After

Debbie has two kids, girls. The eldest, Miranda, is six. The youngest, Chloe, is two. The girls' father, Hank, is a fucking asshole who we will only mention once here to illustrate that Debbie isn't The Virgin Mary.

Deborah Molineaux is young but haggard. Being a single mom at twenty-three will do that to a woman, but Debbie's rough visage is more due to past abusive relationships and meth addiction, both of which she has successfully kept at bay for eleven months.

Now, Debbie lives with her mother, Francine, and Francine's second husband, Will. Both retired, they take care of the kids while Debbie works at the Safeway from nine until six, Monday to Friday.

Debbie enjoys spending time with Miranda and Chloe when she has it. She dedicates every waking hour when she's not at work to her two adorable children. Weekends are too short, and whenever she wakes up on Monday morning to get ready for work she feels a heaviness inside her that feels like it will never lift. She cries in the shower because it's the only place no one can see her doing so.

Apart from missing her kids, her job isn't so bad. She had to drop out of college when she became pregnant with Miranda, but Debbie doesn't dwell on that too much. She sometimes wonders if she could have been a physicist or a pediatrician if she had completed her education, but she knows that's pure fantasy, something she only thinks about at night when she's lying in bed, unable to fall asleep. She was already in danger of getting kicked out of school before her life took its first wrong turn in a series of many to follow, and she knows that there's a singular pleasure in remaining cautiously practical about her lot in life. Her co-workers are all very nice, especially Brandon, the autistic boy who greets her every morning with a smile and a wave, and Melanie, the middle-aged Kenyan woman who gives her a warm hug each day after close.

Still, human instinct being what it is, and despite her poor history of intimate relationships, Debbie longs to be closer to a man. Not a Brad Pitt lookalike, of course; just some nice guy who talks to her like he cares about her and who can every now and then fulfill her more carnal needs.

Enter: Scott. A bus driver. Scott Pine drives a bus because his father, Alan Pine, drove one and Alan's father before him did, too. The Pine family has driven buses stretching back to the early 1900s, and every male Pine takes pride in his bus-driving legacy. "The Kennedys and the Pines," Debbie's late father Victor Molineaux used to say, "are the closest to nobility we have in this fucking country."

Back when they were in grade school together, Debbie had a crush on Scott's older brother, Olden. Olden, an avid camper, died four weeks ago in a forest fire, Scott explained to Debbie when he stepped into the Safeway for a newspaper and Wrigley's gum and the two recognized each other. After that lengthy tale, he said, "Any chance I might take you out some time? Sometime soon?"

The rest, as they say, is history. Debbie and Scott enjoyed a romance that, contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald's belief that there are no second acts in American lives, grew more intense over the three-year period that the couple dated, and in early autumn of 2011 they wed. Debbie's two children, Miranda, now nine, and Chloe, now five, were her bridesmaids. Scott's best man was his bulldog, Patton.

It was a storybook union for the ages, but like all tales, good and bad, it lacked resolution. Surely, such a story cannot end without proper closure. What happened after? The original plot of this short story involved Debbie's youngest daughter Chloe fatally breaking her neck while figure skating, Debbie, guilt-ridden, falling off the wagon and reacquainting herself with hard drugs, her husband Scott dying in a plane crash (for irony), and Miranda becoming a porn starlet who is later murdered by a jealous boyfriend.

Not me. Take the ambiguous ending and like it.

Because F. Scott Fitzgerald was a fucking liar.