The Good Wife

by Stewart O'Nan

  SEVERANCE

  THEY HAVE FORTY-FIVE DAYS TO FILE MOTIONS; SO DO GARY AND HIS lawyer. Usually they’d try to get the worst of the evidence suppressed, but in this case it’s all solid. The cops caught the guys and Mirandized them right there, the truck falls under probable cause, the house was on fire. A suppression hearing would just repeat the same basic testimony they heard at the prelim. The thing to do now is go ahead and file the best motion for severance they can and hope the judge grants it.

  “What if he doesn’t?” Patty asks, because by now she knows to question everything he says.

  “If he doesn’t and nothing else happens, I’m not going to lie to you, we’re probably looking at manslaughter.”

  “Probably or definitely?”

  “Eighty-twenty, seventy-thirty. I can’t give you exact odds.”

  She watches him as he says this, trying to see if he’s lying.

  “What else could happen?”

  “There are two possibilities. One, your husband turns his buddy. Two, his buddy turns him.”

  And she doesn’t see why he can’t make the trade—Gary for her and Casey. This is how the cops want her to think. They want her to turn him the same way he’s supposed to turn Gary. The lawyer would go for it; it’s a hell of a lot easier than doing his job, which is proving Tommy’s innocent. They don’t even talk about that anymore.

  “So we go for the severance,” she says, like they’re a team.

  She’s eight months and it’s harder to get around now. It seems the only time she leaves the house is to visit Tommy. She thinks she’s getting strange, wearing the same Bills sweatshirt of his, mumbling to herself as she lumbers from room to room, watching for the mail jeep and then swearing when there’s nothing but flyers.

  When she’s two weeks away from her due date, her mother comes over during the day so Patty won’t be alone, the two of them watching soap operas and leafing through Eileen’s magazines. Search for Tomorrow, The Edge of Night. Her mother makes her Lipton chicken noodle soup and toast, brings a platter in as if she’s sick. It’s the most they’ve been together since right after her father died. Patty stayed with her then, keeping the household going, making sure she are. It was easier, having a job to concentrate on, and Patty appreciates her mother doing the same for her. And there’s a bonus; her mother has no problem seizing the opportunity to give the whole place a good scrubbing, for the baby’s sake.

  They’ve already turned her room into a nursery, the bassinet at the head of her bed. Patty thinks she should have a place of her own, though she knows that’s not possible. And besides, she reminds herself, to plan anything beyond the trial is pointless. She needs to just wait and see.

  The days go slowly—like anything watched. She can’t stand sitting there while her mother buzzes around the downstairs in her rubber gloves. She calls Mr. McChesney and lets it ring ten times, waits and tries again, then calls the lawyer and asks if he can send him a letter about the security deposit. She calls the impound yard and bugs the guy about the truck.

  She hates to look at the checkbook. She has enough for another month, a month and a half. After that, she has no idea. Her mother’s offered her her old room at home. When Patty confides this to Eileen, Eileen says she can stay as long as she wants.

  Even Shannon surprises her one night, calling in the middle of Hawaii Five-0 to see if Patty can use a hand after she has the baby. She’s got the time, and she knows Eileen’s working. Patty doesn’t think she’s serious—their mother probably thought it would be a nice gesture on her part—but thanks her anyway.

  “I’ve still got all of Randy’s baby clothes if you want to look through them,” Shannon says. “There are some really nice outfits. If you don’t take them they’ll just go to Goodwill, because we’re done.”

  Patty thanks her again—she knows how expensive those clothes are from her trips to the mall. They set up a time to meet as if this is a regular thing.

  “That was weird,” she says when she gets off the phone, and replays their conversation for Eileen.

  “That’s fine if she wants to come up, but she’s not staying here.”

  “I don’t think she’s coming up, she was just offering.”

  “She can if she wants,” Eileen says, as if she doesn’t care.

  “I wouldn’t ask her to,” Patty reassures her, out of loyalty. “There’s going to be too many people here already.”

