Another Excerpt from Sigrid and Mik's Story

     “Tell me, Sigrid, why did you make me come home with you--or do you pick up every kinky-looking street beggar you see?”
      “Because I knew you, you ass!”
    “ So?  Did I embarrass you?  Were you afraid someone would realize I used to be your husband?” 
     “Don’t be ridiculous,” she bit out between thinned lips.  “No one around here would even care.”
     “Then why?, he prodded. "You could have pretended not to recognize me, or refused to look at me, like three-quarters of the people who drive by, but you stopped and picked me up.”
      Good question, and she had to struggle to articulate an answer. 
      The anger drained out of her, and she walked to the floor-length window to look out at the new day, trying to sort through her thoughts.
      Their marriage had been so brief, less than a year, but it had changed her life.  During that time she’d gone from total  ecstasy to total despair—three months in that wonderful crummy little apartment followed by five months of hell living with his parents in Elk River.  His mother and sisters did the best they could, but his father was a horror, and soon Mik was spending all his time drinking and playing video games, just like Papa.  And there was nothing she could say that had any effect on him. 
      She was out of there As as soon as she’d saved enough money from her minimum-wage job to file for divorce. Then, like a phoenix from the flames, a new Sigrid had emerged , cold as ice and tough as nails.  So why had she bothered to bring Mik home with her?   
     “I don’t know,” she finally murmured--to herself as well as to him.  “Maybe because of the sweet boy I married nine years ago, the one who wrote poetry and said he loved me.” 
     She shook her head in disbelief, then turned to face him.
     “What a fool I was.”