The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  The wrong house. What now?

  The front door opened and a small woman with pretty black eyes and dark hair twisted into a bun stepped onto the porch, regarding her suspiciously. “Hola,” the woman said.

  “Mary,” Mary corrected her.

  “Hola?” the woman tried again.

  “No, Mary,” Mary repeated, pointing to herself. “Mary.”

  The woman said something in Spanish that Mary did not understand, and called quietly in the direction of a darkened room, “Señora.”

  “I seem to have the wrong house,” Mary apologized. Then she saw through the open door a frail, elderly woman limping down the shadowed hall, and her heart began to race. Although she hadn’t seen Eden in nearly twenty years, she recognized her instantly as she shuffled into the light, by her trademark black bob.

  If her mother-in-law’s face had ever been lifted, the lower half had fallen again. Her rheumy blue eyes slanted catlike toward her bangs, and her cheeks and jowls hung like laundry on the line. Her body was weathered and as fragile as wood left out in the rain. Hands clawed by arthritis punctuated her spindly arms. Eden did not recognize Mary, or couldn’t see clearly. “What is it, Chita?” she asked.

  “Eden,” Mary breathed.

  “Yes,” the old woman answered, squinting, piqued.

  “Eden. It’s Mary.”

  The dawning of familiarity rose in Eden’s fallen face. “Mary?”

  “I’m sorry to just show up like this.”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized you,” Eden said.

  Mary touched her swingy red hair, and then realized that Eden was referring to her extreme weight, not her extreme makeover. She stood on the porch, waiting to be invited into the house.

  The sound of a beeping microwave drew the Mexican woman back inside as Eden leaned against the door frame, weary from the walk, irritated by the intrusion. “He’s not here, Mary.”

  “But Heather said—”

  “Heather?” Eden said, lifting her brow. “Well, he was here, but he’s gone.”

  Mary sniffed the air, hoping to catch his scent, as Eden opened the door and sighed, resigned, “I suppose you’d better come in. But be quiet. Jack’s asleep.”

  The fragrance of the house was faint but familiar—a whiff of urine, a hint of decay, like St. John’s in Leaford. Christopher Klik’s house on the day of the funeral. Led into a small living room crammed with oversized furniture, Mary realized that she was trembling. So close, she thought. She had missed Gooch by hours, days, she told herself, but she knew it was really years. She felt faint, and did not so much sit in one of the upholstered chairs as fall into it. “I hate to trouble you, Eden, but I haven’t eaten much today. I’m afraid I might faint.”

  Eden rolled her eyes, calling out in a hush toward the back of the house, “Bring in the prune Danish and some iced tea, Chita!” Taking a place on the sofa across from Mary, she did not disguise her contempt. “You shouldn’t have come. And why on earth are you wearing winter boots in California?”

  “I had to come.”

  “He’s a wreck. You know that. He’s just a wreck.”

  In twenty-five years Mary had not heard her husband referred to in such sorry terms. It was she who’d always been the wreck, or the wretch, or the mess. Not Gooch. Gooch lived the dream. Gooch triumphed. Gooch accepted his story as it unfolded, while she propped her memoir on her rolling stomach, turning the pages at random, wishing the author had taken it a different way.

  “Heather said he won money on the scratch-and-win.”

  “I know.” Eden smiled for the first time, revealing a set of pearl-white teeth longer and squarer than her originals. “The Lord heard my prayer.”

  “When was he here?” she asked carefully, afraid that Eden might run away like a feral cat, or decide to play dumb like a child.

  “Last week. Tuesday or Wednesday. I lose track of time.”

  Had the circumstances been different, Mary might have offered her own understanding of the loss of time. Instead she said, “I’ve been so worried.”

  “He didn’t do this to hurt you, Mary.”

  “We’ve been going through a rough patch,” Mary said quietly, taking the cold glass offered by the Mexican woman, who’d appeared with iced tea and a tray of pastry.

  “He blames himself.”

  “He does?”

