Cowboy Junkies Live at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel

by Helen R. Peterson

She knows her husband doesn't love her anymore, that he'll leave in six months for the younger, chubby girl who'll drink motor oil to keep him.  This concert, a "gift" to her, is performed by his favorite band.  He was standing before the stage, his tall gaunt frame swaying to the music like a redwood in a storm while she roamed, bored, along the edge of the club, touching the dead musicians painted on the walls as if translating cuneiform scrawled in an Egyptian tomb with one hand while the other is clutching a plastic brown bottle of Bud by the neck, the curve of the rim a twin of her own shoulders, hips, the swell of her belly still clinging to baby fat. Their paths meet only at the exit—where Margot signs autographs—but you wouldn't know it, seeing his face filled with pride, ("This is my wife.  She's a singer too."), turning to gaze from the singer whose low mellow voice reminds him of dulcet moments reading Richard Brautigan aloud in bed, crooning her to sleep with suicide poetry to his wife, who has spent nights in bed teaching him to sing "The Water is Wide," her lofty soprano as high as when he is laughing at nothing, like the Halloween night they were Lincoln and Wilkes Booth, wrestling on the ground, demanding mercy.