DINAH COX
Please Listen Carefully; Our Menu Items Have Changed The ghost in Miriam’s garage was not a ghost at all but her exboyfriend, dressed in yesterday’s brown work uniform—he was a driver for UPS—ratty house slippers, and a floral fitted sheet fresh from the laundry. He wore the fitted sheet over his head, and, worst of all, he told her he’d used the sharp edge of a pair of needle nosed pliers to cut holes in the sheet for the eyes and nose. On the place where the mouth should have been, he’d used silver duct tape to affix an oversized X, like the ones used by abortion protesters and people who thought you shouldn’t pull the plug. That particular set of sheets was new, too, a gift from Miriam’s father, a man who shopped at white sales, taught gluten-free cooking classes, and crocheted afghans even though he was not gay, or not publicly, at least, since he was still married to Miriam’s mother. And maybe that was Miriam’s problem, somehow, that she’d expected Donnie to act more like her kindly domestic father. And now Donnie was moving out, after only three months, and, he said, cutting holes in her floral fitted sheet was some kind of last stand, a protest meant to force her to concede she’d been unfair, unreasonable to expect him to watch television programs about interior design, to watch the flamethrowers and jugglers at her Renaissance fairs, and to take medication for his cat allergy or learn to live with the occasional sneeze. But maybe she had been stupid to ask him to move in with her in the first place since she was not, and never had been, what they called “girlfriend material.” She liked to do her own thing—she was used to doing her own thing—and she was not about to change at this late date. She was forty-two and never married, and Donnie was six years her junior and already twice divorced. He had a son from his first marriage and a daughter from his second, neither of whom he saw Raleigh Review | 45