  They watch the show in silence for a while—cops in suits chasing a sniper across a hotel rooftop, a blue sweep of ocean in the background. She almost wants to ask Cy to change the channel, but it’s so stupid that it doesn’t bother her. The guy stops at the edge and shoots at the cops. The cops shoot the guy and he falls over the side, all the way down to the parking lot.

  “I’m surprised she remembered my number,” Eileen says.

  The next day, when Patty feels her mother out about Shannon’s call, her mother acts like she had nothing to do with it. “Are you going to take her up on it? I think it would be nice, all four of us together.”

  “I don’t know,” Patty says. It’s a battle she’s spent most of her life trying to defuse. The last couple of years she’s succeeded in avoiding it altogether, living with Tommy. She feels guilty—she needs her family but doesn’t want to have to deal with them, at least not all in one place, and not now. She wishes she could file a motion for severance against them.

  She calls the lawyer, hoping for news on the motion. He’s still putting it together.

  “How long is it going to take?” she asks, and he explains that they normally use whatever time the court gives them. He’s been talking with Gary’s lawyer.

  “Right now the thinking is we’re going to ask for relief from prejudice on the grounds of the two defenses being irreconcilably antagonistic.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they’re going to try to prove it was your husband, and we’re going to try to prove it was Mr. Rooker. We’re not actually going to do that—we can’t, short of one of them testifying—we’re just using it as a basis for severance. Without solid evidence against one or the other of the defendants, a judge will usually go for it if he thinks the two defenses could end up confusing the jury.”

  “So you think it’ll work,” Patty asks.

  “I think it’s what we have to do. You can never tell, especially with this particular judge. I’m going to say fifty-fifty, so who knows. How are you doing?”

  “Okay,” she says. She’s not used to him asking her anything personal. She tells him she’s ready to have the baby.

  “That’s going to be at Robert Packer?” he asks, because he should check in with her, even if nothing’s happening. She almost doesn’t want to tell him. It feels like he’s making it part of the case. When she puts down the phone, she’s bummed, but covers it up, with her mother right there.

  At least she can tell Casey how she feels, lying on her side in bed with the door closed, the eggshell wall so close her eyes can follow the brushstrokes, even in the muted light from outside. She curls up like a child wishing the rest of the world would go away and hums made-up lullabies to him, quietly, a murmur cupped in her throat and the ear pressed against the pillow.

  He’s more active now, as if he’s trying to get out. She has trouble sleeping at night and can’t nap in the afternoon the way she used to. Her mother says it’s her body getting ready for midnight feedings. The doctor says it’s normal, but he always says that. She could walk into his office on fire and he’d say that’s to be expected.

  She’s a week away. When it’s time, her mother will call Eileen and then take Patty to the hospital. Eileen will call the lawyer, who’ll call the jail and let Tommy know what’s going on—unless it happens at night, like it did both times with Shannon. Everyone tells her to relax, that everything will be fine. She pictures the delivery room and her imagination takes over—gloves and scalpels, a baby with eyes like bloody fried eggs. She’s been so frantic these last month
s; it has to be affecting him somehow.

  Tommy calls at the same time every night after supper. She runs the phone cord under her door for privacy. “You’ve been careful,” he reminds her. “You’re eating right, you’re taking your vitamins. There’s nothing else you can do.”

  The joke around the house is that her mother’s the slowest driver of them all.

  “I hope you’re ready to have it in the backseat,” Eileen teases.

  Secretly she hopes it happens at night so Cy can drive her and Eileen can hold her hand.

  Patty’s only half interested in the Super Bowl. The Steelers, who eliminated the Bills in the playoffs, completely shut down Fran Tarkenton and Minnesota. “Hell, the way they played we coulda beat ’em,” Tommy gripes over the phone.

  It’s the last day of January, it’s the first day of February. Her due date is the day after Groundhog Day. It comes and goes.

