Listen for the Lie

by Amy Tintera

I guess we’re not getting “sorry you were fired for being a suspected murderer” drinks.

I take a bite of roast chicken. Dad’s disappointment doesn’t transfer to his cooking. People like to claim that food tastes better when it’s made with love—like how their grandmother’s pie didn’t taste right when they made it, so it must have been the love that made it good. This is bullshit, in my opinion. It was probably just extra butter or better-quality sugar that made it good. Dad’s cooking is proof of this. It is not made with love; it’s made with resentment and disappointment. And it still tastes fucking great.

seriously don’t understand developing a drinking problem in your seventies,” Mom says. Grandma sits at the head of the table. “Why not? Way I see it, seems like the perfect time to develop a drinking problem. It’s dull as hell around here.”

But I didn’t really get out. I wasn’t here physically, but in a way, I’ve spent every day of the last five years here. Other people moved on with their lives. Look at Nina and Emmett. I’m still defined by everything that happened to me in my hometown. By my first husband, and the life I had in my early twenties. I’m like the football jock who never gets over peaking in high school, except I’m the tragic murder version. Fuck, that’s depressing.

In the end, life is just sweatpants and children who resent you and all your choices. But no one wants to hear that.

A little podcast souvenir. I should get a T-shirt: I was the subject of a true crime podcast and all I got was this T-shirt and gonorrhea.

How did Matt believe Emmett over his own wife? Ben: It does seem strange. Beverly: Well, not strange, exactly. Typical. Men always believe each other.