Chapter Text
At least this time, Roslyn was able to strike out on her own with a little money and a weight off her shoulders. However bad things seemed — and oh boy, did they seem bad — the worst of it was over. She still had to find a car and a new place to live, but conversely, she wanted to raise her hands up and exalt the narrow avoidance of marriage.
Time was sliding on toward five. People driving west would be nearly blinded by the sun nestled above; at least she didn't have to be one of them.
The streets she walked were those she might never see again. Without Nolan, she would never in her wildest dreams be able to afford a place in this uppity neighborhood that had been her home for three years. She had walked these streets up and down, day and night, in awe of the wonderfully antiquated architecture.
Soon she would live in the same manner as her students — enclosed in a small apartment in want of repair, atop roads cracked and crumbling, bearing the weight of crime and poverty. Or, she would live in her childhood bedroom in the suburbs of Albany, and spend her days shoveling snow.
She took about a half-hour to roam past residential buildings, dazed for not the first time that day. Nolan had actually committed an act of violence against her.
She had done a horrible thing to him, and gotten her just reward for it, and was almost glad. It was a favor returned, a debt repaid. Her nose stung, but it was a soothing ache, like the pain of calves and thighs after a long run, a manifestation of the body's power. The blood had dried into burgundy crust.
Nevertheless, the evidence had to be got rid of, lest people make assumptions. She didn't think her nose was broken — not that it mattered, given that she could afford neither a hospital bill nor rhinoplasty. It was swollen and tender, but the pain had receded enough to be considered mild. She would just have to put up with a blooming bruise.
Now on the edge of her nice neighborhood, she crossed over the busy road that delineated it, entering a less gentrified quartier with a good deal more personality. She hustled into a corner store and bought a cold water bottle and a pack of crackers. She also managed to solicit a napkin from the clerk, who looked at her pityingly. Wiping the condensation off the bottle with the napkin, she ran it beneath her nose and along her upper lip, holding the bottle to her nose to mitigate swelling.
The crackers were plain and dry, sweetening in her mouth the way crackers did when saturated with saliva. Once, someone had told her that it was the enzymes in spit that made things like bread and crackers taste sweet; they split the large, complex carbohydrate molecular scaffolding into simpler sugars, to help with digestion. It was another small pleasure, a thread in the tapestry that made life such a precious affair.
Once the crackers had disappeared, Roslyn set about calling two of her four bridesmaids to explain and apologize. Her cousin Kerri Giannelli, an aggressively bottle-blonde Italian woman in her early thirties, had no reproach at all to offer.
"I envy you, Roslyn," said Kerri, in her Jersey accent. "Y'know, I was married for ten years. You remember my ex-husband Donny, don't you? Well, anyway, he was a real piece of work. God forgive me, I shoulda turned my happy ass around and marched right outta that church. But no, I just had to marry the guy with the big muscles and nice hair."
"Well, you were trying to do the right thing," said Roslyn. "After all, he knocked you up."
"Yeah, and now I gotta send my kids to his place every other weekend, where he's shacked up with his mistress-turned-girlfriend."
"He's still with her? Even after she gave him — and you, by extension — chlamydia? Sheesh."
"That he is. My point being, maybe your timing was doo-doo, but at least you got outta that whole mess before sh*t hit the fan. You were unhappy, why wait to get even unhappier? Sure, my divorce was hard on the kids, but it would have f*cked 'em up even worse if they saw me stay. Can't set that kind of example for my daughter."
"Forget marketing, you should have been a philosopher," said Roslyn.
Her second bridesmaid, Xiling, was similarly nonplussed. She had been Roslyn's roommate for a couple years in college, right before she moved in with Nolan. Xiling had never been especially fond of Nolan to begin with. She found him overbearing and dull. All she had to say was that Roslyn should have left him before she bought her a wedding gift.
She neglected to call Nolan's sisters, Mallory and Isabel, who were her other two bridesmaids. They loved their brother despite his foul temper (a fixture of his personality since childhood) and as such, now hated her for what she did. They would hear what had since transpired from him. Of course, he probably wouldn't tell them how Roslyn had come by a bloody nose.
A few people had already called or left voicemails. Uncle Ted was among them, along with his ex-wife Aunt Lucretzia. Mallory had left a voicemail calling her a wicked bitch. That one almost made her weep again.
Now what was there to do, except go back? The risk of having another book launched at her was frightening in a distant, abstract way, but not really cause for concern — she could handle it. What she couldn't handle was what came after, when all her stuff was packed away and laid on the curb, with nowhere to bring it.
No. Her apartment could miss her for another few hours, and so could Nolan. She was going to find someplace to add to the crackers in her stomach, and then she was going to go to Julian's show.
