Praying for Sleep

rained her good nature on you and if you were her man there were plenty of other rewards. But if you didn’t share her opinion or—good luck—if you opposed her, then the flesh over her cheekbones tightened and her tongue somehow contracted and she commenced to take you down.
    Trenton Heck in fact had not been all that certain about getting married. Unreasonably, he was disappointed at having a fiancée with one syllable in her name. And when Jill grew angry—he couldn’t always predict when this would happen—she became a tiny fireball. Her eyebrows knit and her voice grew husky, like the tone he believed hookers took when confronting obnoxious clients. She would mope aggressively if he said they couldn’t afford a pair of high-heeled green shoes dusted with sequins, or a microwave with a revolving carousel.
    “You’re icky to me, Trenton. And I don’t like it one bit.”
    “Jill, honey, baby . . .”
    But the fact remained that she was a woman who’d leap into his arms at unexpected times, even at the mall, and kiss his ear wetly. She would smile with her entire face when he came home and talk nonstop about some silliness in a way that made the whole evening seem to him like good crystal and silver. And he could never forget the way she’d wake suddenly in the middle of the night, roll over on top of him, and drive her head into his collarbone, humping with so much energy that he fought hard not to move for fear it would be over too fast.
    Slowly though the pouts began to outnumber the smiles and humps. The money, which was like a lubricant between their spirits, grew sparse when he was denied a raise and the mortgage on the trailer was adjusted upward. Heck began to like Jill’s waitress friends and their husbands less and less; there was much drinking in that group and more silliness than seemed normal for people in their thirties. These were clues and he supposed he’d been aware of them all along. But when he finally understood that she really meant mental cruelty and abandonment— his mental cruelty and his abandonment—it knocked the wind clean out of him.
    Exactly twenty-two months ago, at nine-forty-eight one Saturday night, Jill let slam the aluminum door of their trailer for the last time and went to live by herself in Dillon. The ultimate insult was that she moved into a mobile-home park. “Why didn’t you just stay with me ?” he blurted. “I thought you left because you wanted a house.”
    “Oh, Trent,” she moaned hopelessly, “you don’t understand nothing, do you? Not . . . a . . . thing.”
    “Well, you’re in a trailer park, for God’s sake!”
    “Trent!”
    “What’d I say?”
    So Jill left to live in a mobile home somehow better than the one that Trenton Heck could offer her and once there, he supposed, entertain men friends. Billy Mosler, Heck’s truck-driving buddy from next door, seemed relieved at the breakup. “Trenton, she wasn’t for you. I’m not going to say anything bad about Jill because that’s not my way—”
    Watch it, you prick, Heck thought, eyeing his friend belligerently.
    “—but she was too dippy for you. Bad choice in a woman. Don’t look at me that way. You can do better.”
    “But I loved her,” Heck said, his anger sadly tamed by a memory of Jill making him a lunch of egg salad one autumn afternoon. “Oh, damn, I’m whining, aren’t I? Damn.”
    “You didn’t love her,” Billy Mosler said sagely. “You were in love with her. Or, in lust with her, more like. See the difference?”
    Watch it, prick. Heck recovered enough to begin glaring once more.
    The worst of the sting wore off after a few months though still he mourned. He drove past her restaurant a hundred times and would call her often to talk to her about the few things they could still talk about, which was not much. Many times he got her answering machine. What the hell does a waitress need an answering machine for, he brooded, except to take men’s phone calls? He grew despairing when the machine picked up on the second ring, which meant that someone had called before him. Heck saw his ex-wife all over the county. At Kmart, at picnics, driving in cars he didn’t recognize, in Jo-Jo’s steakhouse, in liquor-store parking lots as she hiked her skirt up to adjust her slip, rolled at the waist to compensate for her being four foot eleven.
    There weren’t this many Jills in the universe but Trenton Heck saw them just the same.
    Tonight, his ex-wife fading very