by Jack Ketchum
She turned and looked at it like she’d been bitten by a snake.
The phone was hard reality.
What she’d been doing, it suddenly occurred to her, was not.
What she’d been doing fell squarely into the category of sick twisted fantasy and that was all it was. She felt suddenly ashamed.
“Don’t,” he whispered. “Don’t get it”
“Jesus. You know what time it is?”
“It’s probably a wrong number.”
“It’s not a wrong number, Ray. Not at this hour.”
She got off him, shaking now and not knowing whether it was him or what she’d almost done with him that made her shake or if it was what the call might mean. All she did know was that she was afraid of picking up that phone and afraid of herself most of all.
She picked up the receiver and listened and when she heard the voice on the other end in all its sadness and lost desolation she began to cry but tried not to show it for her father’s sake. She let him speak until it seemed he was through and his voice was almost normal and then told him that she’d call right away, she’d be on the first plane in the morning and said she’s better off, daddy, you know the way she suffered and he said yes I know, I know, but dammit I loved her and Katherine said, so did I and then she didn’t even try to hide the fact that she was crying, the shock that it was simply true and inevitably true ran all at once too deep. All these bitter spiteful years she’d loved her and hadn’t known, not really, it was a small light in a cave, a light too dim to penetrate the dark but it was burning now. She was a child parted forever from the mother she had loved and no more and no less than that and she hadn’t known.
She hadn’t known at all.
Part Two
“There are no intact men.”
—Pete Dexter, The Paperboy
Chapter Twenty-six
Monday, August 11 to
Friday, August 15
The Week in Review
At ten o’clock Monday morning when the phone rang the cat lay on Ed Anderson’s sofa sleeping off a half-can of Friskies Buffet mixed with a handful of dry, the sleep of the not-so-innocent, since, having eaten and feeling fine, she immediately began using the leg of Ed’s sofa as a scratching post, quitting only under threat of being misted with water from his flower spritzer. She reacted to the phone by opening her eyes and yawning, extending and retracting the claws of her right front paw and going back to sleep again.
It was Charlie on the line. If the cat had been awake she could have watched Ed’s face fall as Charlie told him the results of his efforts to get Sally a job at the department.
Ed hung up feeling dazed and vaguely shamed. If the department knew, who else? He’d thought they were being discreet, he and Sally.
He thought about the boys over at Teddy Panik’s place. Would they know too? And why should he give a damn anyway? There wasn’t anything wrong about what they were doing. Sally was of age under the law.
They cared for each other.
Aw, shit, he thought and called her.
Sally had a private line in her room so it shouldn’t have been June Richmond who answered, but it was. He hung up on her and sat there a moment next to the cat just staring at the phone. He felt like a teenage kid sneaking phone calls behind his parents’ back. His mother and father had been dead for eight years and seven years respectively. It was as though the sheer fact that Sally was still living with her own parents had dragged him back decades to when Ed was living with his.
He should have known that in a small town like this secrets wouldn’t keep. But he’d thought that if anybody discovered them it would be somebody who had reason to care. In particular her father and mother. That it was common knowledge at least in the department surprised and bothered him.
What the hell was he doing?
The afternoon was slightly hellish.
He drove the few blocks to town and dropped off his cleaning and picked up his shirts. One of the few little luxuries he allowed himself since Evelyn died was to skip the ironing completely. He walked over to the Sugar Bowl and went to the Hallmark rack and picked out a birthday card for his sister in Wisconsin and paid the girl at the counter. He crossed the street and made a hundred-dollar withdrawal from his account at Mayflower Savings.
Then he got into the car again and drove to the A&P. From the seafood counter he got a one-and-a-half-pound lobster, a dozen mussels, a dozen medium shrimp, a dozen bay scallops and a pound of cod. He wheeled the shopping cart over to the produce department and picked out some leeks and parsley, a head of celery, a medium onion and a clove of garlic. In the aisles he got a loaf of french bread, a bottle of clam juice, crushed fennel seeds, bay leaves and a can of tomatoes. The thyme, white wine, bay leaves and oil he already had at home. He was going to make a bouillabaisse. He was a good cook, even better than Ev had been. Since his retirement it helped to pass the time.
He paid for the groceries and wheeled them to the car.
And all these people, all the way along, he knew. Most of them by name.
The cleaner, the girl he paid for the birthday card, the teller at the Mayflower, the man in the white apron behind the seafood counter, the A&P checkout clerk.
He knew them all. And they knew him.
He felt the everyday and natural go unnatural all over the course of just a few hours. As though his life were an open secret. As though he were in some way marked now. Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.
So this is what paranoia’s like, he thought.
Welcome to the Monkey House.
At home he put away the groceries and unwrapped the shirts and hung them in the closet and thought about calling her again but decided against it. He didn’t want to risk getting June again instead. A second mysterious hang-up call would raise questions. He found it interesting and unnerving that all of a sudden he was worried about raising questions. But speaking to Sally could wait anyhow. She was due at seven-thirty for dinner.
He wondered what she told her parents about her apparent lack of appetite at their dinner table those two or three nights a week she ate at his place.
