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I suppose I need to tell you how Ken did it, how he broke up with me, since this is really where this story starts, my birth, my rebirth, my re-rebirth. Almost a month has passed now, so I suppose I can handle it. I'll try at least. Here goes:
It started in the kitchen. I was heating up some Campbell's tomato soup for dinner. Ken sat down at the counter with an Academy Sporting Goods catalog, looked over at the stove.
"What's that?" he asked. "Soup again?"
I shrugged. Yeah, it was soup again. What did he expect? The microwave was broken, so I was kind of limited in the ready-made meals available to us.
He shook his head. "Can't you make something real for once?" he asked.
"What do you mean 'real'?" I asked. "Isn't this real enough for you?" I pointed to the pan on the stove.
"If I brought in some venison," Ken said, "you wouldn't know what to do with it."
"When have you ever brought venison?" I asked.
"I haven't," Ken said. "That's the point."
I'll admit. I do cook a bit too much from a package. But a girl's only got so much time in the day and only so many talents. Cooking isn't one of mine. I don't enjoy it, and I don't do it well. But if Ken cared so much about that, nothing was around to stop him from cooking for himself. He knew what he was getting in me. We'd been together eight years after all.
The next day was more of the same. At a party at our friends Terrell and Jennifer, he gave me the "stare" when I asked Jennifer about her sister's baby. How was I to know about the miscarriage? I told her I understood, since my mom went through same thing herself before she had me. Apparently the comment didn't rate as genius enough with Ken.
"Can't you just shut up once in awhile?" he asked on our way home. "Some things are better off dropped."
Two days later, my schedule didn't suit him. I was supposed to meet him and a couple of our friends at DePalma's for dinner. I was ten minutes late. Ten minutes. You'd have thought the place was going to ban us for life if we didn't get seated right away.
"What took you so long?" he asked.
"My hair," I said. "I had to do my hair." I'd gotten back from the gym later than expected.
"Your hair," he repeated, shook his head. "Your hair. It's always about your hair. Sometimes I think you're dating your hair instead of me."
And on he went for the next two months, one dig after another. It was like he wanted me to dump him, and when I didn't, he just got meaner.
Finally, a week before July 4, he told me. He did it over the phone--at work, where he knew I wouldn't have time to talk for long, where he too could use an impending workplace situation to get off the phone. It was simple. He didn't want to go out that weekend. He didn't want to see me--not that not Friday night, not Saturday, not Sunday. Really, he didn't want to see me at all.
The next Sunday, the weekend after July 4, I saw him out with Casey. I was sitting in front of Espresso Royale Café having a coffee double latte, reading a Cosmo I'd picked up at Barnette's (what else was I going to do with my day, now that he'd dumped me). They walked right past me. He didn't even acknowledge my existence.
Soon after, I walked by East-West Bistro, threw my empty cup down at his table as I passed. I hoped he got the point.
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