Sunday

Maria left me on a Sunday.  We had made love in the morning, while listening to Van Morrison.  Maria loved Van Morrison.  After, we ate pancakes and our dog slept under the kitchen table.  He was a mutt, with gray around his mouth like a christening of age, and his legs sometimes shook while he slept.  Maria liked to say he dreamed of chasing rabbits.  I don’t know if he had ever even seen a rabbit.

I went to work that afternoon as I did every Sunday, and the sky was the same worn, dated gray of the crumbling asphalt that led me to the high school.  A wind charged out of the west and I could taste the rain in the air.

The gymnasium needed to be swept before school on Monday.  The floor really needed to be waxed and polished but it could go another week.  I gathered the empty styrofoam cups and candy wrappers from the bleachers.  I swept and mopped.  The rest of the school was still clean, but I took a walk around it to be sure.  I had walked these halls for the last sixteen years; twelve of them as a janitor.  My shoes padded softly on the tiled floors.  A bathroom next to the gym needed a fresh wastebasket liner, but there was nothing besides.  No teachers, no students, no one except me and my thoughts which echoed off the walls and down the halls and bounced back at me off the new glass doors.

I drove home through town; rain started falling in soft flecks on my windshield.  I waited at the one stoplight in town with no one else.  Maria’s car was gone when I turned onto our dirt drive, and Gus ran out to greet me.  I rubbed his ears and we went inside.  A note was on the table.  It said Maria was going back to live with her mom in Omaha, that she couldn’t take any more of this small town life or jobs that defined tedium.  Her clothes were gone, but nothing else.  Look me up, she said, if I ever change my mind and decide to leave.

I took a beer out of the fridge and walked out to the back porch.  Gus rolled around on the plastic, green carpet.  Rain tapped on the awning above us, and fed the corn in the field next door.  It would be a good crop this year.  Gus laid his head down on my feet.  Soon, his legs were shaking, and I watched the earth soak up the rain as the sky grew dark with the night.