  The doctor won’t admit he was wrong. He brings her in and measures her, weighs her, checks her cervix to see how dilated she is.

  “Any time now,” he says.

  She sees it as another thing that’s gone wrong, and then, late the next afternoon, she feels a cramp in her side and presses a hand to it, only to have the pain regroup and move, circling her whole belly while she holds her breath against it. It could be a false alarm, so she sits on the couch until a second wave takes her before reporting the news to her mother.

  “Okay,” her mother says, one hand out to stop her from getting up. “Where’s your jacket?”

  PLACE OF BIRTH

  IT TAKES HER EIGHT HOURS, WITH DRUGS AND A PAIR OF SHEARS. The doctor has to sew her closed, but by then Casey has been tested and placed on her chest. She’s weak and afraid he’ll slide off He has a cap of dark hair, but what impresses Patty most are his fingers, perfect all the way down to the tiny nails. In her Demerol-softened exhaustion, she credits this workmanship not to herself but to God, someone she normally ignores.

  They take Casey from her and make her sleep. By the time she wakes up, it’s four in the morning. There are roses on her nightstand, and Eileen’s sleeping on a cot. Patty doesn’t want to wake her, but she needs to know if someone told Tommy.

  “Who do you think the roses are from?” Eileen says.

  It’s impossible, for a bunch of reasons. They’re probably from the gift shop downstairs; Eileen probably bought them herself, to cheer her up. Patty doesn’t question it, just leans over, bends one to her nose and breathes in the clean scent.

  A RESPECTABLE FAMILY

  CASEY MAKES VISITING EASIER. THE GUARDS TREAT HER DIFFERENTLY, suddenly sentimental. Tommy’s allowed to hold him at the beginning and the end. In between she props the carrier on the table and they try to read his mind. His eyes never settle on anything long, as if he’s searching for a way out.

  “He’s thinking, No way,” Tommy says, “I just did nine months.”

  The silences that used to separate them are filled with making faces and baby talk. They can’t resist being ventriloquists.

  “‘Daddy thinks Mommy should tell Aunt Shannon to go fly a kite.’”

  “‘Mommy thinks Daddy should take a look at the checkbook, yes she does.’”

  For minutes at a time they’re happy here, the three of them together. That’s what’s real, she thinks, not these bars and walls.

  And she’s busy now. For the first time in her life, her mother’s advice is actually helpful. She shows Patty how to bathe Casey in the sink, how to wrap him snug in a cocoon so he can’t scratch his face. He takes to her breast immediately, and she feels supremely useful. There’s a satisfaction she takes in watching him sleep. It’s like a crush—she can’t get enough of him.

  She trails him into sleep and wakes to his demands. Cy’s fitted the window with cardboard so no light from outside disturbs them. When Patty pads to the bathroom, she’s not surprised to find her mother making lunch for herself, or Eileen and Cy getting high. It’s like she’s a dreamy visitor in their lives, a bleary, badbreathed ghost. Time only takes on a shape when Tommy calls, or the lawyer.

  He’s finished drafting the motion and submitted it. The next step is the hearing itself After that, the judge has two weeks to rule.

  “You definitely want to be at the hearing,” he says. “You and the baby and whoever else you can get. From now on we need to show what kind of support he’s got. How many people can you bring?”

  “I don’t know,” Patty says.

  “That’s okay, the baby’s the important thing. And wear your Sunday best. This guy likes to see a respectable family. Pretend you’re going to church.”

  She spends the week before the hearing trying to find something to wear. She’s flabby and slack, in between sizes. Eileen’s too small, and doesn’t wear those kinds of clothes. Her mother wants to lend her an old Easter outfit, navy with cookie-sized white buttons and piping. Patty can’t say it’s horrible, but manages through her silence to communicate that fact.

  “Well I’m sorry,” her mother says. “I thought I was trying to help but obviously not.”

