HERE WAS THE JOKE OF IT

Here was the joke of it: before they moved, but after they found out they had to move, Magda was told by Billie, a friend whose husband had been transferred the year before, that the place was “kind of a one-horse town,” and that was why, Billie said, she was hanging out at bars when Fred was away on business, why she sometimes went home with the guys she met there, why once she even brought a guy to her home, to the apartment she and Fred shared, and Magda said that she had to go or else the news was going to give her a heart attack, and Billie said that she wished Fred would have one, and Magda clucked her tongue and said that even though Fred had his problems he had always been a good friend to them like that one time that he loaned them his generator and then didn’t even ask for it back the next winter just bought himself a new one and Billie said sure he could be giving in some ways but not in the most important ways if Magda knew what she meant and Magda clucked her tongue again and said that Billie and Fred better stay together so that Magda and Francesca would have friends to go to dinner with or to invite over to watch football, there was a new coach, everyone was hopeful, and Billie sighed and said that yes, it was likely that she and Fred would stay together, she was just trying to keep her head above water in the pile of sticks and bricks they called a town, and Magda hung up and she and Francesca packed up their life into boxes and waited most of a morning for the movers and spent the night in a motel and then drove to meet the movers at their new house, and this was all before Billie failed in her attempt to hold things together with Fred, failed because it turned out he was running around too, and she poisoned him for a little while but decided that divorce was probably easier, and he moved back to the city and remarried, and Billie had a brief fling with Magda, nothing serious at all, too much vodka and sorrow, a little high school redux was all, Magda even told Francesca, who said she was hurt but would laugh it off (and did), but back to when they were waking up in the motel and driving to meet the movers, when the first thing they saw when they came across the town line, plain as day, was two horses. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas