“I’ll ignore that,” Leonard said. “So, John, we’re the cruise guinea pigs.”

“Kinda,” John said.

I eyeballed the brochure. I had never really considered, or even thought about a cruise, but now the idea was starting to appeal. “Maybe it’s too late to get on this one, it leaves, what? Two weeks?”

“You could call them,” John said. “Their number is on the brochure.”

I’m not exactly sure why I was convinced to do the cruise, maybe because it was so alien to me. The closest my family had ever come to a cruise was a rowboat down the Sabine River with fishing poles.

At first I thought spending a few thousand dollars for such was foolish. That was a good chunk out of the hundred-thousand-dollar check, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted it. I wanted to step outside my life and enter into another. I wanted to leave chickens and disappointment behind. It wasn’t like I was leaving anything of importance, even Brett was out of the picture. It might be nice to masturbate in an exotic location for a change.

Growing up, my parents had continually put aside things like trips, vacations; only rarely went to movies and ate out at Dairy Queens to save money. Maybe they had to. But they had never had a hundred thousand dollars in their hand at one time. What would they have done?

I knew what they would have done. They’d have thought first of me, second about survival, and last about a vacation. They’d have banked the money, kept working, and maybe driven over to Tyler to visit relatives. My dad might have gone fishing.

I wanted to do different. I wanted a radical change.

But I hesitated, and I knew why. Brett.

Last week of work before my vacation started, on a blue Monday, early morning when I should have been sleeping off the night shift, I called Brett. If nothing had changed in her schedule, she’d be home from the night shift at the hospital.