  “But it takes two to tango, doesn’t it?” Eden asked. “And that’s what I told him. I said ‘Stop blaming yourself, Jimmy. Surely Mary had something to do with it.’ He didn’t say a word against you. Not a word. He didn’t tell me how big you’d gotten.” Eden raised her high brows. “I hardly recognized you. You’re twice the size you were when I saw you last.”

  Mary considered the pastry on the table but could not bring herself to reach for it; the thought of biting into the sweet, doughy bread brought on another wave of nausea, and the forgotten pain between her eyes trumpeted reveille.

  “I can only imagine what it’s been like for him all these years. That boy had so many gifts. He should have been a writer,” Eden said, and Gooch’s potential, along with his mother’s clear subtext, hung in the dank, pissy air.

  It was true, Mary thought. Gooch should have been a writer. He should have been anything other than what he had become.

  “Don’t you dare spill that tea,” Eden warned, as Mary listed in her seat. “That’s a two-thousand-dollar Ethan Allen!”

  “Oh,” Mary said, sipping from the overfilled glass.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “The same.”

  “I know you’ve had your share of disappointments, Mary.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s no excuse, though.”

  “Where did he go when he left here? Please tell me if you know, Eden. I’m his wife.” Mary pleaded. “I’m his wife.”

  “He said something about seeing the redwoods. Big Sur. Hiking or some other. He had a guidebook. He said he didn’t have firm plans, he just needed some time to think.”

  Time to think. “He didn’t say for how long?”

  “He didn’t say. And not that he asked for my opinion—not that he’s ever asked for my opinion—but I told him he should file for divorce and put an end to it. You both need to get on with your lives. He’s still young. He could have thirty good years with somebody else. Look at Jack and me.”

  Mary cleared her throat. “You really don’t know where he went?”

  “He was here for all of an hour before he and Jack got into it,” Eden sniffed. “That’s the price you pay. You put your husband before everything. That’s what you do. That’s what you should have done.”

  Mary didn’t ask her if losing her children had been too great a price to pay, for she could see in the woman’s righteous eyes that she felt the loss was theirs.

  “I want to help Gooch. I want to …” The addendum to her want was too complicated and intimate to express aloud.

  “I’d ask you to stay, but we’ve got six coming for prayer circle in half an hour.”

  If her head had not hurt, Mary might have hammered it with the heel of her palm and exclaimed, What was I thinking? How had she ever imagined that she might find Gooch taking his time to think in the toxic presence of Jack Asquith? “I’m sorry, Eden. I’m sorry he and Jack got into it. It must have been awful.”

  Eden softened. “He said he’d come to see me again before he left the state. I told him I’d meet him out at the deli.”

  “He’s coming back?”

  “He promised he’d come to say goodbye.”

  Goodbye. Gooch understood the ritual too. He needed to say goodbye to his mother because he felt her mortality. Or his own. The lottery win had been the force disrupting his inertia. Mary imagined him sitting in his truck behind Chung’s, salivating for his Combo Number 3. She could see his face as he scratched that ticket with a quarter from his pocket, and in those three matching numbers found both the impetus and the means to leave his wife, to ponder his existence. Free.

/>   “I think I should wait for him,” she said.

  “Well, not here,” Eden assured her. “Besides, we don’t know when he’s coming back.”

  “Eventually he’ll run out of money.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And he’ll have to go back to work.”

  “Eventually.”

  “It’s not like he has a million dollars. Did he tell you how much he’d won?”

  “Enough. He just said enough.”

  Enough. That word. The suggestion of balance. Just the right amount. A lovely word—until someone yells it at you. Enough!

  Suspecting that Eden was lying, Mary said, “Well, if he promised he’d come back, he’ll come back. And I should be here when he does.”

  “Suit yourself, Mary, but I can’t offer you a room, and even the cheap motels down here are expensive. Besides, what if it’s not a day or two days or a week? What if he’s gone off for a month? Or more?”

  “He wouldn’t do that.” Drinking the iced tea, Mary calculated the cost of a month’s hotel lodging and incidentals.

