37-Year-Old Father of 3 Seeks Breakup Song Suggestions

(originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, 2025 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology)

The ad appears overnight on your favorite coffeeshop’s billboard. It hangs among the posters for local concerts and canned-food drives, handwritten in red sharpie on cheap printer paper, its floppy corners dangling like guilty puppy ears. You stare at it, clutching your latte and the croissant that you promised yourself you wouldn’t get but definitely need, already compiling songs in your head.

Mostly, it’s because you feel for the guy. The songs (the flyer explains in slumping fine print) are for personal use. You’re a mother yourself, albeit of two rather than three, and you’re thirty-eight years old, not thirty-seven. Dating is a different game, you learned, after you turn thirty: one with devastating, diminishing odds, worse each time another partner cashes out and forces you to roll the dice yet again at a slightly older age. You only cut your losses and married your spouse because you’d started suspecting the whole casino was rigged.

Plus, the flyer offers two dollars per song. This could mean a lot of croissants.

The work starts immediately. You plop into one of the stiff black armchairs with wafer-thin pillows, create a playlist on your phone, and add every breakup song that you know. There are a lot. You try not to think about what it says about you. In your increasingly distant youth, you’d even fantasized about writing your own breakup song, getting famous, escaping from the humid folds of the country’s flabby midsection to the sexy, sun-toasted, star-freckled west coast.

Eventually, the barista comes by and asks whether there’s anything else that he can get you. You tell him there isn’t. He keeps lingering there, though, just beside your chair. That’s when you realize that he’s holding a broom and a dustpan, and that the café is empty, and that it is, in fact, dark outside. You’d arrived just after ten o’clock that morning.

As you start your car (yes, you drove the quarter mile to the coffeeshop), you try not to feel guilty about having left your partner with the kids all day. These are back-breaking mental acrobatics to pull off, given that you dread returning home with every molecule in your quickly evaporating soul. Yes, you love your daughters more than anything; having reached toddlerhood, though, they show no particular investment in your continued existence. Your partner convinced you that working from home would help restore your bond. So far, the only appreciable effects have been cutting your income in half while your daughters remain contentedly aloof, and your partner leverages his new status as the primary breadwinner to exempt himself from any childcare, and from washing his own underwear.

Now, though, you have this new, important work. A moral obligation. A chance to prove to this heartbroken stranger—and, by extension, every heartbroken post-breakup version of your past self, unfolding accordion-style through the space-time continuum like a karmic paper chain—that he is not alone. How might your life have turned out differently, you let yourself wonder, if someone had given you a list of songs to help mourn your breakups? You probably would’ve fallen in love with them right then and there.

You keep thinking of more songs all throughout the drive home, the long overdue taking out of the trash, the sacrilege that your family makes of a dinner ritual: dino nuggets with boxed mashed potatoes, strawberry Pop-Tarts for dessert. Even after your partner rolls into his first snore (no sex tonight, but they were losing odds anyway), you cannot sleep for all the songs popping into your head, one after another, each a red strobe accompanied by a burst of vengeful lyrics. So you get up to scavenge another Pop-Tart pouch—chocolate-fudge flavor this time, from the stash you’ve hidden for yourself in the back of the freezer—then occupy the recliner and continue working, your face aglow with your phone’s light in the darkened living room. In the morning, your partner staggers out of the bedroom wearing his robe, bleary-eyed, unbecomingly bewildered. He asks whether you’ve made coffee yet. As an afterthought, he kisses your cheek. You wipe away the imprint of his morning breath, take the Pop-Tart wrappers to the kitchen, and make a slapdash pot of coffee. By the time you return with his mug, he’s already occupied your recliner.

You take a sick day from work, which grows into an extended long weekend, which then morphs into a week-long staycation. Every minute is spent plugged into your phone: in bed, on the toilet, during your two daughters’ bathtime. This is an investment in their future, you think, as they prowl and pounce through the scented bubbles. Statistically, they’re almost guaranteed at least one breakup in their lives—several, if your condition is genetic. You wish that you could give them a song for when it happens, one that encapsulates their slick, raw perfection here in the bathtub, worrying about and beholden to nobody. As they dry off, you snug your headphones tighter, and you crank up the volume.

Soon, your daughters have eaten the dino nuggets into their extinction, ushering in a new era ruled by Goldfish in a canned-soup ocean. The seasons seem to cycle through at an accelerated rate as your family runs out of clean summer clothing, moving prematurely to their fall wardrobe, then their winter outfits. Your oldest daughter trudges out the door to her first day of kindergarten in fleece pajamas under the blazing August sun. Your youngest itches constantly at last year’s pumpkin costume, but enjoys wearing it immensely. Only when your partner runs out of clean underwear does he ask what’s got you so busy. You tell him it’s a work project (shorthand for work of art and passion project) and ask whether he could help out around the house while you’re working. He instead buys himself several packs of new underwear and counts the problem resolved.

Your first sweep of your music library results in just over four hundred songs. It is dismally insufficient. No single song can fully capture the grief and relief and terror of a breakup, just like no single word can describe a latte’s confusing bittersweetness, their aftertaste of melancholy. So you keep searching, sifting through obscure romance movie scores and one-hit wonders’ forgotten B-sides. Your search algorithms become saturated with breakup songs; the tiles on your YouTube homepage, a scrapbook of Alannis Morisette; your Spotify suggestions, a shrine to Adele. Just as much time is spent sculpting the playlist, the order replicating a real breakup’s crushing falls and wavering rises and violent, unexpected cracks in mood. When you finish, it totals 82 hours, 7 minutes.

