It was the middle of summer and Carolina sandhills hot. A haze rose around everything. The crickets deafened at night, and death was the only way to escape the humidity.

Something stirred me from sleep, so I barefooted out to the garage to find Danny Boy shirtless, holding the whiskey bottle, screaming that he was going to unalive himself, and I said well go on ahead and do it.

He’d set out a bar stool and tossed a noose fashioned from an extension cord over a rafter.

My grandma used to say, Ellie, you can’t fix crazy, but you might can help stupid, though only unlearnt stupid, not born and ingrained stupid cause that stupid’s bad as crazy.

Well, after four years together, three married, I’d decided Danny Boy was born stupid. Which is why I told him I was leaving come morning.

Of course, people would ask why I stayed as long as I did.

And I’d tell them it wasn’t a fixing him thing. I never thought that was possible. It was more a belief that maybe I could puppeteer him well enough or operate him like one of those remote-control cars into being mostly how I wanted him to be.

And then there was his physical.

The man didn’t have a soft part. You just go to touch him he’d tense up. And all I’ll say is, when it came to the bedroom, I liked that. Dissolving them hard edges was like breaking a mustang.

But that stuff can only get you so far and our journey had ended.

Whether his journey as a person on the planet was over was up to him.

I closed the door to the garage and stood in the glow from the motion light over the door. Where the light ended was pure black. The crickets went on and on and the longer I stood listening the louder the sound grew. I didn’t move for so long the light turned off.

My heart beat in my throat in the darkness. I was of the South as much as the blood that ran through me, and though I’d been nowhere else, I never imagined I’d leave. It was supposed to be me and Danny Boy. The kids and the pets and the vacations and the years and the little house. But bruises heal and plans change, and where I’d end up, I could hardly say.

As I moved to go inside the house, I heard the bottle shatter in the garage and what sounded like the stool fall, but I didn’t go back to see.