She didn’t get an invitation.
It wasn’t that she’d expected one – you don’t invite your ex no matter how much of a whore your new bride was – but it hurt. She thought about crashing, about wrenching the veil off of that slut, who’d look a right mess with her hair ripped out, but she couldn’t afford to alienate the few friends she had left.
So she did the only thing she could. Guzzling down his hundred-year-old scotch, she went through old photographs, cutting him out of the pictures. She’d burn them later, imagining it was him writhing in the flames.
As they all jumbled around together, facing the camera, she thought of her mother’s phrase. “Each photo is a bit of history.”
Three nights earlier, Mary had been sorting through her belongings – deciding what little to take, what to abandon, and what to store – when she’d found her old photo albums, full of the pictures she’d taken, her husband and children spread across the pages but almost nothing of her. It was almost as if she didn’t have a past.
She’d sold the camera, after the divorce. He’d gotten the money. He’d gotten the house. He’d gotten one mistress pregnant and had married another. He’d gotten the children. Given the thinly veiled threat that they could have his support or their mother, his children had each made the pragmatic choice.
That had been three years ago, and she’d barely seen them since. After the youngest had graduated, but still hadn’t sent even a card, Mary had decided to take control of her life. “OK, smile.” The words broke her out of her reverie. Looking up, she saw Dave running around to join them. The timer was set.
Before the bulb flashed, with a quick rub over her t-shirt’s raised logo, that told the world she’d joined the Peace Corps, Mary smiled. She couldn’t change the past, but she could damn well make sure she had a better future.
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