The Good Wife

by Stewart O'Nan

  “I’m sorry but they were being assholes,” she tells Tommy during their regular call, and he agrees. She shouldn’t have to take their shit.

  He does, and she wonders if he’ll get in trouble just for saying this (because they’re always listening). She worries that he’ll end up paying for her big mouth. The guards have all the power, and they’re like cops, they stick together.

  The week creeps by. It seems like she hasn’t seen him in months. She has the picture of him from last summer on her old bureau facing Casey’s crib, and says good night to him before bed, but that’s the only reminder of Tommy in the whole house. At work, the guys who know him occasionally mention his name, but mostly they steer clear. Russ is the only one who asks how he’s doing, and after a while even that feels more polite than anything. Perry and Shawn haven’t bothered to call in months. It’s as if he died, as if he never existed.

  Sunday she brings him six pictures and prepays to do the click-click, a concession the prison runs. For twenty bucks, another prisoner supervised by a guard takes ten Polaroids of the three of them together, a sort of family portrait. They stand in front of a mural celebrating Auburn history, smiling like pioneers.

  The first one turns out the best. It’s not very big, and the flash makes his face look pasty, but Patty finds a nice frame for it at the Craft Barn. With the edges covered up, you can barely tell it’s a Polaroid. She has to ask her mother if she can set it on top of the TV with her father. For an instant her mother hesitates, as if she has to think, and Patty wants to take the question back.

  “Of course,” her mother says, and arranges them so they’re as far apart as possible.

  It’s only a couple of days later, stoned and watching Johnny Carson with the sound down low so she doesn’t wake anyone up, that Patty realizes how depressing it must be for her mother to have to constantly see the two biggest things that went wrong in her life. And then Patty laughs. She’s so stupid. It’s not just her mother. It’s true for her too.

  GHOSTS

  AS HALLOWEEN PASSES (POWERWASHING YOLK OFF THE MIDDLE school windows) and the election (rolling the voting machines through town hall) and the last big leaf pickup and the crew starts marking fire hydrants and guardrails for the snowplows, Patty senses the date looming ahead, lying in wait.

  She can’t believe it’s only been a year. She has no reason to go by their old place, but sometimes when the crew’s bombing along Frost Hollow Road she’ll watch the sign for Spaulding Hill float by and wonder what the house looks like. Probably the same, Mr. McChesney’s so cheap. Patty just wants to confirm that it’s still there. Their years in that house seem like a kind of paradise; at the time it just felt normal, regular everyday life, no better or worse than anyone else’s. She wishes she could go back and enjoy it for what it was, but that could apply to so many things now. And what was it, really? When did he start lying to her about everything?

  A week before Thanksgiving the crew is stopped at the Citgo for their morning smokes and coffees when Patty’s Dart pulls up to the light. She’s never seen the older woman who’s driving. She must be the handyman’s wife, because it’s hers, Patty recognizes the Firestone redlines Tommy bought for her. Standing there, caught for a moment in the open, she has the strange sensation that she and the woman have magically changed places, that she’s been lifted out of her life, transported from behind the wheel into someone else’s watching body, and then the light turns and the Dart accelerates away. It’s Wednesday and they have to stake rolls of snow fence around the softball fields.

  Tommy calls that night. When she tries to explain how she felt, he tells her she should have sold the truck.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about!” she says, and then feels bad. It’s hard to argue with him when she’s responsible for his happiness. He needs money for cigarettes, and she promises she’ll bring a money order on Sunday. And though he must know—really, shouldn’t he?—neither of them mentions that it will be a year come Friday.

  After her mother goes to bed and she gets Casey down, Patty goes out on the back porch to get high before Johnny comes on and stands there holding herself in the starry cold and thinks of Elsie Wagner teaching her to swim—the chlorine smell and the little, different-colored tiles at her feet like a crossword puzzle, the lanes roped off with blue and white floats like strung beads. Elsie will remember, Patty thinks. Elsie will know exactly what day it is.

