“Debbie, is that Gary in your driveway?”

My neighbor Linda was calling from across the street. I could see her through my front window, standing at her own living room window in her bathrobe with the phone pressed against her ear and the curtain pulled back.

I looked outside.

There he was.

My husband was standing at the bottom of my front porch steps holding two suitcases, with a bag of golf clubs slung over his shoulder. He was wearing the gray windbreaker I’d bought him for his fiftieth birthday. His silver Buick was parked crooked in the driveway, half on the grass.

Four months earlier, he’d walked out of this house after twenty-two years of marriage. He’d said he needed “a fresh start.”

Apparently, the fresh start was over.

“Debbie?” Linda said. “You still there?”

“I’m here,” I said. “Let me call you back.”

I opened the front door.

Gary looked up at me and smiled. A big, easy smile, like he was coming home from a long business trip.

“My girlfriend kicked me out,” he announced, “so I’m back!”

I stared at him.

“Was that supposed to be good news?” I said.

My name is Debbie Holloway. I’m fifty-one years old. For twenty-two years, I was married to Gary Holloway, who sold insurance, played golf every Saturday, and never once in two decades remembered to buy toilet paper.

We met when I was twenty-eight. He was thirty. He was charming and funny and loud, the kind of man who walked into a room and started talking to strangers like he’d known them for years. I was quiet. I liked that he did the talking. I liked that he made every party fun.

We got married at twenty-nine and thirty-one. We bought this house, a little yellow two-story on Maple Court with a big front porch and a backyard full of my tomato plants. We had one son, Kevin, who’s twenty-four now and lives in Denver with his girlfriend.

For twenty-two years, I thought we were fine.

Not perfect. Nobody’s perfect. Gary forgot birthdays. He left his socks on the bathroom floor. He took long golf weekends with his buddies and never asked if I wanted to come. He talked over me at dinner parties. He called me “the boss” to his friends in a way that wasn’t really a compliment.

But he also warmed up my car on freezing mornings without being asked. He made ridiculous commentary during crime shows, guessing the killer in the first five minutes and always being wrong. He threw his keys on the kitchen counter every night at six-fifteen, and the sound of them hitting the granite meant home.

I thought that was what marriage looked like after twenty-two years. Comfortable. Ordinary.

I was wrong.

He left on a Tuesday in June.

I came home from the dentist’s office where I work as a receptionist and found him in our bedroom, packing a suitcase. Not a weekend bag. The big one. The one we took to Florida.

“Gary? What’s going on?”

He didn’t stop packing. He folded a polo shirt very carefully and laid it in the suitcase.

“I’m leaving, Deb,” he said.

I stood in the doorway holding my purse.

“Leaving where?”

“Leaving,” he said. “You. This. I need a fresh start.”

I laughed. I actually laughed. I thought it was some kind of strange joke.

He didn’t laugh.

“I’ve met someone,” he said. He still wasn’t looking at me. “Her name doesn’t matter. I’m not happy, Debbie. I haven’t been happy in a long time. I need to figure out who I am.”

“You’re fifty-three,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “I don’t have time to waste.”