by Milo Abrams
best to take a job an hour away to make enough money for their hopefully budding family. On his way home from working the night shift, he passed through three exits and crossed the county line all without realizing it. Then, he was exhausted physically, but now it was a mental exhaustion.
He was nearly at the end of his road by the time he snapped out of his haze and noticed the wildflowers he picked for Ruby still sitting on the seat.
Damn. I wonder if those would've helped?
He didn't even bother to turn on the radio. If they had children, maybe he would've been used to the garbage that spewed from the speakers. He imagined having to deal with whatever music his child was into that year, never understanding how he could seem so old. Instead, he let the quiet whirring of the road under his tires help cultivate ideas on how to fix up the goat pen so nothing could get in.
Will McAllister was no carpenter. Pulling up to the home improvement store, he was instantly intimidated at the selection. Inside, he was constantly bothered by older men in dirt covered smocks who happily directed him to where he wanted to go. The sheer amount of stuff inside made Cray’s look like a garage sale. He selected a few rolls of super fine chicken wire and then, with the assistant of one of the kind older gentlemen, got a cart and collected a stack of lumber. He wheeled the entire thing up front, looking for someone to help him check out, but the teenage kids hired to run the registers collected around each other like pieces of garbage in a sewer drain. Will was annoyed, and impatient. The entire trip took about an hour, most of which was spent waiting at the register while a boy with forty piercings tried to figure out to ring up wood.
Between the lack of sleep, the stress of Ruby, and Tucker missing, Will was exhausted. The day hadn't even reached afternoon and he was already aching for bed.
He drove back through city, wondering where he could find a place to get a security camera but quickly became annoyed. Living in the country for so many years, he had forgotten how noisy and crowded the city could get. He had grown accustomed to the wide-open spaces and seeing only his wife every day. It was exactly what he wanted.
His stomach growled as he waited at a stoplight. Automatically, he picked up the receipt from the home improvement store and looked it over. He was shocked to see how much he had spent. At the time he didn't care, he just wanted to get out and get away from all of the noise. He needed space to breathe, and wasn't listening when the cashier rang him up. He just swiped his bank card through the machine and then got the hell out of there. Before realizing how much he spent, he considered bringing back lunch for Ruby and himself. He had also planned to stop and buy a security camera for the barn, but he knew how paranoid she got about the money. It was all they had to live off until he sold that year’s harvest, and each year it seemed to get harder and harder to get by.
Changing his mind, he turned down a residential street to try and find his way back around to head home. As he looked down at the bag to put the receipt inside, something flew by the front of the truck out of the corner of his eye. He instinctively slammed the brakes and immediately came to a jolting halt. In front of him, three young boys chased a dog that had run out into the road. Lost in the adrenaline, Will punched the horn of his truck at them, the misplaced anger beaming from his face. One of the boys, who was wearing a bright pink hat, turned at him and flipped him off. Will took a deep breath and moved on as soon as they had cleared the road.
They're just kids.
By the time he pulled back into his driveway, it was too late for lunch. He backed the truck up to the barn and then grabbed the flowers from the seat.
She loves flowers, he thought.
But when he opened the door, he could hear the shower running upstairs. He pulled a vase from the top shelf in the closet and put the flowers inside with a little water. He then set it in the middle of the table. There was nothing for him to do except work on the goat pen.
Hopefully, she'll be happy that I'm home.
Will quickly got lost in his work. He was a mild perfectionist, and quickly came up with a plan to not only completely seal off the goat pen within the barn, but to also build a second gate at the back opening of the barn to keep the goats from immediately running out if they got loose. He spent hours draping chicken wire from the gate to the ceiling and inspecting every single gap and space along not only the pen, but around the outside of the barn itself. He wasn't going to be taking any more chances. If an animal tried to get in, it would fail miserably.
