Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

of her dignity. Take the high road! Two wrongs don’t make
a right!
All those things that spineless women say,
confusing their weakness with morality.
I won’t divorce him because that’s exactly what he’d
like. And I won’t forgive him because I don’t feel like 
turning
the other cheek
. Can I make it any more clear? I won’t find
that a satisfactory ending. The bad guy wins? Fuck him.
For over a year now, I’ve smelled her twat on his
fingertips as he slipped into bed next to me. I’ve watched
him ogle himself in the mirror, grooming himself like a horny
baboon for their dates. I’ve listened to his lies, lies, lies –
from simplistic child’s fibs to elaborate Rube Goldbergian
contraptions. I’ve tasted butterscotch on his dry-kiss lips, a
cloying flavor that was never there before. I’ve felt the
stubble on his cheeks that he knows I don’t like but
apparently she does. I’ve suffered betrayal with all five
senses. For over a year.
So I may have gone a bit mad. I do know that framing
your husband for your murder is beyond the pale of what an
average woman might do.
But it’s so very 
necessary
. Nick must be taught a
lesson. He’s 
never
been taught a lesson! He glides through
life with that charming-Nicky grin, his beloved-child
entitlement, his fibs and shirkings, his shortcomings and

---

selfishness, and no one calls him on 
anything
. I think this
experience will make him a better person. Or at least a
sorrier one. Fucker.
I’ve always thought I could commit the perfect murder.
People who get caught get caught because they don’t have
patience; they refuse to plan. I smile again as I shift my
crappy getaway car into fifth gear (Carthage now seventy-
eight miles in the dust) and brace myself for a speeding
truck – the car seems ready to take flight every time a semi
passes. But I do smile, because this car shows just how
smart I am: purchased for twelve hundred dollars cash from
a Craigslist posting. Five months ago, so the memory
wouldn’t be fresh in anyone’s mind. A 1992 Ford Festiva,
the tiniest, most forgettable car in the world. I met the
sellers at night, in the parking lot of a WalMart in
Jonesboro, Arkansas. I took the train down with a bundle of
cash in my purse – eight hours each way, while Nick was
on a boys’ trip. (And by 
boys’ trip
, I mean 
fucking the slut
.) I
ate in the train’s dining car, a clump of lettuce with two
cherry tomatoes that the menu described as a salad. I was
seated with a melancholy farmer returning home after
visiting his baby granddaughter for the first time.
The couple selling the Ford seemed as interested in
discretion as I. The woman remained in the car the whole
time, a pacifiered toddler in her arms, watching her
husband and me trade cash for keys. (That is the correct
grammar, you know: her husband and me.) Then she got
out and I got in. That quick. In the rearview mirror, I saw the
couple strolling into WalMart with their money. I’ve been
parking it in long-term lots in St. Louis. I go down twice a

---

month and park it somewhere new. Pay cash. Wear a
baseball cap. Easy enough.
So that’s just an example. Of patience, planning, and
ingenuity. I am pleased with myself; I have three hours more
until I reach the thick of the Missouri Ozarks and my
destination, a small archipelago of cabins in the woods that
accepts cash for weekly rentals and has cable TV, a must. I
plan to hole up there the first week or two; I don’t want to be
on the road when the news hits, and it’s the last place Nick
would think I’d hide once he realizes I’m hiding.
This stretch of highway is particularly ugly. Middle-
America blight. After another twenty miles, I see, up on the
off-ramp, the remains of a lonesome family gas station,
vacant but not boarded up, and when I pull to the side, I see
the women’s restroom door swung wide. I enter – no
electricity, but there’s a warped metal mirror and the water
is still on. In the afternoon sunlight and the sauna heat, I
remove from my purse a pair of metal scissors and bunny-
brown hair dye. I shear off large chunks of my hair. All the
blond goes into a plastic bag. Air hits the back of my neck,
and my head feels light, like a balloon – I roll it around a few
times to enjoy. I apply the color, check my watch, and linger
in the doorway, looking out over miles of flatland pocked
with fast-food restaurants and motel chains. I can feel an
Indian crying. (Nick would hate that joke. Derivative! And
then he’d add, ‘although the word