Blood

MY DOWNSTAIRS NEIGHBOR, BART, who's been a Marine and served in Afghanistan and still has a Semper Fi sticker on the rear window of his truck, says I have to get back on the bus. He means the Number 3 outbound. I stopped riding the bus after seeing my ex-fiancé, Todd, on it two mornings in a row, last Thursday and Friday. On Thursday, I thought he was probably taking it to get his teeth cleaned—his dentist's office is on South Temple. But then he was on it again Friday morning, and nobody gets their teeth cleaned two mornings in a row, not even people with really dirty teeth.

Every morning this week I've been pounding on Bart's door at 7:30 so he'll drive me to work. He answers in his green plaid pajama pants and a ratty Alice in Chains T-shirt. His dark curly hair is messier than it usually is; half-asleep and groggy, leaning his forehead against the doorjamb, he looks like a little kid in a big, muscly Marine body. But this morning, he looks straight at me, awake and cranky. No, he says, before I even ask. He says he is done driving me because I am a coward, but he'll ride the bus with me for moral support. And because he has to go up to the VA anyway. He'll just go early, with me.

Moral support. Such a strange phrase. What's moral about it? Don't they mean morale? Morale support?

Todd shouldn't be in my neighborhood. The avenues down through South Temple and the north half of campus are mine. Todd can have the rest of the city and the south side of campus, where he works in a toxicology lab with his new girlfriend. I worked there too, before I got a job as the office assistant for the Department of Geology and Mines on the northwest side of campus. We've never spoken about our geographical divorce, but it makes sense to me. That he would bike from the house we used to share to my side of the city, just to put his bike on the bus and ride it up to his side of campus—that's the lowest of low moves since the time I walked in on him and Mimi stand-up fucking in the bathroom I'd repainted myself.

Bart gets dressed in three minutes—he can do that—and comes out to the bus stop across the street from our apartment building, where I'm waiting for him, my boots planted in the snow that never seems to melt completely off the berms even though the sidewalks get clear. It's January, and spring in Salt Lake seems a long way away. Bart has time to make a giant snowball before the Number 3 pulls up, and he chucks it at the no parking—bus stop sign before we board. There are only three other people: a rugged-faced woman with a red scarf knotted at her throat, texting so furiously that when I sit in the seat behind her I can hear the parts of her phone creaking under the force of her thumbs, and an old man and young boy sitting together on the row of seats reserved for handicapped people, facing the aisle. Bart slides into the seat beside me and stares at the man and boy. They both have brown skin and black hair. The man's wearing a white, fez-like cap and a white tunic. The boy has huge, thick-lashed eyes and keeps his thin arms folded over a Dora the Explorer backpack. I notice Bart can't take his eyes off of them.

I nudge him. "You okay?"

"What? Oh. Yeah," he says. And then he looks out the window to the right of me. We're passing the Friendship Hotel with its sad row of bare trees in front, all the slushy snow piled up at the curb. A couple seconds later I notice him...