  “And what would you do, Mary? Sit in a hotel room watching television? Ordering in junk food? And if you plan to stay down here at all, you’ll need a car the whole time. You can’t get anywhere without a car. What are you driving?”

  “I got a ride.” Adding car rental fees, at which she could only guess, Mary began to fret. Stay in this foreign land to wait for Gooch until her money ran out? Return to Leaford to get on with her life? But what life? Mr. Barkley gone. Orin gone. Her mother a ghost. She didn’t even have a job to return to, a fact which she realized she would at some point need to address. “I’m going to stay,” she decided aloud.

  “Well, I’ve said my piece,” Eden declared, throwing up her hands.

  Reaching into her purse, Mary found a pen and scrap of paper. “I’ll write down my cellphone number, and you’ll call me, won’t you? When you hear from him?”

  Eden took the piece of paper and set it on the table. “I think it’s a mistake. I really do.”

  The women rose, struggling with their broken bodies as they made their way to the door. Mary had almost reached the porch when she remembered her purse and the plastic bag with her navy uniform. Stepping back into the house, she heard a sound coming from a room at the end of the hallway. Gooch.

  So Eden was lying, as Heather had lied, as all people lied for people they loved, or people they owed. He was there, about to step out of the room, believing his wife was gone. “Gooch?” she blurted.

  Jack Asquith—bleary and beaten, shrunken and shrivelled, an oxygen mask suffocating his cured-leather face—emerged from the room on a small motorized wheelchair. Here was death, hollow-eyed and terrified, approaching Mary at the door. “Jack,” she breathed.

  “Go get ready for prayer circle, Jack,” Eden instructed him. But Jack stayed his course, motoring over the terracotta floor, regarding Mary with squinting mistrust, as if she’d been let backstage for a show without a special pass. He stopped at the toe of her boots, pulled the mask away from his face and croaked, “Who?”

  Eden waved him off. “Nobody, dear. Go get ready.” Dragging Mary out to the porch and closing the door behind them so he couldn’t overhear, she begged, “Please don’t get him upset.”

  “He looks terrible,” Mary cried. “Oh my God.”

  “We do not use God to exclaim in this house.”

  “I’m sorry, I just—”

  “Well, you knew he had the emphysema.” Mary shook her head, speechless. “He’s been going down fast.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Imagine me having to ask my son for money.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? Jack’s health insurance hasn’t covered half the expenses.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you knew.”

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve talked, Eden.”

  “You knew we lost the business. You knew we lost the house.” Mary shook her head. “I lose track of time. Maybe I didn’t tell you,” Eden said. “You stopped calling.”

  It was true. Mary had stopped calling Eden on the last Sunday of every month. So often a message service had answered the line and she had panicked about what to say, then realized that she had nothing to say to Eden nor Eden to her. Finally she had dispensed with the sham of their relationship. As Gooch had done long ago. She wondered if, in his ritual of farewell to his mother, he’d been seeking forgiveness. Or offering it.

  “I have money, Eden. I could—”

  “Jimmy gave me five thousand. And I’ve got a bond coming due next month, and that’ll see me for a time. The rest is in his hands.”

  “Gooch’s?”

  “God’s. Besides, I wouldn’t take your share of that lottery money, Mary. You’ll need it yourself, to start over.”

  A fait accompli—Mary remembered the phrase from French class at school. A thing finished. Done with. Over. Decided. Dead. That was how Eden saw Mary’s marriage, but Mary had enough cash reserves to keep hope alive. Still, she was confused as to just how much money Gooch had won, and how much of it was still in the account. She would need to find a bank, and she hoped the Canadian card would work in American machines.

  “There’s a Pleasant Inn down near the highway. I’m going to get a room there,” she said.

  “And …?”

  “Wait. I’m going to wait for Gooch.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t drive you there.”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “That’s more than a mile,” Eden laughed.

  “I can walk,” Mary assured her. “You’ll call me?” she asked, insisting that Eden meet her eyes.

