One Last Thing Before I Go

veer into her space. Are you kidding me? she thinks. She speeds up, forcing him back. The bough is a thick one, with numerous smaller branches that still have their leaves. He will not be able to ride over it, would be an idiot to even try.
    He’s an idiot. She should have known. The jersey was a dead giveaway.
    She hears the sound of the leaves and twigs swallowed up into his spokes, the almost musical sound of his small metal components vibrating against each other as the bike thrashes and then goes over. He lets out a short, panicked bark as the bike goes down, and she hears it slide into the gravel along the side of the road. She looks back to see that he managed to click out of his pedals and take the fall on his side. She wishes him dead in the same instant that she hopes he’s not hurt.
    His voice fills the morning air like a call to prayer. “Cunt!”
    Perfect.
    She laughs and flips him a reverse bird, bends over her bike, and throws herself into the final climb, the wind whistling in her ears like a catcall.
    * * *
    Rich, sitting on her doorstep, stands up as Denise pulls her bike into the driveway. She leans the bike against the garage door and turns to face him.
    “I got your message,” he says.
    “I figured.”
    She left him a message late last night after another marathon argument with Casey, apologizing for not calling him back for the last few days and suggesting, in a matter-of-fact tone, that they postpone the wedding.
    “What’s this about, Denise?”
    He is dressed in what she considers his unofficial uniform; dark slacks and a button-down shirt with some element of blue in it. His hair is cut close, revealing a high forehead, tanned and slightly weathered from his days on the links. She can remember how his forehead had appealed to her on their first date, its sand-colored, textured surface like the side of a rocky mountain. There was something strong and solid about it, about him. It was funny how a little subliminal imagery could determine the course of love, she thought to herself, how small visual grace notes could trigger lasting emotional changes.
    “You’re so laid back for a surgeon,” she’d exclaimed over dinner, sounding younger and so much less cynical than she’d become. And he’d laughed, and she’d watched that forehead crease and go smooth, and she knew right then that she would go home with him that night. And now here she was, three years later, sweating in her driveway, hating herself for not being able to summon up any kind of warmth for him.
    “I just think we need to push the wedding off,” she tells him now, unable to look him in the eye. “Between Casey’s situation and my face . . .”
    “It won’t look that bad in two weeks.”
    “It will still look like someone beat the shit out of me.”
    He cringes when she says this, as she knew he would. His buttons have always been right there on the surface, just waiting to be pushed. She loves him for this readability, for all the time not spent wondering what he’s thinking or feeling. And sometimes she hates him for it.
    “I’m sorry,” he says. “You know it was an accident.”
    “I don’t blame you,” she lies, once again picturing that single instant: Silver’s hand on her arm, his eyes ablaze with . . . something.
    “Then why am I sleeping alone?”
    “Listen to me,” she says. “My daughter is pregnant. Silver is dying.”
    “Silver is being an idiot.”
    “Silver has always been an idiot. The point is that I don’t want to get married while my life is in turmoil. You don’t want that either. You can’t. And I want to be a beautiful bride.” She chokes up at this, realizing that it’s true.
    He steps over to her and runs his hand down her sticky wet face. “You are beautiful. A little bruise can’t even make a dent in that.”
    She smiles. She knew he would say that, and she wonders to herself when it suddenly became a crime to always say the right thing.
    “I just need a little time,” she says. “I need to focus on my family.”
    “You mean our family, right?”
    “Right,” she says, and can tell from his expression that he remains unconvinced.

CHAPTER 22
    “I s everything OK?” the girl asks him.
    She’s pretty, topless, panting slightly, and right to ask, because she is holding, in the palm of her hand, his increasingly flaccid member.
    They are lying on a twin bed in Jack’s guest room. Beyond the closed door are the not-so-muffled sounds of throbbing dance mixes,