Don't Forget the Wine

Don’t Forget the Wine

By

Nathan Caleb Camerer

Russ caught a glimpse of the bottle of wine hurdling towards his head just in time to duck.  He didn’t see the Martini Shaker that followed it however and acquired a nice cut and knot above his left eye.

“AHH!  What the fuck!?” he yelled.

“You cheating bastard!” Mary yelled back at him as she reached for another bottle of wine to throw.

“What are you talking about, Mary?”

“Who the fuck is Amy?” she asked as she hurled the bottle at him.

“I don’t know.  Who is she?”  he screams back at her as he ducks the bottle and starts to side step around the dining room table to get close enough to Mary to restrain her from throwing anymore wine.

“You know who she is.  You bought her flowers” Mary bellows at him as she backsteps into kitchen.

“I think you might be talking about Amy Russell.  She is a friend of my family from way back.  Her mother just passed away.  I sent her flowers from both of us with our condolences.”  By the time he finished this sentence, he is around the table and heading into the kitchen behind Mary.

Mary had grabbed a knife after she entered the kitchen and was waiting for Russ when he came in.

“Whoa.  What are you going to do with that?” asked Russ.

“I’m going to stab you, you cheating motherfucker” she replied.

“I told you.  I didn’t cheat on you, so why don’t you put that down?”

“I don’t believe you.  I think you’ve been cheating on me.”

“I haven’t been cheating on you,” he says as he starts creeping forward towards Mary, not believing she will actually stab him.

“I know you’ve been cheating on me,’ she says.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would I cheat on you?”

“I don’t know why you’re cheating on me. Why are you cheating on me?”

Russ had crept to within arms length of Mary by now and makes a lunge for her and the knife. This did not work out the way he had pictured it in his head before he attempted it. Instead of some smooth Jason Bourne style disarming move, it turned into some ugly, bloody dance backwards through the sliding glass doors onto the back patio.

The crash and yelling and grunting got the attention of Mike and Linda, the neighbors, who were in the process of lighting the grill for some BBQ. They come running across the yard to find Russ and Mary covered in glass and blood in a heap on the back patio. They quickly call 911 and start trying to find out what happen.

It didn’t take long for Mike to get Russ up and around and into the house and start assessing the damage.

Russ had a good size knot and cut that would need a couple of stitches on his forehead from the Martini Shaker and from the knife fight/window breaking dance he had a pretty good cut on his side that would probably need stitches and had been stabbed in the left thigh. Pulling the knife out was a source of some amusement to Mike. He also had what appeared to be 2 or 3 broken fingers on his right hand plus several other minor cuts and scrapes from crashing through the window onto the patio.

While he was trying to clean Russ up a bit while waiting for the Ambulance he asked Russ what caused it. Russ replied, “She thinks I’m cheating on her.”

Mike asked if he was and he says, “No. I would never cheat on her.”

“Then what is going on between you two?”

“I don’t know, Mike. I don’t think she loves me anymore. I can’t remember the last time she said it to me. I don’t think I make her happy anymore. I think she’s looking for a reason to end it. Our life plan hasn’t worked out exactly the way we had planned. We had planned on having our second child right about now and we haven’t even had our first.”

“Look, Russ, you two need to talk to each other about this stuff and figure it out before it’s too late to start over with someone else and still have a family if you aren’t going to stay together.”

“I know, Mike. I know. I think it may already be too late for me to start over with someone else. If I can’t make it work with Mary then I’m done with trying to make a family.”

“It’s never too late, Russ.”

While Mike was getting Russ cleaned up and giving him advice inside, Linda was trying to get Mary to wake up, Mary had taken a pretty good knock on the head when it bounced off the patio, and get her cleaned up and find out her side of the story. Mary came out of the whole thing pretty good, except for the possible Concussion and some cuts and scrapes from the glass.

“Mary, what is going on? What happened? “

“I don’t know, Linda. I don’t know.”

“You and Russ just fell through the window and he got stabbed in the leg by accident?”

“No. We were fighting. I accused him of cheating on me.”

“Why would you do that Mary? Why do you think he’s cheating on you?”

“Because he doesn’t tell me he loves me anymore. He hasn’t said it in so long.”

“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.”

“I don’t think he’s happy with me anymore.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be happy with you if you were accusing me of cheating and trying to stab me either.”

“True. Very true.”

“You need to talk to him about this like an adult and not act like a teenager.”

“I know.”

When the Ambulance arrived, the EMT’s loaded up Mary and took her to the hospital to see if she had any serious damage to her head after the knock it took and left Russ with Mike and Linda who said they would drive him. They had both stopped bleeding by now, mostly.