Meanwhile, your household has continued disintegrating. The Goldfish crackers have been wiped out, evolution taking another step back to Ikea meatballs revived from an ice age of freezer burn, then crackers matted with peanut butter like primordial sludge. Your youngest has embraced the savagery and delights in biting you, her sister, everyone, everything with her fresh, sharp teeth. Your partner now walks around the house wearing nothing but white briefs straight from the package; your oldest daughter’s kindergarten called to complain about her smell. Your boss called, too, to ask when you’d be coming back to work. She isn’t calling anymore.

Yet though you are lost to the world, you feel more in your element than you have in years. You listen to the playlist in its entirety for quality control, taking long drives and longer walks to the soundtrack of divas squeezing their bleeding hearts onto platinum records. As you belt the latest Ariana Grande song in the shower, it occurs to you that you might’ve missed out on a very lucrative career. You’ve certainly had enough inspiration. Enough to make up for not having a popstar’s creativity. Or a popstar’s face. Or a popstar’s perky, ageless body. It would be a depressing line of thought, but the music playing in the background makes it masochistically pleasurable. You lie back in your unmade bed with your headphones clamped over your ears, smiling with each song raking at the itchy scabs on your soul, shuddering as each peels away to reveal what might’ve been.

On Saturday morning, exactly four weeks after you first saw the ad, you wake up as early as you can manage. Your partner still snores and snuffles, but your daughters are already awake, befriending the giant amoeba of stained T-shirts occupying the laundry room. They sense an adventure afoot and invite themselves along, an argument that you know you cannot win and lack the energy to attempt anyway, so you strap them into their car seats, drive the quarter mile to the café, and leave them in the still-running car with a promise that you’ll be right back, and with croissants. You say it with an overdone French accent, cwahssahns, an ode to the kind of quirky, free-spirited mother you’d once hoped you could be.

As you stride into the café, you wave to the barista, who quickly pretends not to see you and busies himself with the milk steamer. The flyer still hangs on the corkboard, as plain and lonely as the man you imagine put it there. There’s a phone number at the bottom of the page. You dial it. As you hit the last number, your phone links it to an existing contact, helpfully popping their name onto your screen.

It’s your partner.

You stare, dumbly, at his contact photo, his name, the three kissy-face emojis that you added after your first date years ago, and which you sometimes contemplate swapping for monkeys, or devil faces, or piles of poop. You double-check the number on the poster. It only proves that you’re doubly screwed.

He picks up on the first ring. “Hey, let me call you back, I’m in the middle of—”

“Forget You,” you say.

There’s a long pause. “What?”

“Somebody That I Used to Know,” you go on. Straight down the playlist. “Bye Bye Bye. We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“I’ve got more,” you say. You’re not sure if it’s a threat or a plea.

He sighs. Over the speaker, a toilet flushes. “So you saw the ad.”

His belt buckle jangles as he cinches his gut back into his jeans. Your jaw trembles. You imagine your eyes popping out like a Mrs. Potato Head’s, first the left, then the right, from the building pressure in your skull. “You. Are. Leaving. Me?” The barista glances at you, concerned. You are aware that you are screaming. You just don’t know how to stop. “And this is how you were planning to tell me?”

“I mean, I was planning to tell you with the playlist.” Your partner sounds injured, as if he’s the victim of a ruined surprise. On his end of the line, the bathroom door opens, closes. He didn’t even wash his hands. Disgust ripples up your vertebrae. “I know you go nuts for those crummy breakup songs. Thought it’d be a nice farewell gift, you know. I guess you can still have it anyway.”

Footsteps, flapping across your kitchen’s tile floor. The suctioning whoosh of the freezer door. A cardboard box popping open, crinkling wrappers, chewing noises transmitted directly into your ear. That bastard. That bastard is eating your chocolate-fudge Pop-Tarts. “But…but….” You retaliate with the only argument you can come up with. “We’ve got kids. Two kids! The ad says father of three.”

The chewing stops. He swallows wetly. Laughs uncomfortably. You can just imagine him rubbing his hand over the fuzz on the back of his fat neck, that guilty grin curling the lips that’ve always been too thick to kiss comfortably. “Right. Well,” he begins.

You throw the phone to the floor, stomp on it, fling it across the café as hard as you can. Its screen detaches as it ricochets against the wall, skittering across the floor, dragging loose wires like spilled intestines. Your partner’s voice shrinks to a puny buzz, then fizzles out completely.

The barista gapes at you from behind the espresso bar. The customers queued up by the pastry cabinet have all stopped to stare, except for the old man with the cane, who uses the distraction to shuffle several spots forward in line. Aside from your labored breathing, the only noise comes from the inescapable coffeeshop music, still whispering happily to itself through the speakers overhead. It is, of course, a breakup song.

The irony is not lost on you that you want nothing more than to escape into a breakup song all of your own: to take control of the story, to revel in the vengeance, to be, for once in your life, the one who vanishes overnight into an exciting and glamorous future all of your own choosing, rather than the one left sitting at home, alone, asking themselves what happened.

But then—you did drive here yourself.

You have your daughters, and your music.

You need nothing else.

The thought empowers you, in the literal sense, sending an electric current vibrating through your body. You can almost feel the bars of a battery icon lighting up along your torso, hips-belly-chest, one, two, three. Ready. Set. Go.

These are the first three words of the song that hits you just as you and your daughters reach the freeway. The chorus comes to you at the city limit. By sunset, you have the verses made and memorized. You stop for fuel and bathrooms at a new coffeeshop, buy yourself the croissant that you never should’ve deprived yourself of, and scribble the lyrics on a napkin while waiting for your latte. They’re slick, raw perfection. You belt them out as you fly down the highway, punching out the rhythm on the horn, your oldest daughter singing along while your youngest cackles in her car seat, the three of you finally bonding over the abandon.

You speed west, ripping through the velvet twilight, a star in the making.