The Wolf Wants In

by Laura McHugh

  I thought of our mother, when Becca and I came to tell her that Shane had died, how she had struggled to accept it. How grief came in slow tides of shock and disbelief and then wave upon wave of sorrow, interspersed, at first, with brief lulls where you could almost forget that it was real. She’d been robbed of the one thing she felt she was owed after so many years of nursing and bathing, cooking and sewing and cleaning, doling out discipline and love in careful measures. Dying before your children, she had said, was supposed to be a mother’s greatest blessing.

  * * *

  —

  Becca and I had promised to help Mom go through the boxes we’d brought back from Shane’s. After Dad died, she’d given up partway through sorting his belongings, filling the basement with musty cartons of unknown contents, waiting for a heavy rain to seep through the floor and destroy it all so she wouldn’t have to make decisions about what to toss and what to keep.

  Mom still lived in the battered three-bedroom house where we’d grown up, paint peeling off the old aluminum awnings, asbestos-shingle siding peppered with mildew. The yard was shaggy. Weeds had kept growing until the recent cold snap, and Shane was the one who usually mowed it. A neighbor came by with his brush hog the day after Shane died, but he’d mowed right over the dogwood sapling Mom had won in a drawing at the bank, and she told him not to come back. She’d been saying since Dad died—it had been a dozen years now—that she should sell the house and move into an apartment over in Blackwater (a regular apartment, not one specifically for old people, God forbid) but then she’d be out planting tomatoes and pruning the pussy willows and sticking new weather stripping around the drafty front door, and it seemed fairly obvious that she would never leave. Not because she loved the house—she was forever grousing about the lack of a decent porch—but because it was familiar.

  After so many years, she no longer saw the outdated linoleum in the kitchen, the hideous mirrored tiles glued to the dining room wall, the pea-green sink in the bathroom. A dog named Brownie (all of our pets had been unimaginatively named after their most obvious characteristic: Spot, Fluffy, Shorty) had ripped up the carpet in the living room, and she had smoothed it down with packing tape so that no one would trip on it, saying she wanted to wait and replace it right before she moved. She would stay, unless something happened to upheave her life in such a way that she couldn’t go on there. If Dad’s death hadn’t done it—or Shane’s—nothing would.

  She’d settled into a simple routine after Dad died. I’d thought at first that she was depressed, because she stopped cooking and sewing, two things I’d always thought she enjoyed. When I asked her about it, she’d been indignant. Decades of necessary seamstress duties—stitching everything from Halloween costumes to prom dresses, constantly altering our clothes to make them last a little longer—had eroded any joy she got from her sewing machine. Same with cooking. She now relished making dinner for one, a Banquet potpie in a foil pan that could go right in the trash, no dishwashing required, nobody bothering her while she ate. The house was quiet and empty, devoid of people and pets after a lifetime of crowding, and she didn’t seem to mind.

  Becca and I carried in the crates of old yearbooks and cassette tapes and photo albums—all sentimental things Crystle didn’t want—and the boxes of papers that we’d saved from the fire. Becca said she’d let me have the antique pie safe because she knew I wanted it, even though she was technically next in line. Mom sank into her recliner, staring out the window at the silver Firebird in her driveway, and then closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see it. She either fell asleep or pretended to, leaving Becca and me alone at the kitchen table to sift through what Shane had left behind.

  We quickly realized that the papers, which we’d thought might be trash, were actually organized by year, and it looked as though Shane had saved every vaguely important document or piece of mail he’d ever received—an inefficient system, maybe, but I was impressed that he had a system at all. I kept my mail in a pile on the counter, cleaning around it and watching it grow until the inevitable avalanche forced me to do the necessary culling and filing.

  “Do you remember a girlfriend named DeAnne?” Becca asked, picking through a stack of greeting cards.

  “Nope.”

  “How about Lindsey? Or Tara?”

  “Never heard of them,” I said. “Are they from his Alabama days?” Shane had wanted to get as far away from home as possible after graduation, and he’d found his escape through a trade school in Birmingham. He earned his welding certification and didn’t move back until after Dad had died.