  “I’ll call you,” Eden answered, and with that she closed the door, entombing herself and Jack and the black-eyed Mexican woman inside the fetid house to await God’s mercy in their circle of prayer.

  TARGET CLEAR

  The sun inched higher as Mary paused on the sidewalk, waiting in case, like Heather, Eden had been lying and would race out any moment, breathless and regretful, shouting, “You can find him at the such-and-such!” Or “He’s staying at a place over in so-and-so!”

  When the door didn’t open, she realized that she could not walk a full mile to the Pleasant Inn. Neither could she stand still as the sun burned her fair skin and torched her red hair and seared her white scalp. She’d never used sunscreen, having never sunbathed, and rarely allowed her flesh the attention of solar rays. A few more minutes on high and she’d be crisp around the edges.

  Laughter and tears, such as were promised by the novels in her heavy purse, fought in Mary’s throat as she started down the sidewalk toward Willow Highlands. On the other side of the hill was the main road, where she remembered seeing a shopping plaza. There was a bank there where she could check the balance on her funds before heading for the hotel. One half mile. Over the hill. Go.

  The hill was less a slope than a vertical ascent and, climbing the white sidewalk, struggling for breath, her feet sweltering in her winter boots, she wondered idly how children ever learned to ride bicycles in Golden Hills. Up ahead, she saw a middle-aged Mexican man hefting a lawn mower from the back of a small red truck near an empty children’s play park. She waved to him, ignoring his look of confusion, and called inanely over the clanking, “Hot, eh?”

  The spare strength she possessed carried her halfway up the steep hill before she stopped to rest on the edge of a sparkling rock fountain in the shade of a monster garage. Willow Highlands, she thought, catching her breath and looking around. The splendid abundance to which the universe aspired. Ah, beauty. What would Gooch have made of this foreign landscape? Gooch had once repeated to Mary a conversation he’d had with an immigrant from West Africa at a roadside diner on one of his deliveries north of London. The man had told Gooch that it was his dream to raise his children in America, so they could grow up to take things for granted.
/>
  Though Gooch coveted Corvettes and longed for Lincolns, he was not by nature—or perhaps it was because of circum-stances—a materialist. It was not new things but new experiences that he described craving, in candid moments, in those early years when Mary still played along. “We should take a driving trip to British Columbia,” he’d say, or “Someday we should go up the St. Lawrence to see the migrating whales.” And “I want to take you skating on the Rideau Canal.” He’d never mentioned the redwoods or Big Sur as dream destinations, but they could have been. So could Washington, D.C. Or Yellowknife. Or New York. Or Istanbul. Come with me, Mary. Come with me.

  Sitting on the fountain’s edge with a spray of water at her back, she took long, deep breaths, listening to the white noise of lawn mowers and leaf blowers. There the workers, toiling for the wealthy. Somewhere Gooch, sipping from a canteen, the wide blue ocean rolling out before him, searching for his own truth—or maybe it was God—at the end of all journeys of discovery. What might he talk about with God? World politics. Classic films. Mary hoped God would make Gooch cinnamon toast and let him sleep it off in the sanctity of her wilderness.

  It was clear to Mary, when she tried to rise, that she could not continue her ascent. She felt her body’s quiet insistence on sustenance. She had not eaten enough and it was retaliating, seizing and stopping and waiting, much the same way it had belched and shat and cramped when she’d eaten too much.

  She spotted the Mexican man she’d seen earlier coaxing his tired red truck up the hill, and realized she’d been resting there for the length of time it took to trim the park’s lawn. “Wait,” she called, waving. “Please.” He pulled to a stop at the curb as she wrenched her body from the fountain’s edge. She smiled. “Could you give me a ride to the bank, please?”

  The man appeared not to understand, and was startled when Mary opened the passenger door and set her big purse on the seat, saying, “I can pay you.” Drawing out her wad of cash, she took fifty dollars and pressed it into his green-stained palms. He accepted the money, still not comprehending. “That’s Canadian,” she said. “But you can change it over at the bank.” She hoisted herself into the front seat, gesturing. “You can take me to the bank?”