Then wondered why he hadn’t wondered it before.
Questions again.
Teddy Panik’s Happy Hour at four-thirty came and went. He wasn’t up to it. He cracked a couple beers from the refrigerator instead and tried to read but much as he liked the book despite some of its politics Mailer’s Armies of the Night was not about to hold him. By five-thirty he’d retreated into sleep, his second beer half-finished on the floor beside him.
He woke at six-thirty with the cat that thus far still remained nameless perched on his belly and gently kneading. The cat was looking for her dinner. Getting into the habit of easier, fatter times. He dumped the flat warm beer into the sink and opened a cold one and fed her the leftover half-can of Friskies and chopped up the vegetables for dinner.
He got Ev’s big kettle out from under the sink and put it on the stove and heated the quarter-cup of olive oil, the vegetables, the thyme and bay leaf for five minutes and then added in the clam juice, wine, tomatoes and the rest of the spices and simmered them for another fifteen while he peeled and deveined the shrimp and rinsed them in a colander. He boiled the lobster, cut the raw cod into pieces and scrubbed and debearded the mussels. When the lobster was done he ran it under cold water and cracked and cleaned it and broke it into quarters. He figured he’d wait for Sally to arrive to add the seafood for the final fifteen minutes’ cooking time and to slice up the bread. He turned off the burner and put the cover on the kettle and returned the seafood to the refrigerator.
He felt no better for his nap nor for the cooking so he made himself a martini, very dry and dropped in three pimento-stuffed olives. By the time he heard her Volkswagen pull around back of the house he was building himself another. No olives this time. Just gin and vermouth.
She came in wearing a smile and a halter top and a pair of cut-off jeans and carrying a bottle of Pepsi and another loaf of french bread in a
paper shopping bag. He put his own bread in the freezer. Hers was fresher. She gave him a kiss and he asked her about her day but she didn’t answer, just looked at him as he took the seafood out of the refrigerator and dropped it into the kettle and stirred while he turned on and adjusted the burner.
“What’s going on?” she said.
Jesus, she could read him. Kid her age, it was amazing. But there was no point lying to her or avoiding the matter.
She poured herself a glass of Pepsi and they sat down at the table while he told her.
“So you’re feeling guilty, is that it?” she said.
“I don’t know if guilty’s the word. I’m feeling . . . I guess you’d say exposed. All day long I had this feeling people were staring at me. Here comes the dirty old man.”
She smiled. “You’re not a dirty old man.”
“So how come I feel like one?”
“Ed, the only thing that bothers me about this is that school doesn’t start up until September fifteenth, a month from now. And I need to make some money between now and then. I still need some kind of job. As far as the rest of it goes, so what? I don’t care who knows about us. I wouldn’t really even care if my parents knew about us. Except that it would make being us harder. Don’t you get it? I’m happy with you and proud of you, you dope.”
“Christ, Sally. I’m old enough to be your grandfather.”
“Sure, if you’d married and had a kid at fourteen. You’re two years older than my dad. I don’t see that as such a great big deal.”
“The town would. Your parents would. The department thinks it’s a big enough deal not to hire you.”
“To hell with the department.” She got up and took the knife from him and finished cutting the bread. His hands were shaking. She wasn’t blind. She was doing him a favor taking over.
He finished his martini and opened the cabinet and took out the gin.
“Are you gonna get drunk on me now?”
“Sal, I don’t know why but I’m doing about sixty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. I’m not going to get drunk on you. I don’t think I could if I wanted to.”
She sighed. “Just forget about it, Ed. Let’s have ourselves a nice dinner. I’ll just have to do some job-hunting tomorrow, that’s all.”
She arranged the bread along the length of folded white linen in his wicker basket.
“The department doesn’t matter. And the town doesn’t matter. We do.”
“Charlie thinks I’m nuts. He thinks I’m riding for a fall.”
“So are you? Are you riding for a fall? Forget about what Charue thinks for a minute. What do you think?”
“I don’t know what I think. I know I’ve still got to live in this town once you’re gone.”
He saw her wince at that and instantly regretted it. He couldn’t remember ever regretting anything he’d said to her before no matter how foolish. He poured his martini. He sat down at the table. She put the basket on the table and sat across from him, folded her arms and watched him.
“So what are you saying, Ed?”
“Huh?”
“You know what I mean. What are you telling me?”
“You’ve got your reputation to think of, Sally. I don’t want that damaged because of me.”
“My reputation? In a month I’m leaving it in its tracks.”
“You’ll be coming back. Vacations, Christmas. Sparta’s your hometown for godsakes.”
“I don’t care about that. I want to know exactly what you’re telling me. Don’t fuck around with me, Ed.”
He didn’t think he’d ever felt so uncomfortable in all his life.
Still he owed her the truth.
“I just don’t feel right about it the way I did. I don’t know why people knowing about us should change anything. Charlie’s known all along and that didn’t change anything. But I guess I’m wondering if maybe we shouldn’t . . . I dunno . . . maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe it’s just not right for me to be doing this. Jesus. I don’t know.”
