had led Harry to believe he was something, a star, a noble creature. As much as I loved him, even in the dazzle of those first days, he was just a guy. A good guy, but—a guy.
    Now he looked at me. “You know what? Never mind. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”
    I didn’t turn around. “Me? When I’m like this? When I’m like what, Harry?”
    “You don’t believe in me. You would rather I stay in a job that—”
    “Look,” and now I whirled around, wielding a dripping spatula, my comically ineffective weapon. “Do you think anyone is happy a hundred percent of the time? Life’s tough, baby. That’s just how it is.”
    “Oh,” he said quietly, as if talking to a tiny scuba diver deep in his drink. “I see. So from someone who drinks lattes on the playground all day, that’s very nice. I should keep slaving away sellingfucking candy because you don’t want your pretty little life to get shaken up.”
    “My pretty little life? Really?” I was gesturing wildly with the spatula, Jackson Pollock-ing the kitchen with spatters of sudsy water. “You think this is how I envisioned things turning out? Stuck home all day with two screaming children in a shoe box because we can’t afford more because you—”
    “Don’t say it, Jenny. You just—just watch what you say.”
    It was hard for me to look at him when we fought like this. His whole being was transformed, the man I loved possessed by someone so ugly, so dark and twisted, that he was rendered unrecognizable. I pushed because I couldn’t help myself, because I was tired and annoyed that there wasn’t enough soap and that Rose would surely wake up in a few minutes, and I got up in his face, and hating myself, I said, “People work, Harry. Men work. It’s not the hugest tragedy in the world, you know.”
    “ I work. You—” He was looking at me