Introduction

Some marriages don't end in blowups. They cool slowly, degree by degree, until one person has had enough and the other one hasn't noticed.

In this short story, Ronnie Redd Rice writes about a husband who came home every night for twenty-two years and never once asked his wife how she was doing. He wasn't cruel. He was comfortable — and comfort, left unchecked, has a way of becoming neglect. When his wife finally speaks her mind and then disappears to Jamaica alone, he's left to sit with what he's been doing.

Rice tells it plainly and without self-pity, in the voice of a man who knows himself well enough to admit what he got wrong. That honesty is what gives a story this short its weight.

Ronnie Redd Rice is the author of Kameesha, coming soon from Word Out Books