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Emily Rinkema
Five Stages of Doug
Citrus
Two weeks after my mother-in-law’s funeral, I come home from work to limes. Everywhere. My husband is at the kitchen island on the phone, boxes of limes stacked on the floor next to him, rolling on the counter in front of him.
“I’m your guy,” he says, writing something down in a purple Moleskine notebook, the one I bought our daughter for Christmas and that she left in her room when she went back to college last week. “Half dozen? I’ll pop by in about an hour,” he says.
I set my bag down on the chair by the fridge and wait for him to explain. I left for work this morning and we had no limes. I know that because last night he had wanted to toast his mother on her birthday with her favorite drink, a gin and tonic with extra lime, but we were out of limes, not even a slightly browning wedge in the fruit drawer. So we’d used lemon, which I said would be good enough, even though I knew it wouldn’t be.
So I know we had no limes this morning and now we have what looks to be hundreds.
“Doug,” I say. “You okay?”
“DeeDee! So glad you’re home, I’ve got to run out for a bit,” he says, and starts counting limes and putting them in paper lunch bags. “Lots of deliveries,” he says.
Space
There are twelve Star Wars movies and Doug watches them all back to back. He does it in two days. It’s over 26 hours of Star Wars. When I force him to take a break, he tells me Star Wars facts as I put away the groceries.
“There are 3.2 billion habitable systems in the Star Wars galaxy.”
“That’s a lot,” I say, opening the refrigerator.
“George Lucas thought it was going to be a flop. He went on vacation when it opened because he thought people would hate it.”
“He couldn’t have been more wrong,” I say. I slide the new milk in behind the old milk.
“Every one of the movies has the line, ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’”
“Mmmm,” I say. The fruit drawer is too full of limes to add the grapefruit I bought. I set it on the shelf next to the milk.
“I was seven when the first one came out,” he says. “Mom kept us home from school so we could go to the matinee on the day it opened.”
“Ahhh,” I say.
Gym
Doug joins the gym. He has given up his lime hobby and instead of morning citrus deliveries to our neighbors, he now goes to the gym. He lifts weights and he runs. When he comes home, he tells me how many steps he did, how many calories he burned, how many miles he ran before lunch. He tells me he’s considering buying a plunge pool so he can take ice baths every day.
On Sundays, Doug goes to the gym in the afternoon, even though it’s the busiest time of the week.
“Is this because you visited your mom on Sunday afternoons?” I ask him. He used to visit every week. He’d bring takeout, her favorite Chinese place, and they would sit in front of the TV and watch old movies, just the two of them.
He looks genuinely surprised. “Of course not,” he says.
“It’s okay to miss her,” I say. “You don’t have to literally run away from it. We could talk about it.” I reach across the table to put my hand on his, but he stands up before I can touch him.
“There’s nothing to fucking talk about,” he says.
Tools
When I come home from dinner with my sister I find Doug in the garage. He has moved the car into the driveway and the floor around him is covered in sawdust and two-by-fours. Not a lime in sight. I didn’t even know we had a power saw, but here he is leaning over it, toolbelt strapped around his waist, plastic goggles over his glasses, the “I am your father” hat our daughter bought him for his birthday one year, a hat I haven’t seen in a decade, on backwards.
I wait until he stops so I don’t startle him. “What are you making?” I ask, then have to repeat it louder so he’ll remove his ear protection.
“Blue bird houses,” he says, pointing at two finished houses to his right. They actually look pretty good.
“Do we have blue birds around here?” I ask. I’ve never seen one here. We used to see them at his mom’s.
“Not yet,” he says, optimistically.
“How many are you going to make?” I ask him. We live on a quarter acre.
“As many as we need,” he says. “Be in in a bit,” he says, and puts his ear muffs back on.
I go inside, change into my pajamas, and think about the neighbors I’m going to have to apologize to tomorrow. I can hear the saw over the sound of The TV, and even though it’s almost nine o’clock, and even though I already had a glass with my sister at dinner, I pour myself some wine.
Mole
I wake up and Doug’s not in bed. I find him on the kitchen floor with a gin and tonic, two limes. He leans against the island, his knees tucked under his chin like a little boy. He’s completely naked. I can’t remember when I last saw him completely naked outside of our bedroom.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” I say, but he doesn’t laugh, doesn’t respond, doesn’t even look up.
For the first time in twenty two years of marriage, I have no idea what to do.
I turn on the light and go to the refrigerator. I take out the tonic and a lime. We are down to a couple dozen in the fruit drawer, some too hard to use. I take the gin out of the cupboard over the toaster. I fill a glass with ice, pour in more gin than I should, and add the tonic. I cut a wedge of lime. It’s taken me just under two minutes to make my drink and Doug has said nothing, made no sound. I wanted him to be the first to speak, to give me some direction here, a hint about what I’m supposed to do or say or be.
I come around to his side of the island and squat down next to him. His legs are muscular, more defined now than they’ve been in a decade. He has a mole on his side, just under his armpit, one of four I keep track of, that I watch in case they grow into something we should worry about. To see him naked here, on the floor of the kitchen, almost makes my heart stop.
Still, Doug says nothing. He runs his finger around the rim of the glass in front of him.
Because I can’t think of what I should do, and because I think I might break if I look at him any longer, I set my drink on the island and take my clothes off, slowly, until I am as naked as he is, and then I sit next to him, my back pressed against the island, not touching, but close enough to feel him. And I wait.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing most recently appeared in Variant Lit, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Trash Cat and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work and follow her on X, BS, or IG ( @emilyrinkema). Website: emilyrinkema.wixsite.com.
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