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Once I have the last box assembled, I help pull bins off the shelves and carry them into the room.
“Wow, she certainly isn’t ever going to run out of outfit options or hair extensions,” Maxi says as she holds up a long ash-brown strip of hair.
She’s sitting on the floor in front of the bed, folding clothes we took off hangers and sorting through some bins.
“I have no idea why she wastes money on those. I can’t even tell the difference when she wears them.”
I use the tape gun to close another box and set it to the side. We’ve almost cleared the master closet. I thought it would be hard, but having Maxi here to commentate the occasion has made it easy.
“How many do we have now?” she asks.
“Twenty-three.”
“Are you kidding? We haven’t touched the chest of drawers yet.”
I shrug. “I guess a decade of living takes a while to pack away.”
She stops what she’s doing and looks up at me. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“Not a hundred percent. We had some great years.”
“I’m sure you did. There has to be some good in her, or you wouldn’t have fallen in love in the first place.”
“Yeah, but lately, I’ve had to search deep for the good. She only shows it to me when she feels like it or when she thinks I’ve had enough.”
“That’s the sad part. Nobody’s all bad. If they were, it’d make it a hell of a lot easier to walk away,” she says.
“True, but my father always taught us that if you want something to be different, you have to make a choice. If things haven’t changed after all this time, they never will. Starting now, I choose different,” I declare as I throw another item into a box.
“Good. Because nothing works if you do it halfway,” she says as she tosses the extension in with it.
We work steadily for the next hour and a half. Once I place the last box in the building and take a step back inside, I let out the breath I was holding.
It feels freeing.
I have my home back. I’m taking my life back.
I walk over to the hook by the door, grab the keys to the Challenger, and pitch them in her direction.
She catches them, and her face lights up.
“Let’s go,” I say, and I don’t have to say it twice because she is out the door and in the garage before I can finish the sentence.
She drives us the hour and a half to Gatlinburg and then takes the entrance onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. I watch her face as she shifts into fifth gear, and we take off like a rocket, chasing the sunset.
We drive until the gas light comes on, and we have to exit into the little town of Waynesville in North Carolina.
“Let’s find a place to eat,” I suggest.
We follow the signs to downtown and end up at a place called The Cuban Guy. It’s a walk-up restaurant that serves Cuban sandwiches.
“Here,” she declares.
“You don’t want to go somewhere and sit down and eat?” I ask.
“Why? Dude, it’s a Cuban sandwich, and we can walk around town while we eat,” she replies.
We order two sandwiches and a guava and cheese pastry to go. While we wait, Maxi chats with the owner and finds out that he and his wife just purchased the place from its previous owner. They are both from Cuba but have lived in the United States for the last ten years. He and his wife do all the cooking themselves, and their daughters help in the kitchen after school.
