a prolonged feeling of guilt

When Victor left he took the George Forman grill. All of his philosophy books were still in a stack beside the nightstand. The Tibetan prayer flag was still strung across the window in the bedroom, right where he put it when he moved in. The scarf that Kelly knit him last winter was on the bottom of the laundry basket. That aroma therapy eye pillow that they’d sometimes fight over was stashed under the pillows. The “This mug says nothing about me” mug sat on the kitchen counter making coffee stain circles, but the George Foreman was definitely gone.

“Wasn’t he a vegetarian?” her sister asks over the phone.

“Yeah–I mean, no,” she pauses. Kelly is lying on her bed and staring at the blank ceiling. “He was a pescatarian.”

“Oh yeah. What’s that mean again?”

“He eats fish, but no other meats.”

“Oh, I never thought about using the Foreman for salmon!–”

Kelly interrupts, “I think he used it to grill zucchini actually.”

“I heard Mariah Carrey does that too.”

Every other Monday, Kelly goes to see Dr. Carmichael.  It’s been like that for three years now. She lives in New York alone and this is her parent’s way of making sure she’s doing okay.

“Tell me one thing that you never told him,” instructs Dr. Carmichael.

She thinks, I never told him about you, but she keeps that to herself.   Kelly stares at the box of Kleenex on the table. It’s one of those holiday designs with smiling snowmen. She thinks they look creepy.

“I guess,” she pauses and realizes that one of the snowmen has the same hat with ear flaps that Victor had. She hopes he left it behind and starts visualizing where he might have put it if he didn’t take it. Was it under the bed? Or in that messy pile of coats and shoes by the door

“Kelly?”

“Oh, sorry. I just got distracted, I like your Kleenex box.”

“Oh thank you, but I asked you to tell me something you kept from him. Can you think of anything?” She sounds like one of those detectives on TV.

“His breath smelled.”

Kelly starts rubbing the surface of the couch, feeling the soft ridges of the fabric. Her palm flattens and flexes as she tells Dr. Carmichael about how offended he got when she bought him that special toothpaste that supposedly helped with morning breath. This petting action happens often during their sessions together. Dr. Carmichael thinks it’s the most interesting thing about Kelly. She calls Kelly, Linus in all of her notes, and even once half way joked with her husband about making Kelly the subject of her next self help book.

“So how did you feel when he didn’t want your help to cure this bad breath?” Dr. Carmichael tries to make her voice sound sympathetic.

Kelly doesn’t know how it made her feel, or she can’t remember because it happened last spring and now it’s winter and it’s cold outside and she’s worried he forgot his hat with the ear flaps because now his ears might be cold wherever he is.

Dr. Carmichael yawns and the session ends a little early so that they can have time to make the next appointment.

Kelly met Victor when he was working for Save the Children. He was just one of those guys who stands out on the streets asking people to “adopt” a child. He was really good at picking out the people he thought might donate. Then, he’d turn a friendly conversation into a prolonged discussion of that person’s wasteful budget which led the said person to all of a sudden feel a pile of guilt and the quick fix was pulling out a credit card. It was a process that caused his managers to never promote him from the street level. “You’re the best one we’ve got. Think of the children,” they told him.

Victor was working in Soho while Kelly was shopping. She probably would have handed over her credit card regardless, but Victor didn’t know that then. He saw that she had a couple shopping bags and convinced her that if she would cut back on designer jeans, little girls in Calcutta might not be forced into prostitution.

Two weeks later Kelly received a picture of a boy in Ecuador. Pedro.

Things got serious really quickly.  He moved in by the time that Pedro had sent her two pictures and a thank you note. Kelly wasn’t the type to keep a boyfriend.  Even her sister was shocked, “Wait, that guy that suckered you into giving up an extra thirty bucks every month?”

“It just happened all of a sudden.  He just needed a place to stay, something about having a crazy roommate.  I couldn’t tell him no…”she told her.

“Well, we already knew that.  Pedro is proof.”

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