Maybe if I would have thrown the trash more often. Maybe if I didn’t let the dishes pile up. Who knows, really? Women are hard. That’s the advice I would have given my son if he had not have died. You never know why they do the things they do, but it sure hurts when they do ’em.

I guess the final straw was that I’m an Evo. Joanne has never liked Evos much, not after Odessa. She blamed them for everything. “I blame them for everything!” she once yelled at me when I questioned her belief that an Evo was responsible for our hour-long wait on line for a cronut.

Despite this, I had to come clean. I had to be a man tell my wife the truth. “Sweetie Pumpkin,” I said.

“Excuse me?” she replied.

My bad. I was a bit nervous, and I guess it was making me forget my manners. “I mean, Mistress Sweetie Pumpkin.” She smiled and lowered her gun a little. “There’s something,” I continued sweating like a pubescent boy on prom night, “I need to tell you.”

“Well, get on with it,” she demanded in her own loving way.

“Um, I…like musicals.” It wasn’t the best time to come clean, I decided. No, I should put it off a little longer. Maybe until she’s unarmed. Of course, then I’d be waiting forever.

Man up, I thought on the ride to our next victim. Joanne gleefully drew red X’s over his eyes in the mugshot, giggling like the sweet little girl I first fell in love with. “Look, okay, I just need to,” I grabbed the paper and set it on fire with my renewable energy superpower. “It’s just, that was me, I’m a them, yeah, sorry I know you don’t like, but that’s what, please don’t kill me!”

After a very tense moment with a gun to my head, she finally responded. She didn’t say anything, but she did lower the gun which is essentially her way of saying “I love you”. Then she left me there, alone in the car. My marriage had come to an end. My wife had literally left me. For the first time in over a decade I was single again.

Being out of the game so long, I wasn’t sure how kids today were hooking up. I suppose I would need to do some Tinding or Grinding, whatever it is. I decided to kick off my hunt for the ladies back in my old stomping ground, Rochester, NY. Swingersville. Copulation Central. The Deflower City. If I could get laid anywhere, it would be in Rochester.

I went to The Old Toad, the finest bar in my old neighborhood. Boy did it bring back memories. Well, it would have if I hadn’t been drinking so much during them. And just as expected, there was a buffet of single co-eds for me to choose from.

“Alright, Luke,” I told myself. “You can do this. Joanne isn’t here to watch you fail anymore. You have nothing to worry about. She won’t give you a beating if you strike out.”

“You gonna order something?” the bartender interrupted my pep talk.

I got two gin and tonics and started on my way. The first woman looked like a sweet girl. A quiet blonde with a couple of loud friends talking away with each other and ignoring her. I went up to her and said, “Hey there.”

She smiled.

“So my kid died,” I opened.

She frowned.

“He exploded. But I’m single now, so how about we get married and have another one?”

“Get away from me, like right now,” she said. Not the response I was hoping for, but that’s the game. You gotta keep trying. Before I met Joanne, my motto had always been it’s not whether you fall down, it’s whether you get back up. Joanne’s motto had been if someone falls, stand on their head and hold their face down in the mud. Both are valid life philosophies, but I’m glad I can embrace my own once again. And so, I set off to the next potential suitress.

This one was a mysterious brunette sitting alone at the end of the bar. I made my approach and turned on my sexy face.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she replied.

This was it. I could feel the connection, like a phantom phone vibration in my pants. “I’m really sad and will you please just come home with me? We don’t even have to do anything. You can just hold me. I just want someone to talk to. Joanne never listened, you know? She rarely even let me speak, to be honest. It’s just I have so much to say, especially with everything that has been going on right now, but nobody to talk to. It’s like that time when I was in fourth grade and Andy told all the other guys that I was really a girl, and then they stopped talking to me, except for Jerry. For some reason he always wanted to hang out and play contact sports. That was the real reason I did so poorly that year. My parents thought something was wrong. They had me all checked out and everything. A child psychologist said I….”

Suddenly I realized I had been talking to an empty chair. I looked around for my mysterious brunette. How mysterious!

“Dude, bro,” the bartender said, “You’re scaring off the girls. How about you call it a night?”

He was right. Perhaps I wasn’t ready, or perhaps there’s nobody in this world that could love me anymore. Maybe I’ll just go home and burn the house down or something. Might check out that Kimmy Schmidt show on Netflix too.