  BICENTENNIAL MINUTES

  THE FIRST YEAR HAS TO BE THE WORST–AT LEAST SHE HOPES SO. She hasn’t heard from Albany in a long time, but now she expects the system to take forever. Having Casey helps. When she gets frustrated or depressed, he lets her concentrate on things like creamed turkey and strained peas.

  She survives Thanksgiving by keeping busy, helping her mother in the kitchen. Christmas, the two of them drive down to Shannon’s together, silent for miles like two old widow ladies, Casey asleep in the backseat. New Year’s Eve she watches Dick Clark by herself, clicking it off right after the ball drops, then wakes up early and works twelve hours of double time.

  The holidays with Tommy feel like regular visits, just more crowded, whole families coming up from the city, the parking lot overflowing into the side streets. Like last year, Tommy asks her what she wants, and Christmas morning she’s not surprised to find a present waiting with the paper on the welcome mat. She thanks Russ the next day, not mentioning how expensive the stroller must have been. They owe him so much already.

  January the snows come, knee deep, followed by frostbite windchills, and she realizes the guys weren’t kidding about the job. Every day they’re digging out fire hydrants and breaking ice that’s formed over storm drains, sweating inside the hoods of their heavy jackets. Russ blasts the truck’s heater to warm their feet but only melts the snow stuck to their pants, soaking the cuffs. Patty keeps a tin of bag balm in a pocket, rubbing it into her fingers between jobs so her skin won’t crack. She offers it to the rest of the crew, telling them it’s an old farmer’s trick. They’re all too macho to borrow it until Russ says he’ll give it a try; then they all dig in.

  The Steelers are in the Super Bowl again. It pisses Tommy off—with O. J. hurt, the Bills didn’t even make the playoffs. Every other commercial is a bicentennial minute, famous actors backed by heroic music telling her how much freedom and equality Americans have. Worse, at halftime Up With People does a fruity tribute: Two Hundred Years and Still a Baby. For the finale they recite the Pledge of Allegiance, hands on hearts. “With liberty and justice for all,” the corny voice echoes, and the Orange Bowl blooms with flags, balloons, fireworks. At least the Steelers are losing, but then they come back late and Patty turns it off so she doesn’t have to watch another celebration.

