For years, they’d all taken bets on who would be next. I tried not to resent anyone who guessed me. “We’re sorry, Diya,” they said as they collected their winnings. “Where do you want the funeral?”
It began with Jill. After her divorce was final, she sent us formal invitations that insisted we wear black dresses and heels. At the cemetery, she placed flowers at the base of a tree before saying a few words. She claimed she did it to be funny, but she seemed to take the proceedings pretty seriously. Around the midway point, we went from finding the whole thing annoying to cathartic, finally telling her all our unspoken truths about their doomed trajectory as high school sweethearts turned bitter divorcees. We’ve since paid our respects at a mini-golf place, where Sarah’s first date had gone horribly but she married him anyway, and an old abandoned building, home to the lousy apartment Kavita and her ex had once shared. The last one was a bonfire in which Melanie torched every memory and smiled at the leaping flames. The funerals help us mourn and celebrate these endings. The drinks let us temporarily forget. Merlot at a classy restaurant after Jill’s. Yuengling at a dive bar after Sarah’s. Soju at a karaoke lounge after Kavita’s. Root beer floats at a drive-in movie after Melanie’s.
Today is my turn. I choose the graveyard even though when I die, I’ll be nothing but ashes scattered at a far less depressing location. Maybe the beach or the woods. I look to my friends to start.
“He was funny sometimes,” Melanie says.
“But pretentious,” Kavita adds.
I appreciate the balance they struck.
“You two cared about each other and tried your best,” Amaya says. Everyone knows that the last part isn’t true, even if the first part is. Her marriage is the youngest and the only remaining survivor. We knew today would be hard for her. She was counting on me not to leave her behind. She is standing slightly apart from us, like our divorces are a virus she can catch. “Why did any of you even let me get married in the first place?” she asks. “It almost always ends. And now you all hate those guys.”
We can tell she’s torn between fearing that hers is doomed and resenting us for giving up on ours. We avoid eye contact with her, focusing instead on the nature around us. I notice a cloud resembling my ex-husband’s misshapen head.
“I love mine,” Sarah says after the long silence. We politely don’t mention her rant about him from the day before, how he’d been forty minutes late picking their daughter up from a birthday party because he fell asleep on the couch and lost track of time even though he only has her every other weekend. Still, she’s not lying. Sarah does love him in her own way, like how you love your childhood teddy bear despite its missing eye and rough, matted fur.
“Do you love yours?” I ask Amaya.
“Yes,” she says, looking like she might cry.
“Then go home after this and enjoy it while it lasts.” She nods. We hug each other. “I promise yours will last. Don’t worry about me. I’ll fall in love again.” I say this for her, but also to try and make myself believe it. The thought of anyone else in my bed besides him is daunting. I can’t even allow my imagination to stray to the image of another woman in his.
“Now are you done making this about you?” Jill asks her.
Amaya laughs and looks appropriately embarrassed. “Yeah, sorry, Diya.”
“Good. Because I didn’t get to say how we pretended to like his cooking even though it was so bland, I thought he had some deep unresolved trauma involving salt.”
“Hey.” I shove Jill. “I loved his boring food. It was comforting and predictable.”
“Just like him,” Kavita says, stepping out of my reach.
“He was predictable until he wasn’t,” I say. No one thought he’d go through with serving me the papers. They all assumed that I’d do it or we’d stay together until death parted us. All the books, TV shows, and movies prepared us for infidelity, illness, and explosive arguments, but we were blindsided by the less interesting reality, like how you run out of things to talk about and neither of you puts in the effort to speak until the quiet is so loud you both start losing your minds listening to it. In the movie, maybe we’d have found our way back to each other. In reality, our farewell was anticlimactic. “I’ll miss him.”
“Me, too,” Melanie says, hooking her arm around my waist and pulling me close enough to smell her shampoo. I let myself lean on her. “What?” She stares defiantly at the others. “He was nice.”
“Is it time to drink yet?” I ask.
“Definitely,” Sarah says. “Where to?”
“Pregaming and then the nightclub on Pine.” He hates dancing. I love it even if I’m old and never do it anymore. Now seems like as good a time as any.
I wait for the others to head over to the street, telling them I’ll catch up. I walk among the tombstones surrounding me until one inscription—“Mary, beloved wife of Michael”— stops me. I think about how when he and I die, we’ll still be a beloved something of each other. That isn’t nothing. If we once loved and once were loved, the marriage ending doesn’t erase that anymore than death would have. But when I’m gone, having been someone’s wife for a while probably will not be what defines the life I lived. I hear voices in the distance yelling that rum and Coke waits for no one. I won’t have a grave, but maybe mine would say “Diya, beloved friend.”
***
Anna Vangala Jones is the author of Turmeric & Sugar: Stories (Thirty West, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Wigleaf, Rejection Letters, Berkeley Fiction Review, Short Story Long, Craft Literary, Terrazzo Editions, HAD, and The Bulb Region, among others. Find her online at annavangalajones.com.
Rejection Letters 