  “Yeah. Looks like he was keeping Hallmark in business.” She held up a Valentine card covered in lacy hearts. “I wonder if any of them know. That he’s gone. Or any of his old buddies, the ones he hasn’t seen in a while. There are letters from some of them.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “Maybe it’s better that way.” Shane wasn’t into social media, so we didn’t have an easy way to track down his old friends. I envied them, that they could continue to think of him from time to time, imagining that he was out there somewhere if they wanted to get in touch. I still caught myself picking up the phone to text him, not wanting to remove his name from my contacts because that felt too final, too real. As though erasing him from my phone was somehow worse than burying him.

  “That’s weird.” Becca frowned.

  “What?”

  “His mortgage. It was going down with every statement, like you’d expect. Then here it jumped up, higher than where it started.”

  “What year was that?”

  Becca handed me the paper. “Two years ago. Around the time he and Crystle got engaged.”

  “He must have pulled out his equity and refinanced.”

  “Yeah, but what do you think he needed all that cash for?”

  “My guess would be Crystle.” He’d bought her a modest engagement ring at first, but she’d talked him into exchanging it for something flashier, the new diamond larger and surrounded by a halo of smaller gems. Right after their engagement, her car had broken down and he’d replaced it with a new Jeep. Shane was frugal in many ways, packing bologna sandwiches for lunch every day and putting a box fan in the window rather than running the air conditioner, but when it came to women and cars, he was easily convinced to open his wallet.

  “Look at this,” Becca said. “About a year ago, he took out a personal loan.”

  “I bet that was when he helped Crystle go into business selling those leggings. That didn’t last long.”

  “Just long enough for her to quit her job,” Becca grumbled. She’d bought several pairs of Crystle’s leggings to be nice but never wore them after the first pair she tried on split a seam along the crotch. Crystle had switched from leggings to selling essential oils, then diet supplements, not sticking with anything long enough to come out ahead.

  “Hey, are there credit card statements in there?” I asked.

  “Everything’s in here,” she said. We dug through the most recent boxes and compared. His credit card, bank, and mortgage statements all tracked a steady decline in his finances from the time he and Crystle had gotten together.

  “He worked so hard,” Becca said, getting up to stretch and rub her eyes. “And then he was just moving backward.” She opened Mom’s nearly empty fridge and scooted aside a few cans of store-brand soda to get out the iced tea. “Don’t you think it’s strange, too, that Crystle’s name’s not on any of this? The house? The checking account?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, plenty of people keep their finances separate when they get married.”

  “I guess,” Becca said, pouring two glasses of tea. “You want something to eat?”

  “Nah, I’m okay.” It was getting dark, nearly dinnertime, but our late lunch of gas station hotdogs was still churning in my stomach.

  “Good,” Becca said, carefully opening and closing cabinet d
oors so as not to wake Mom. “Because there’s nothing to eat here but saltine crackers and bouillon cubes. Maybe we should run and get her some groceries.”

  “I can do it when you head home,” I said. “The boys’ll want you there to tuck them in.” I missed putting Lily to bed on the nights she wasn’t with me. She still liked for me to read to her, sometimes library books that seemed too mature for her but weren’t, other times she’d surprise me and choose an old favorite, a picture book like Scrambled Eggs Super! by Dr. Seuss, something she’d probably be embarrassed to admit to anyone. I knew she was safe at Greg’s, but that wasn’t the same as being able to see her foot poking out of the covers, hearing her sigh in her sleep when I peered in to check on her.

  Becca handed me a glass of tea and sat back down. “Yeah, Jerry has a hard time wrangling them into bed. And he’s probably sneezing like crazy from having Gravy there all day.” She started stuffing papers back into the appropriate boxes.

  “Maybe he just hadn’t gotten around to putting Crystle’s name on everything yet,” Becca continued. “I’m sure he wasn’t thinking he’d die anytime soon.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “Or maybe things weren’t going well between them. Maybe he wasn’t sure the marriage would last.”