The hospital decided to keep Mary overnight for observation. After some stitches and shots for pain and having three fingers splinted, they let Russ go.

Russ got home and started cleaning up the mess they made with some help from Mike and Linda and by the red morning light they had the broken window boarded up and all the blood and glass was gone.

All three of them called into their respective jobs and Linda headed back to the hospital to wait for them to release Mary.

Russ was exhausted but he couldn’t sleep. Instead he laid in bed and thought about what was going on with him and Mary and tried to figure out when things had started going south. Trying to remember the last time he had heard ‘I love you’ from Mary. He really couldn’t figure out how long it had been. The more he thought about it, the more he started to realize something else though. He started to realize that there were a lot of things he couldn’t remember or put into proper order on a timeline.  Unfortunately, before he could get this train of thought all the way to its conclusion, he fell asleep.

Despite the drugs and weary feeling, sleep did not come very easily for Mary either. As she was laying in her little hospital bed, in her little hospital gown, she was thinking the same things as Russ. Putting together the same dots, sort of. She suffered the same fate though, as she also succumbed to sleep before she could connect all the dots.

When Russ woke up, it was 6:54 PM and that meant he had slept all day, almost 12 hours. He rolled over towards Mary’s side of the bed, very gingerly since he felt like a train had hit him, and it was obvious she had been in bed but wasn’t there now. He slowly sat up and started the long process of getting out of bed. After he had finally gotten up and showered and dressed, which seemed to take forever, he checked the house for Mary. She wasn’t in the house but she had been there and it didn’t look like she had packed anything, which meant she hadn’t left him.

He realized he was starving and made a sandwich and went out on the back patio to eat. When he slid the door open he saw Mary sitting on the back patio. He hadn’t checked that during his search and kind of felt dumb for not doing so.

“Well, hello” he says to Mary.

“Hi” is all she says back.

“Umm. How do you feel? How’s your head? What time did Linda drop you off?”

“I feel like shit. My head hurts. It was around noon when she dropped me off. How are you? You look like you’re in a lot of pain.”

“I am in a lot of pain, even with the pain meds but, when you try and catch a Martini Shaker with your head and take a knife to the thigh and go crashing through a sliding glass door and have two people land on three of your ten fingers, then pain is going to be the outcome.”

“Don’t be an ass. I know what happened to you. I’m sorry. I really am very sorry for what happened.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be an ass. I’m very sorry about it as well.”

“Now what do we do?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do, Mary?”

“Well, Russ. I think we need to re-evaluate our lives and if we want to stay together and married and moving in the direction we are moving.”

“I agree with the re-evaluating and I want to stay together and married. I don’t want anybody else and never have since I fell for you. The direction we are moving in seems a little too destructive. Can we maybe change that?”

“If you want to stay married, we have to. Russ, I think I know what one of the problems is.”

“Really? I think I might have an idea or two as well. What do you have as a reason?”

“I think we drink too much and work too much and are trying too hard to make other people happy. Instead of focusing on each other, we are focusing on other things.”

“Wow. That’s almost exactly what I was going to say. I think we are comparing ourselves and where we are to our friends and family and it’s making us lose that focus on each other.”

“I agree. I don’t want to fight anymore. Russ, I’m still soo in love with you and want to be happy with you again.” As Mary said this she got up and moved over to Russ’s chair and slowly and gingerly, so she wouldn’t hurt, sat down in his lap and kissed him.

“Mary, I love you more than anything or anyone in my life. I want to watch you grow old.”

Despite their wounds, they had a passionate night of love making that started on the patio and moved indoors.

This is not where the story ends, however. This would be a good spot to end it so that it has a Happy Ending. The rest of the story is not happy though. It does have happiness in it but it does not end happily.

A few months down the road, Russ started feeling bad and couldn’t seem to get enough sleep. Mary took him to see a Doctor and he was diagnosed with Hyper Acute Liver Failure. A schedule was made for treatment and they set about fixing the 20 or so years of Alcohol and Drug abuse that Russ had been enjoying.

It was too late though and before they could right the wrongs, Russ fell into a coma and never came out of it.

After his death, Mary fell into a very deep depression. She started drinking again, even more heavily than before. Then one night, on her way home from a local vineyard they had visited regularly, she died in a car crash.

They say that she wasn’t speeding but she lost control of her car somehow at the only spot on the road to and from the Vineyard where you could die in a car crash.

Some say she did it on purpose and it was suicide. I don’t think so. I think she just simply lost control at the worst possible time and spot. Bad luck. We’ll never know.