“When it rains, it pours,” his mother told him once. “I didn’t come up with that but I’ll be damned if I don’t know that one better than anyone after all the shit I’ve been through.”
Chance thought about that a lot when things weren’t quite going the way he hoped in life, which was often. When he was younger it was issues with girls or with his mother scolding him for staying out too late or even problems with the gang. Even the most monumental of feuds in the groups seemed to pale in comparison to Chance going on a three day bender.
He ended up at some dive bar out of town. He didn’t want to run into anyone he knew. In hindsight he realized it wasn’t exactly smart to go so far away when he thought someone was stalking his family but all he could see was red. And all he could hear was the blood pumping in his own ears and making him go insane. He wanted to punch something or crash his bike into the lake or smash his head against a wall. He had all sorts of self-destructive fantasies when he got angry. But, more than anything, they manifested themselves with him drinking pint after pint of beer until he bartender took his keys away from him and he was forced to rent a motel room. Hannah would kill him for dropping so much money on alcohol and accommodations to make up for being so drunk. But she didn’t have ties to his bank account yet and he was a grown man. He could do what he wanted when he wanted and right now he just wanted to drink until he forgot everything and then sleep until it was all over.
He repeated this process several days in a row before his card was finally declined for another motel room night and he was forced to return back to his home, hoping he had enough gas in the tank to get him there since he was, regrettably, out of money. He drove down the road and felt like he did back when he was a teenager and performing the famous walks of shame from some girl’s apartment back to his own the following morning. Except this time he was a grown man getting ready to grovel at the feet of his fiancée for overreacting and blowing up in her face over things she couldn’t control and then running off and leaving her to deal with the pieces.
He was agitated, at first, that she hadn’t called but he also realized these things were a two way street and she was likely going to be waiting for him to call and fix things since, whether he liked it or not, he was certainly the one who was in the wrong in this situation. So he journeyed home, far humbler than before, and pulled into the driveway with a roaring headache.
He unlocked the front door and stepped in. He expected to be met with a flurry of anger, with her yelling at him, screaming that he’d left and it was unacceptable and all sorts of other things. But instead he was met with silence. That was odd. Not even the coffee maker was on and boiling a pot despite this being the time Hannah usually was into her second pot of decaf, trying to pretend it was real coffee. What the hell was going on?
He walked into the bedroom to find her closet missing a fair amount of her own clothes. He saw that her duffel bag was also gone. He moved into the bathroom and the toiletries were gone too. The more he walked through the house and found things missing, the angrier and angrier he became. She was nowhere in sight, he things were gone, there was no note, there were no phone calls. She’d up and left. She’d quit and run off because things got tough. They hadn’t taken marriage vows yet but he’d expected better of her than that. She’d been the strong one, the level headed one, the smart one.
Now she was gone. There was no trace of her anywhere in the house and no clues to where she’d run off to or why. She had simply vanished without a trace and he felt his blood begin to simmer once again. He walked over to the coffee mug she’d used just days ago, the smear from her Chapstick still evident. He threw it on the floor in a glorious shatter and listened to the sounds of the breaking ceramic. He looked at the pile of shards on the floor and took several deep breaths.
So that was that then. She was the love of his life, or so he thought. And now she was gone after one fight. He’d admit it was a doozy but they had a child together, they were going to get married. How could she just leave all that behind because h asked her to take some time off school for her own safety? It wasn’t right. Maybe she wasn’t who he thought she was, maybe she was just some illusion of his dream girl, a woman to call his wife and the mother of his child.
The dream they were building was in so many pieces, not unlike the broken pile of a mug now sitting on the kitchen floor. That was that then. Ben had won at that as well. He’d taken the most precious thing in the world away from him and now he was left to stare at the broken pieces and replay it all, wondering where he could go back and fix things if he was able.