  “Wouldn’t he have said something to us, though?” Becca asked. “Wouldn’t he have told us if they were having problems?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Did he ever say anything to you about their relationship?”

  She shook her head. Shane had always kept his personal life private, even from us. I’d never thought of it as intentional, just a guy thing, not wanting to tell his sisters about his girlfriends. When we were all together, we played cards, horsed around with the kids, watched Royals games. We texted stupid memes back and forth, things to make one another laugh. He didn’t talk about his job or his friends or what he did when we weren’t around. He’d barely mentioned Crystle before they got engaged—he only said something when Mom wondered aloud why he hadn’t been coming around as often. If there had been some sliver of uncertainty between Shane and his wife, something that kept them from going all in as most newlyweds do, I didn’t know anything about it.

  “One more box,” I said, “and I think we’re done for the night.” I opened a storage tub that Shane had helpfully labeled JUNK. At the top were old Field & Stream and Hot Rod magazines, and beneath those, a mishmash of mementos and trinkets: loose coins, Matchbox cars, Mardi Gras beads, warped cardboard coasters from various dive bars, some with phone numbers scrawled on the margins. Buried in the jumble was a kid’s craft project made of paper plates and yarn and Popsicle sticks, like something Lily would have brought home from preschool. A heart with the words JESUS LOVES ME was pasted unevenly on the front, and a child’s name was inscribed in crayon on the back, the letters long and gangly like they had kept growing after they were drawn. CHARLE. Charlie or Charles, I assumed, didn’t know how to spell his own name.

  “Who’s Charles?” I asked, holding up the craft to show Becca. She looked at it with wide eyes and shrugged.

  I wondered what else Shane had kept from us, what more we might discover. His art teacher’s words floated in my head, the note he’d left on Shane’s unexpected rendering of flowers. You are full of surprises.

  The next week, Henley went to clean the Sullivan house alone. Missy hadn’t come home, and Henley suspected that her mother had hooked up with her old friend Ellie Embry again. Ellie, who hadn’t changed since junior high, when she and Missy had cemented their friendship by getting caught drunk-driving a tractor, still had a year-round suntan, a complete lack of interest in getting sober, and the ability to make terrible ideas sound enticing. Henley hadn’t mentioned Missy’s absence to her uncles, wanting to give her mother a chance to come back on her own. Plenty of times over the years, Raymond and Junior had hunted down their baby sister and extracted her from whatever dark den she’d holed up in, and they would surely do it again if it came to that.

  The Sullivan house felt empty, though it had felt that way the last time, too, and she wondered if it was partly because of Daphne’s looming absence—if a house without women, without a mother, had an inherently different feel. Henley considered skipping Jason’s bedroom altogether, but she hadn’t washed his sheets the week before, for obvious reasons, and she didn’t want to give Earl anything to grouse about. She had no interest in a career as the Sullivans’ housekeeper, but Earl paid better than any job she could find in town, and she needed to stay in his good graces for a while, at least.

  Jason’s door gaped open several inches. She hammered her knuckles on the thick wooden slab and called hello, and when she heard nothing but the whoosh of the air conditioner laboring to keep the big house cool, she let herself in, parking the vacuum on the plush carpet. The bed was empty, the covers twisted up like a pack of wild dogs had been burrowing in them.

  She hadn’t gotten a good look around before, when Jason had rolled over and startled her, but the room was the same as the rest of the house, opulent and outdated, with a preppy argyle wallpaper border and shiny brass sconces and a matching suite of heavy oak furniture. Thick brocade drapes blocked the sun, and an enormous flat-screen television hung on the wall, video games strewn on the floor below. A Kansas City Royals pennant was tacked above the bed. On a shelf weighted down with baseball trophies and track medals was a framed photo of Jason at maybe two years old, wearing a tiny seersucker suit and sitting on his mother’s lap. As she maneuvered around the balled-up socks and empty energy drink cans on the floor and began to strip the bed, Henley noted the same feral scent that all boys’ rooms seemed to have, a musk of sweat and pheromones and wet dreams. She wasn’t sure why she’d thought the rich’s dirty laundry would smell any different, any better.