  There’s only one person in their family who would have what she’s looking for. A couple of diplomatic phone calls and Shannon drives up for the day, bringing a cream pantsuit and a blouse with ruffled cuffs. The unspoken rules of her visit are as rigid as the county lockup’s. Eileen’s at work and out of the house, but Patty still has to take Casey over to their mother’s.

  She recognizes the suit from an old Christmas card, the airbrushed family standing by the mantel. Shannon has to give her its whole history. She bought it when she was pregnant with Randy, she couldn’t have worn it more than three or four times. It sounds like a warning, as if Patty might ruin it.

  Patty tries the suit on in the privacy of their old room (“Come on, big butt”), cinching the built-in belt over her mushy stomach. The jacket smells of mothballs; a dry cleaning tag’s still pinned through a buttonhole. It’s a little tight in the boobs and the hips. She checks herself out, craning back over her shoulder. She looks like one of the fat-assed secretaries from work.

  She comes down to the living room and models it for them, trying to muster a smile. They watch her parade around the coffee table.

  “I like it,” her mother says.

  “How does it feel?” Shannon asks.

  “The jacket’s a little tenty around the boobs.”

  “It’s not the jacket,” her mother says, tugging it down in back. Shannon pulls the collar free.

  They stand back, examining her like a statue.

  “I believe she’ll pass,” her mother says.

  “I think so,” Shannon seconds.

  Patty has no vote. All she can do is thank Shannon, say she’s a lifesaver. But upstairs she’s glad to get the suit off and back on the hanger, as if it’s been strangling her.

  They go through the bag of baby clothes, Shannon reminiscing about each piece.

  “I remember that,” her mother says, cooing over a jumper as if it’s an infant. She makes a show of reading the labels, impressed with Shannon’s taste (though most of the clothes came from her motherin-law, who their mother is desperately jealous of). Everything is cute and expensive. Patty’s glad she can smoke now. That and two cups of real coffee get her through the afternoon. She thanks Shannon again, pecking her cheek goodbye, then tucking her bag of loot into the backseat. It’s only on the way home, with Casey’s carrier belted safely beside her, that she lets out the storm of profanity she’s been keeping in.

  At dinner, Eileen asks how Shannon is without looking at her.

  “You’re not very subtle,” Eileen says.

  “She’s helping me out,” Patty says, hoping that will be the end of it, but of course there is no end when it comes to the three of them, no neutral ground. No matter what she says, this defection will be held against her. A couple of months ago she would have just said fuck it and the two of them would have stopped calling each other for a month. Now, since she’s living there, she’s supposed to sh
ow her allegiance.

  “Look,” she says, “I’m not exactly in a position to choose who helps me, I’m just glad they are. You are—Cy, you are too.”

  “You don’t think it hurts me that she won’t set foot in my house?”

  “I’m sure it hurts,” Patty says, “but it’s not new. You’re acting like it’s a big surprise.”

  “I’m just surprised you let her get away with it.”

  “I’m not the one who told her she’s a crappy mother.”

  “She is! And I never said that. I said she should keep a better eye on her kids after Randy broke the fucking mirror.”

  Cy keeps quiet, cleaning his plate. Patty should apologize just to be done with it, but she doesn’t. Because she’s not wrong. If Eileen doesn’t understand, then tough.

  They make up later, watching TV. Eileen says she’s sorry she jumped down her throat. Patty says she’s sorry she wasn’t honest with her. There’s no winner, only a truce—and absolution: they agree that it’s Shannon’s fault for being Shannon.

  And like that they’re back to normal, which blows Cy’s mind. It’s why she’s at Eileen’s.

  There’s no question that Eileen will take the day off to go to the hearing. She even convinces Cy to get a haircut and wear his powder-blue suit.

  When Patty asks her mother point-blank if she’s going to come, her mother presses a hand to her chest as if she’s having a heart attack.

  “Of course,” she protests, shocked that Patty could ever think otherwise, and instead of letting loose with her stockpile of evidence to the contrary, Patty holds back.