This is a fantasy.
A man, fifty or so. Scars on his forearms and a face half of us find handsome and half of
us find grotesque. A flask.
He could build a wrap around patio and I could plant a garden and he might cry when the memories overwhelm him but I would make him a drink and hold him all night and we’d watch the sunrise. Some mornings he could let out the dogs, there would be three, gifting me an extra hour of sleep. We would like most of all just to sit near one another in quiet.
I could take a few days every month just to stew in a bar in town but he would always know the bar and give me a few days to cool off then find me and we could have that conversation we didn’t want to have followed by rough sex in the bathroom and he could drive me home and I could plant sunflowers.
I can buy him a pipe for Christmas but then use it myself.
He can have an affair with the pianist who lives next door, long black hair in a small bun against her neck like Olive Oyl, and I can yell at him one night as he’s coming home. “I’m not stupid. WHY DO YOU PRETEND LIKE I’M NOT LETTING YOU DO THIS!?” And he can slam the door.
He just wants one thing that is his.
I won't mention it again but the pianist never meets my eyes when she passes me rocking on my porch.

When the first dog dies he could dig a little plot in the backyard and handle the body for me because he’s used to bodies like this and I would say no you don’t have to if it’s too difficult and he would say I’m fine but that night we run out of whiskey and when I plant Queen Anne’s lace over the grave he watches from a safe distance.
The day of his diagnosis I might not even be able to pity him, only feeling for myself. I would have told him it was coming and he knew it too and he never stopped the drinking. Too selfish.
I would ask what I’ll be left with. The garden? The empty spaces in every room? The garage where he once did woodworking would by now be accumulating sawdust. It would become in the final years only a place he would go to weep when I could no longer tolerate his incessant pains. Pacing in the kitchen.
And he would ask me. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Aren’t you the one who wanted me?”
When he’s gone it would just be me and the house and the marks on the floor from the
pacing and the neighbor who would play mournful Beethoven under the moon and the last living dog, a drooling red-eyed hound.