  She wondered how long Jason would be sticking around. Most people assumed he was home from college for the summer, working for his dad before going back for a fifth year, but Missy had told her he’d all but flunked out and was nowhere near a degree, that Earl was fed up with his partying and laziness and complete lack of gratitude for all he’d been given and was determined to reform him into a responsible adult who could run the company one day. According to Missy, Earl had taken control of nearly every aspect of Jason’s life—setting his work schedule, managing his finances, testing him for drugs. She imagined Jason was taking that as well as a cat takes a bath.

  In search of a laundry basket for the sheets, Henley opened the closet door and the light flicked on automatically. It was a sizable walk-in, the floor covered in mounds of discarded clothing. The few things still hanging were encased in plastic dry-cleaning bags like cocoons waiting to hatch. She backed up and bumped into something that hadn’t been there before, and when she whirled around, Jason stood in front of her, warm and damp from a shower, a towel low on his waist.

  She instinctively tried to move away from him but there was nowhere to go. Blood rushed to burn her cheeks.

  “Had to come back for another look?” he said, a cocky grin spreading across his face. He still had a taut, muscular athlete’s body, though she knew that life would start to catch up with him before long, that he’d begin to look like all the other former high school stars—bald and flabby, strutting around like they’d just stepped off a ball field rather than a cornfield. The illusion held within the confines of Blackwater—schoolyard kings were forever royalty in this little town.

  “You should try getting dressed before noon,” Henley said. She took a step forward until they were almost touching, and he gave in and stepped aside, allowing her to move past him.

  “I see you’re working hard,” he said, jutting his chin toward the silent vacuum.

  She rolled her eyes. “Hard to vacuum in here with your shit all over the floor.”

  The words came out without any thought and she didn’t regret them. She was starting to get the feeling that if Jason tattled to Earl,
Earl might take her side.

  “Huh.” He looked amused, like he was enjoying the pushback. “Missy says the same thing.” He plucked a T-shirt off the back of a chair and pulled it over his head, taking his time rolling it down over his chest. “She here today?”

  “No. She wasn’t feeling well,” Henley said, looking away.

  “You wanna go for a swim?” He grabbed a pair of trunks off the floor. “It’s my day off and I’m bored as hell out here.”

  “I’ve got work to do,” she said.

  Jason smiled, a dimple appearing. He pulled the shorts up and dropped the towel in one swift motion as Henley pretended not to notice. “You could take a break. Missy does.”

  “My mom does not go swimming with you.”

  He winked. “She would if I asked her.”

  Henley knew Missy had a soft spot for Jason, feeling bad that he’d had to grow up without his mother, and the way she talked about him sometimes made it seem like he was still a little boy, not a man in his twenties. Maybe he was right and Missy would entertain his every whim, but unlike her mother, Henley felt no obligation to placate him. She scooped up the dirty sheets. “Thanks anyway.”

  Later, as she wiped down the kitchen counters, she watched him lying on the diving board, the sun glinting on his wet skin, the Sullivans’ fields stretching out beyond the crisp aqua rectangle of the pool all the way to the hazy horizon. She’d never given it any thought before, that despite her mother’s close relationship with Jason, Henley didn’t know him at all. Jason sat up, cupping a hand over his eyes, looking toward the house. He probably couldn’t see her watching him through the window, but she ducked down anyway.

  She didn’t feel like going home and seeing that Missy still wasn’t there, so she headed over to her uncles’ place in the ’77 Buick Skylark they’d restored for her sixteenth birthday. It was one of the last model years, Raymond insisted, before Skylarks started to look like something your grandma would drive. Junior, Raymond, and Denny had started Pettit Brothers Auto Body & Salvage together with proceeds from selling their last remaining acres of the farm, and Raymond and Junior, only ten months apart, lived on the property. Denny was currently serving a stretch in Leavenworth for assault with a tire iron, his double-wide empty since his third wife had gotten fed up and his youngest daughter, Crystle, had gotten married and moved out.