Repeating
Mistakes
by Robert Slentz-Kesler
Dean suspected
that if he could ever get his drinking under
control, he'd stop breaking the fifth metatarsal
on his right foot every summer. Every damn summer,
consistently. The annual fracture was almost as
predictable as Cassandra’s infidelity –
each autumn, he’d wonder which of her co-workers
would soon be the beneficiary of her sexual
acrobatics in room 245 of the Back Bay Hilton in
Boston (the private investigator had informed him
that she always used room 245).
And so each
year the pattern repeated itself: near the end of
the season at their summer house on Great East
Lake in New Hampshire, Dean would toss back a few
too many goblets of Westmalle Trappist ale and
then roll his ankle on the second step of the
dock, a step the inspector had warned them was
one inch shorter than the others. Then after the
icing and wrapping of his foot, and after
Cassandra had loaded their gear into the car and
loaded Dean into the front seat with his leg
elevated, she would lecture him during the entire
drive back into the city about bad habits and
repeating mistakes and how you can’t just
keep behaving the same way like that and expect
anything different to come of it.
But one of
these mistakes, Dean finally realized, was his
annual tradition of enduring the car lectures and
nodding his head and promising to do better next
time, so in this moment he chose to heed her
advice and break the pattern.
“You mean
like the bad habit of always using room 245?”
said Dean. “Like that? Is that a repeating
mistake?”
Cassandra
jerked her head to the right and glared at him as
the car swerved and scraped against the guardrail.
“Well, is
it?” yelled Dean above the squeal of metal
on metal. “Ha ha! Here, let me help you with
that,” he said, trying to grab the steering
wheel.
“Letgo
letgo letgo, Jesus!” said Cassandra. She
pushed him away and wrestled the car back onto
the highway.
Dean started
giggling. “Repeating mistakes – that’s
good.”
“Okay
okay,” said Cassandra. “Jesus.”
“Ha Ha!”
“Shithead.”
“Asshole.”
Cassandra
stared straight ahead at the road, her tight jaw
slowly slackening into a faint grin.
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