  CURRENT EVENTS

  THAT SPRING EILEEN BREAKS HER ARM—NOT PLAYING SOFTBALL BUT the first day of trout season, slipping on a rock, Cy driving her to the hospital in his waders. It’s her right arm. After work, Patty delivers casseroles her mother has put together, taking the previous day’s dish back with her on the passenger seat. Casey says “Ga-ga” for Grandma. He stands and walks early, before his birthday. Patty witnesses his first step through her viewfinder, and his fistfuls of cake, clicking away so Tommy can be there. Casey falls hard against the coffee table and gives himself a black eye she feels terrible about. Soon he’s tooling around the house and they have to put up gates. Easter it snows, covering the plastic eggs dotting the backyard. The snow turns to rain and the river rises. For a week Russ has them sandbagging the levee below the speedway. When the weather turns, her mother finally gives in and has a new roof put on the garage, fretting the whole time over the cost. The crew cuts and rakes all the different Little League fields around town; at night Patty finds grass in her pockets. Her class has its tenth reunion, which she skips, watching TV all evening, trying not to imagine the gossip. In Arizona three inmates are killed in a riot; the pictures on the news of smashed windows and overturned desks make it look like the prisoners went wild, mak
ing their demands for better conditions look ridiculous. As June approaches, and her memories of the trial, she reads in the paper that Mr. Ayres has died. Unexpectedly, at home. Patty has nothing against him, so why does she feel guilty? She visits, she writes, she accepts Tommy’s collect calls. She pays her ridiculous phone bills and refills his account when it gets down. She teaches Casey to say “Da-da” into the receiver. After Randy and Kyra both get disappointing report cards, Shannon and Marshall decide this is their last year in public school. A gray cat her mother’s never seen before prowls the yard for a week and then vanishes. There’s a bad accident on the Southern Tier: a trucker has a seizure at the wheel and takes out a family from New Jersey in a van. The bicentennial falls on a Sunday, and Eileen and Cy convince Patty to go with them to the demolition derby at the county fair. She sits there in the stands, afraid to go down and get something at the snack bar in case someone recognizes her. It’s stupid, but she imagines Elsie Wagner in her fancy clothes pointing her out in line and screaming things. The winner is a guy Cy knows from a band he used to be in. They meet him in gasoline alley and end up at the Iroquois, Eileen daring anyone to armwrestle her now that she has the cast off. Patty wants to go home but they’ve got the only car. The guy’s name is Trace. He’s from Candor, where Cy grew up, and introduces himself like he has no idea who she is. She’s wearing her ring, but just by the way he holds on to her eyes and then listens with his head tipped to hear better, she knows he’s interested. It’s been so long that Patty’s flustered—as if she’s interested too—and after two beers she tells Eileen she has to go. Later, alone, she’s mad at herself for even having those thoughts, and snips them out cleanly. When Eileen asks if she wants to go out again the next Friday, she says she’s got to get up early to visit Tommy, and Eileen doesn’t push it. For her birthday, Russ drops off a boombox from Tommy and a tape of the Stones’ latest album with her new favorite song, “Angie,” which she plays late at night, smoking on the back porch. The rest of the summer is patching potholes and oiling backroads, shoveling up skunks. It’s bad hot; they go through two coolers a day, refilling it at lunch, plunking in thick disks of ice. She takes cold showers and shakes on baby powder. She plays pat-a-cake with Casey and keeps an eye on her savings and forgets the way Trace looked at her. She gets her hair cut, then doesn’t like it, and when she tries to fix it herself she just messes it up worse. Casey’s teething and doesn’t want to sleep in his crib; he throws his blanky out and stands there wailing, rattling the bars. “Let him cry,” her mother says, because she thinks Patty spoils him. Every night it’s like this, and she’s tired, she needs her sleep. He spits out his whipped beets in a pink mound, tosses his gnawed zwieback on the floor. When she turns off his cartoons because it’s his bedtime, he pulls away from her, falls to the carpet and wails, kicking. She describes his tantrums to Tommy, but by then it’s too late; she needs the help right when it’s happening. August the softball leagues finish their seasons. Eileen knocks in six runs in a playoff game and her name’s in the paper, making Patty wonder—for an instant—if she should change hers back. The days are hazy, thunderstorms rolling in after dinner. Her mother’s big window fan finally dies, and they make a trip to Sears to replace it, her mother upset that they no longer carry the same model. One lunchtime while Patty’s waiting in the truck, she sees Trace come out of the Dandy Mart wearing his Hilltop Collision uniform, but she’s across the street and he doesn’t see her. Another groundhog takes up residence under the shed in the garden, feasting on her mother’s beans and summer squash, chewing holes in her tomatoes so they go black and soft and rotten. Russ lends Patty a trap from animal control, a spring-loaded cage that’s supposed to be painless, but every day when she checks it, it’s empty. The more Patty looks at the cage, the more she sees Tommy in his cell. She knows it’s silly, but she hopes the groundhog gets away. One warm night after supper she goes out to check on the trap and before she’s off the porch she smells the freshest skunk she’s ever smelled. It’s in the trap instead of the groundhog, hissing and lifting its tail. She can’t get close enough to do anything, and ends up calling animal control. “What’s going to happen to it?” she asks—a dumb question. She shouldn’t care; for all she knows it has rabies. Casey builds towers of soft blocks and knocks them down. “Ka!” he says, clapping. Late one night, after Johnny signs off and they play the Star-Spangled Banner, her boombox eats Tommy’s birthday tape. Mick’s voice wavers in her headphones, drops an octave, warbles, then gives way to a cellophane crackling before she can reach over from her bed and find the stop button. The tape is wound around the rollers and she has to rip it free. She performs surgery with a razor blade, scotch taping the ends together, but knows from experience it won’t last. She has Eileen dub her a copy, but it comes out muddy, so she just buys another one, a belated birthday present to herself. And what does he want for his birthday? It’s not that far off. “French-fried mushrooms,” he tells her. “Like we used to get at Dairy Queen.” And what would it cost her, to have them herself—ninety—nine cents? She can’t even promise him that. Summer’s almost over, the Southern Tier a parade of Winnebagos and boat trailers. The crew repaints the school crosswalks and sandblasts the graffiti off the walls. Patty’s hands tingle from the wand; hours later she still feels pins and needles and is clumsy answering the phone. The operator has a collect call from Tommy. It’s only Tuesday. Yes, she’ll accept, she says, afraid something’s happened. It has, Tommy explains. He’s gotten a letter from the appellate court in Albany. They’ll appoint a lawyer to the case soon. “That’s great,” she says, because it’s the best they could ask for, but for some reason Patty isn’t as happy as she should be. “What is soon?” she asks.

