Writers Tribe Review: Sacrifice Writers Tribe Review, Vol. 2, Issue 2 | Page 10

at your play! I was high at your birthday!”

He asked me how I let him get away with it for so long when I should have been the one to call him out. I should have known, he said, about the other women he was sleeping with. He wasn’t wrong. Someone else might have.

That was two months earlier, but somehow he forgot all of that and remembered my phone number instead. “Sweetheart, Sweetheart, Sweetheart,” he said when I answered the call, “I need help.” I told him that I could not care any less and that I was going to hang up. But I didn’t hang up. The paramedic got on the line and said that they were lifting him into the ambulance, he was in a bad way, and he was all alone. I rolled out of my snuggly covers, slipped on my fake UGGs, and drove here.

Why?

I no longer felt that pang of yearning for him, but there I was, still standing in a sterile room with stark white lights and a beeping vital stats machine. Was it out of respect for the three years we had before he tumbled off a wagon I didn’t know he was riding? Three years of bouquets of pink lilies and orange roses. He wrote my name on his plate in asparagus at a Senate luncheon, dressed as Raggedy Andy to my Ann though the costume barely fit over his then sturdy chest, and learned swing dance for a Christmas talent show I wanted to enter . . . and there was that triangle-shaped diamond we chose at Jared’s. Memories of love, but not love.

Then, why?

The phone rang and buzzzzzzzzz—I felt the little buzz in my heart, like when Uncle Kevin used to knock on my window at 4:00 a.m. when he got off the night shift at the foundry. “Let’s go for breakfast!” Uncle Kevin would wave me to hurry. I would grab a pair of tennies and a sweater, pop the window screen out, and climb onto the dew-filled grass. Pancakes and scrambled eggs tasted more delicious with the excitement of sneaking out before sunrise. I would be back on time to get ready for school and catch the bus. It didn’t occur to me at the time that an uncle should care more about me getting a solid night’s rest before school than him having company at breakfast. Those breakfasts were at least better than the time that same uncle hung his head out the side of his Mustang convertible, vomiting tequila sunrises while steering with his right hand and crying a confession that should have been heard by social services and then the police and not by fifteen-year-old me.

Half a dozen years earlier than that, I handed my mother a bouquet of sun-yellow

blossoms. “I don’t want these weeds,”