Not like this, he thought as he slumped down. The roll of $20s and $50s felt like a fist-sized stone in his shirt pocket.

The pendulum swung right. 10:51 pm, Friday night.

Betty and her sister had taken a tour bus to Toronto for the weekend, to see The Lion King. She wouldn't be back until late Sunday. An empty space beneath his ribs had imploded and he couldn't breathe.

"You're drunk," laughed the girl across the table. She took another shot of gin and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

He wasn't. His face flushed. Sweat pooled at his chin and something like liquid fire worked its way through his chest down to the tips of his fingers.

The pendulum swung left. He'd made a call from a gas station pay phone and they'd sent the girl by taxi. "Just someone to play cards with," he'd said. Sure.

He'd done this a few times before, when Betty was out of town. Paced for hours and checked the windows over and over. Taken the roll of cash from the loose floorboard in the closet. Made the call; played some five card draw. And then, when his cheeks were flushed with booze, he peeled off twenty dollars at a time with shaking hands, to pay for things he was ashamed to ask his wife to do.

But this one was so sweet, and much too young. New to it – maybe a week into it. He couldn’t ask. He was going to send her away untouched. Maybe after one more drink.

The pendulum swung right. What he meant to say was "Listen, I'm having a heart attack. Nobody can know that you were here. You can have all the money in my pocket – there's about eleven hundred bucks. Just wash out your shot glass, put it back in the cupboard, lay out a game of solitaire and get the hell out of here. There's a pay phone down the block."

What he said was "Lissss..." as he slid out of his chair onto the tile floor.

The pendulum swung left. The girl's expression changed. "Shit," she said, "you need an ambulance." She ignored him as he shook his head no. She dialed the phone on the kitchen wall.

The pendulum swung right. He heard the tinny voice of the 911 operator as he interrogated; he heard the girl's shaky responses. The pressure in his chest lifted and the pain melted into a tingling, floating sensation. It seemed to him as if he were looking up from the bottom of a narrow well.

"Please," he wanted to say, "not like this. You'll be in trouble. You’re not supposed to care about me. Don’t you understand why you can’t be here?"

The girl brought him a pillow and an afghan from the living room sofa. She knelt over him in her corset and fishnets, stroking his hair and kissing his forehead, waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

Photo copyright joesnitty (jeremy). View it on Flickr.