For a moment she simply stared at him. His drink untouched in front of him, his eyes not quite seeming able to meet her own.
“So what you’re saying is that what we should do is, we should have ourselves a little dinner, have a little bouillabaisse and call it quits. Is that it?”
“I’m not . . . I don’t . . .”
“For chrissake, Ed!”
He looked up. Her eyes were brimming with tears. He couldn’t stand to see her that way. Not over him. He shook his head.
“Sal, listen, you’re young. You . . .”
She slammed the palms of her hands flat against the table and stood up, leaning toward him. For a moment he thought she might hit him.
“Don’t you say that to me! Goddamn it! Young? That’s bullshit. I never would have figured you for a coward, Ed Anderson! Never. I never would have thought you’d do this to me in a million years! It’s not my reputation you’re worried about. It’s your reputation. And you’re putting that in front of us? In front of what we’ve got? Well fuck this town and your precious department and fuck your goddamn bouillabaisse and Ed, right now, right this moment, fuck you!”
When she was out the door and the house was silent he went to the sink and poured his martini down the drain and turned off the stove. The bouillabaisse was ready but he couldn’t eat. The cat padded into the room, sleepy-eyed, curious about the commotion maybe or about the scent of fish and shrimp and lobster.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to reach down and pet her either.
He sat back at the table and stared at his hands and realized that he really did feel old now. Old and as tired and as empty as he’d felt since Ev died. He told himself that it was all for the best, that it would have happened sooner or later anyway, she was going off to school.
She’d called him a coward and he guessed she’d been right about that.
Her voice inside his head now also called him liar.
She got home and shut the door to her room and sat down on the bed. The tears had subsided in the car as had the anger, enough at least so that her parents hadn’t noticed anything strange about her. Nor did they question her early arrival. Her mother was half in the bag again, watching “Here’s Lucy,” and her father was immersed in paperwork so that probably helped some. What she was left with was a sad and unfamiliar ache inside. She dialed Tonianne Primiano, her best friend since junior high, and told her the whole sad ludicrous story.
“He’s just scared,” Tonianne said. “Why wouldn’t he be? He’ll come around.”
“You think?”
“Sure.”
“It’s like he feels he’s endangering me, corrupting me or something. I dunno. What he doesn’t get is that when I’m around Ed I feel the exact opposite. I feel protected. He knows damn well I wasn’t some sweet little virgin when we met. So what is this?”
“I think he’s scared of what people will say. Are saying. Peer pressure and all. Give him a day or two to stew on it. Then go over and give him another chance. I bet he jumps at it. You really called him a coward?”
“Yeah. I wish I hadn’t now. He thinks he’s doing the right thing.”
“Sure he does. He’s another generation, Sally. Jeez. Sex is something a lot of them don’t handle real well. Plus he’s a man, right? You ever meet a guy who wasn’t a little screwed up sex-wise? Like I say, give him a couple days to get used to the idea that first of all, people know about you two and there’s nothing you can do about it and second of all, you’re not around anymore. Couple of days, he’s gonna be missing you like crazy. You can bet on it. Meanwhile I’ve got some good news. I was going to call you tonight if you hadn’t called me. They fired Liz Beach today. That means we’ve got an opening.”
Tonianne worked at Sam’s Sporting Goods out on Route 15.
“You think you can get me in?”
“I know I can get you in if you want it. I already talked to Sam about it. It’s just a store clerk job
but . . .”
“Toni, I love you. I absolutely love you! You just made my day.”
“Given the givens, I’d say that wasn’t real hard. Be in at eight-thirty. We open at nine. What do you suppose he’ll do with the bouillabaisse?”
“Huh?”
And then wonder of wonders, they were laughing.
By Wednesday night Ray had broken his promise to himself not to sleep with Jennifer again. He told himself it was a mercy fuck. That she kept on hanging around him looking so goddamn pathetic and sounding so goddamn pathetic that what could you do? That fucking her now had more to do with his previous failure to fuck her did not occur to him until afterward. And even then his response was to note that he was back on track again sexually speaking and that was that.
He felt so good and expansive as a result of it though that he gave her one of the rings he kept in his drawer for just this kind of occasion. Saying he’d bought it just for her. To show how much he loved her. That she still was number-one with him.
The ring was Austrian crystal. He told her it was a diamond.
It was pretty and sparkled and she’d never know the difference. And seeing the expression on her face, you could almost believe it was a diamond because how could a ring you picked up for a few bucks bring on all that happiness?
He figured that took care of Jennifer for a while.
The night before that he’d slept with Dee Dee. He was disappointed to find that Dee Dee wasn’t a virgin. He’d figured that somebody named Dee Dee almost had to be. He was even more disappointed with her performance in bed. The chick was enthusiastic, sure. But she hadn’t a clue as to how to actually do the dirty deed. She kissed too hard and too wet, grabbed when she should have stroked, lay back and made him do all the work when she should have been grinding away. He figured that once around with Dee Dee was plenty and got her out of there as soon as he could. With the promise—which he’d never in a billion years think of keeping—to call her about getting together over the weekend.
Not a chance.
By the weekend Kath would be back.