Always (The Dairy Queen)

by Jennifer Happensack

Enlarge

December 7, 2012

My husband goes out around twenty to nine to the Dairy Queen. He wants a strawberry sundae. I find this endearing. Especially later as I watch him eat it, all six foot three of him sprawled across the bed in our hotel room. He tells me he’ll be back in fifteen minutes. At sixteen minutes I wonder if he got in an accident, hit a deer or got attacked (at the Dairy Queen). I pray to St. Teresa like my mother taught me. Please don’t take this man away from me.

I went to bed one night when I was seven and woke up to a missing father. He died of a heart attack in the night. I remember standing on the stairway peering down at the people filling our living room. Lingering in my nightgown after my mother told us.

No amount of therapy will convince that girl he is coming back. No matter how many times he reassures me “I promise I will always come back.”