When You Leave the Location
by Jennifer Wortman
I’m in the phone store and this long-haired old woman in a t-shirt comes in, announcing her wi-fi doesn’t work. The sales dude eyes me and I take over while he clacks info into the computer about the phone and phone service I’ve purchased. As you may recall, I no longer had a working phone, though I can’t remember exactly why. The week during which you or I or possibly we, together, destroyed my phone amid fits of rage remains a terrible blur. For a long time after, I didn’t want a working phone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Except, maybe, you.
I try to explain the concept of wi-fi to the woman, that it’s attached to certain locations. and when you leave the location, you can’t get the wi-fi. The sales dude interrupts his clacking to hook her tablet to the store’s wi-fi, just to be nice. But we explain that once she leaves the store she’ll no longer get the wi-fi unless, maybe, she stands right outside. “Maybe I’ll stand right outside then,” she says. She tells me her husband died and her mother died and she broke her leg, all in the same year. Then she met a man who seemed to turn it all around. She thought he was the nicest man, but it turned out he wasn’t even a nice man. He always wanted to know where she was and who she was with but, if she’d ask him about his whereabouts, he’d say, “None of your concern.” He walked ahead of her in public because she looked “slovenly.” But he could also be kind. He drove her to appointments throughout her broken-leg ordeal. Sometimes he cooked her elaborate meals. She kept thinking she’d had enough but then she’d remember his good side and stick things out. He ended up leaving her, for a woman he said was less slovenly but who, in the woman’s opinion, was more slovenly. And now she wants to use wi-fi to send him a song she’d heard that captures him perfectly. It’s about how he could have been a good man if he hadn’t been such a bad man. Then again, she says, maybe she shouldn’t send it. She wants to show him who he really is, but she fears sending the song would open the door to his meanness and/or confusing kindness.
“Do not engage,” I tell her. “I repeat: do not engage.”
The woman ponders my advice, then breaks into an enormous grin. “God sent me to this store today so I would meet you. You told me exactly what I needed to hear!” She throws her arms around me and leaves.
“Nice work,” says the sales dude, still clacking away. We get each other, the sales dude and I. Better, perhaps, than you and I ever did. Still, how I want to tell you this story. But I swear I will never. I can only pretend. Because I finally learned what you taught and taught me: Do not engage. I repeat: do not engage.
Jennifer Wortman is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. Her work appears in TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature, Brevity, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and elsewhere, and has been cited as distinguished in Best American Short Stories. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell, she lives with her family in Colorado, where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and serves as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review. Find more at jenniferwortman.com.