  THE HAND

  IT TAKES THE COURT NINE MONTHS TO APPOINT A LAWYER. BY THEN Casey is riding a tricycle and filling pages with crayoned tornadoes. Everything official goes through Tommy, so she doesn’t know until he reads her the letter over the phone. The lawyer wants to review the complete transcript before he sits down with him. The state charges a dollar a copy, and it’s 1,600 pages long.

  Whenever she calls the new lawyer she gets a machine, and then when she does catch him in, he talks to her like she’s an idiot. To Patty, the appeal seems simple: go through the evidence again, bring up the money and the missing guns, then put Gary on the stand and show that he’s lying.

  “There are two problems with that,” the lawyer says. “First, is there anything that connects the money to the guns? And second, even if we can establish a connection, what impact does it have on the specific event in question? What I’d like to look at is what kind of precedent there is here in terms of your husband’s legal culpability. Let’s say for the sake of argument that he does push her down and she hits her head. How, legally, does that translate into murder in the second degree, and how is it that in a case with minimal physical evidence he receives the maximum sentence?”

  “He didn’t do it,” Patty says.

  “That very well may be,” the lawyer says. “But I can’t prove it. I’ve got to play the hand I’ve been dealt.”

  She can pay for an investigator, he says, but they’re expensive.

  How expensive?

  The number seems doable, but she’s already started paying off the transcript in installments, like a car. When she sits down with her bankbook she sees she can only afford three weeks. The lawyer says they’d need someone working on it full-time for four or five months to turn up anything worthwhile. Immediately Patty thinks of her mother, and the value of the house, an untapped treasure.

  At dinner, over tuna noodle casserole, she carefully explains the situation, sticking to the script she’s worked on all day.

  “How much?” is her mother’s first question—asked matter-of-factly, as if she’s interested.

  “Two-fifty a week, plus expenses.”

  “So how much is that total?”

  Patty can’t lie. “Just over five thousand dollars.”

  “Before ex
penses.”

  “Before expenses.”

  Her mother shakes her head, pushing her noodles around. “It’s too much.”

  Fork in hand, Patty waits for her to say something else, to go beyond her first offer so they can negotiate.

  Her mother senses her waiting and looks up. She sighs and glances away as if she’s disappointed with Patty, tired of being put in this position again. “I wish you could see what you’re doing.”

  “What am I doing?” Patty comes back, because she’s ready to fight now, to defend Tommy against her one more time—forever, if necessary.

  But the face her mother gives her is open and tender, and her voice is soft. “You’re breaking my heart.”

  THE WINNER’S CIRCLE

  IN THE MEANTIME, TRACE DOESN’T GO AWAY. SHE SEES HIM DRIVING around town, passing the other way in the Hilltop’s flatbed wrecker as they head out to cut brush or weedwhack ditches. Every time they stop in to the Dandy Mart for lunch she scans the lot, then stays in the truck anyway, as if he might ambush her.