A SHORT SHORT STORY
by Louise Jarvis Flynn
Louise Jarvis Flynn writes for a wide variety of periodicals, reviewing books and reporting on topics from adventure sports to health. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and a degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Currently at work on a novel entitled Sublet and a short story collection, Lessons in Sustainable Living, of which “A Windfall” is a part, Flynn lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and sons.
“YOU’D BE SURPRISED how many of us there are,” she said, as if it were gossip. “But most are green-card marriages in retrospect.”
“What happened to yours?” he asked. He now felt silly with this lemon cocktail, but he always said “I’ll have the same” on a first date.
“Same as yours, I bet. Glad to help a friend—I didn’t mind. Then he started dating a guy, moved away. I don’t even know where he is.”
“Did you get divorced?”
She shook her head, and her bangs—growing out—broke free from their barrette. “You?” Just then she didn’t like him enough to bother with the bathroom mirror.
“Who has time?”
Mine went back to Estonia,” he said. “After all that, she went back to her mother.”
“It’s easier, I guess, when they’re gay. You don’t have any expectations.”
“I didn’t have expectations. She always said she hated her mother.”
“Oh, I say that. Everyone says that. It’s like saying you want kids someday. Or you want to be married. Or you want to move out of the city. It’s just something people say.”
He pushed his half-finished drink to the edge of the table and said he’d like to switch to beer.
“Do you check that list of unclaimed money in the paper?” she asked. “Sometimes I think, wouldn’t it be amazing if he died and I inherited a fortune out of the blue?”
“He’s rich?”
“His art reminds me of those potato prints you do in first grade.”
“Very rich, then.”
She launched the laugh again, overshooting this time, and he fought the urge to reach across the table and squeeze her, down to clacking bones and quiet. Since they had known each other only a few hours, he guessed that would be construed as menacing, and maybe it was.
A laugh like that was an assault, he thought.
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