He stood back and admired all the work he had done. Traps might've been less work, but he hated the idea of killing anything. He wiped the sweat from his brow and realized that it had been hours, and Ruby had never come out to see him. It had been hours since their fight, and while he knew she didn't cool down quickly, he did. He was no longer actively mad by the time he had pulled out of the driveway.
Surely, she wasn’t still mad?
He had underestimated her anxiety. He walked into the house, expecting her to be working on that night’s dinner, but instead found her back in the arm chair just sitting there. He walked over slowly as not to spook her. Her eyes seemed glossy and her breathing slow as if she were in a trance.
“I'm home,” he said softly.
“I know. You were gone awhile,” she said.
“Well, I've been home a while. Been working on the goat pen. It looks pretty good. Do you want to come see it?”
She turned toward him, her eyes like ice cubes sitting in their sockets. “You did it, didn't you?”
The question caught him off guard. His body responded accordingly by squishing his eyes into a squint and slowly leaning his torso away “Did what?”
She slowly stood up and walked toward him, her hands balled into tight fists at her sides. “You took Tucker, didn't you? It makes perfect sense.”
“What?” Will said in shock. “Take him where? What're you talking about?”
“You never liked him,” she seethed. “You never liked any of them, but he was the one you hated the most. That's why you always called him Tucker the Fucker.”
Will had seen this before. Sometimes, when Ruby’s anxieties mixed with her insecurities, a devilish personality emerged. It was almost as if she was hiding somewhere inside and a completely different person had taken over. Someone who was like the shadow of the woman he loved. Her words were sharp knife blades covered in salt, and there was no limit to the lengths she would go to hurt him. What ability she had to hold her tongue or not say what she really meant completely evaporated when the shadow took over. He did his best to resist agitating it further, but she was relentless.
“Of course I didn't take him,” he said. “Why would I? I know that he was your favorite. I would never do anything like that to you.”
“You probably took him this morning. That's why you were in such a hurry to get out of here. Where did you take him?”
“I didn't take him,” he said.
“Oh?” she started laughing. “So, you're just going to lie to my face?” She shoved her finger deep into her chest. “I don't need you or anything else to be happy. You hear me?”
That hit him deep. He did his best to resist recoiling in anger. He took a deep breath and allowed a pause before speaking. “Sweetheart, I would never do anything like that. You know that.”
“Do I? You're just so sick of my anxiety that you wanted to shut me up. Silent sadness is better than whining fear, isn't it? You tell me all the time how you hate my anxiety. I'm such an inconvenience to you, and all you do is make me feel like I'm crazy.”
Will stood there silently. He didn't mean to but he knew he wasn't exactly the best listener.
“I'm just not going to tell you how I feel anymore. Then you won't have to hear it.”
“This is ridiculous,” he said boiling over, “I spend my entire life trying to make you better.”
As soon as the words came out he couldn't take them back. She just stared at him as the hurt began to show in her eyes.
“That's not what I
meant.”
“Bullshit!” she screamed. “It's exactly as I said! You think I'm something that's broken and that needs to be fixed instead of considering that my feelings are valid.”
“Your feelings would be valid if they were based on reality, but they aren't!” he yelled back. “All I do is try to make you happy. All I ever want to do is make you happy. Yet despite my efforts, I fail. You are never happy. Not before the goats, not after the damn goats, not in the majority of the last twenty years!”
She stared at him blankly. “Do you really think that this helps? Do you think that you pointing out how you are always right helps me at all? It doesn’t!” She turned away and walked back into the living room toward the TV. Will followed her.
“I’m not going to sit here and agree with you just to make your ego feel better! Facts are facts. You’re always afraid that the worst things are going to happen, and okay, it could. But they are nothing more than possibilities!”
“Blah blah blah,” she said in a monotone voice.
“This is ridiculous!” Will screamed. “Why won’t you just listen to me ever? No matter how many times I’m right, you never believe me about anything!”
She turned toward him, her face red and her eyes dark. “Then what about Tucker?” Her voiced roared out in a way that scared the both of them. “You always tell me that nothing bad will happen, that everything is going to