Free The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate

car and drove, slowly, to an open minigrocery. He paid for a six-pack. Then he drove down to the parking lot near Lake Erie. He didn’t know exactly why hechose the lake, except he knew that the parking lot would be deserted. He was able to pull up close enough to see the water from his car window. He opened the window to let in the warm spring air. He could hear the slap, slap, slap of the small lake waves. But he was afraid to get out of the car. He sat in the front seat and opened can after can of beer until they were all gone. He was too drunk and miserable even to climb into the backseat and lie down. He finally fell asleep in the front seat—passed out really—until the dawn’s light pierced his eyes. When he got home, his beautiful wife said, “I called you in sick already.” She didn’t say another word to him for the rest of the day. He spent much of the day lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, vowing never to drink again, a vow he did not keep. His hands were clenched to fists. His eyes were dry.

Eight
    After that night, the brakes were off. My father was rarely without a beer in his hand. My mother retreated to a sad silence that Tick and I could rarely get her to break. Time went on and time went on. We became teenagers. We both got scholarships to Dean, that prep school I mentioned. We didn’t tell anyone there about what home was like. We just went on. We never talked about what was happening at home and whatever my parents were thinking; they certainly didn’t share with us. So to tell about this last part, I’m going to have to make a bigger imaginative leap than I have thus far—bigger, perhaps, than even seems plausible. But this world is full of implausible things. So I’m going to let them speak through me. My mother first.
    I NEVER COULD GET Tick and Josie to see that a marriage doesn’t come apart all at once. That deciding whether or not to stay or go is the most complicated thing in the world. Especially if sometimes you can still see glimpses of the person you married. That person keeps darting out of reach, washed away or shut away, but you keep hoping he might come back. You keep thinking that if you just hang in there, you might get him back.
    Aside from how lonely it got to be with Ray, I was bored. I missed nursing. I missed being useful, doing for people other than my family. And once the kids got big and got themselves those scholarships and started running with a whole different crowd out at that school, well, I just felt like I didn’t have a place anymore. It was hard, watching Josie at that school, watching her fight to be the girl she wanted to be: a girl who loved something that really seemed to be only for white men. Watching her, I started to think that I wanted to set an example of a woman who did what she needed to do, what she wanted to do, without worrying too much about what other people thought.
    But the main thing was that the man I married was so long gone, and I just didn’t want to pretend he wasn’t anymore. He sat in front of that television like a statue, the beer just flowing through him. I’d have asked him to leave the bedroom, but the house wasn’t big enough. There wasnowhere else for him to sleep. So we slept as far away from each other as we possibly could, hanging on to the edges of our queen-size mattress. I was a little afraid of being alone. But really, I was alone already in all the important ways. Why not make it official?
    So when Josie was a senior, I did a couple of things. I found out what I’d need to do to get back into nursing. I’d been away so long that my license had lapsed; I had to take some classes and an exam to renew it before I could even begin to look for work. But I also saw that the jobs were out there. So quietly, without saying anything to Ray, I started applying to classes for the fall. I hid the forms in my underwear drawer and filled them out, bit by bit,