The Good Wife

by Stewart O'Nan

  “It’s important,” she says gently, and he relents.

  Visiting is already hard. Casey hates going. In the morning he’s deadweight; it’s a chore getting him out of bed and dressed. He complains that he’s missing his cartoons, but Patty notes the way he sticks close to her in the waiting room. The other kids run around, laughing and tripping over people’s feet; they pester their mothers and draw with crayons and play cards on the floor. There aren’t enough seats, and the etiquette is that only adults get chairs. Casey stands facing her, hands on her knees like she’s home base in a game. He’d climb onto her lap if he could still fit. Patty tries to make things easier by reading to him from picture books, but today the guards are being slow, and there are long dead spots.

  “You like football?” a heavy, gap-toothed woman sitting next to her asks Casey, and he curls away from her. “You gonna be a football player, I bet.”

  “He’s a Bills fan,” Patty says, though so far he’s shown no interest.

  “They can use a good player. I like the Redskins ’cause I used to live in Washington.”

  This is all aimed at Casey, who keeps his head tucked into his shoulder.

  “He’s shy,” Patty says.

  “That’s all right. He came to see his daddy, not me. Ain’t that right?”

  “Casey, answer the lady.”

  “That’s right,” the woman says, then turns to Patty. “It’s hard on them, the way they do it here. I hear they’re getting them trailers in though, like they have downstate? Now that’s the way to go.”

  The trailers are for overnight visits. It’s a new program for prisoners who’ve done good time. The whole family spends the weekend together inside the fence, in a trailer set up like a mobile home. You bring your own food and do your own cooking. Every couple of hours they check on you, but basically they lock you in for the night and leave you alone. They’ve had it at Wallkill for a couple of years.

  It sounds like a visiting room rumor, too good to be true. To be with Tommy again, alone. She wonders if the trailers have surveillance cameras in them, if somewhere they’d be on closed-circuit TV, people listening in, like their phone calls.

  Would she really care?

  When they finally get inside, it seems everyone around them is eating. The man at the next table’s lips are dusted bright orange from a bag of cheese curls, one of Casey’s favorites. Patty sees Casey looking at them and pats his arm to break the spell.

  Tommy’s heard of trailers at other places, but doesn’t think they’re supposed to get them here. And like that he shoots down her idea, like it could never happen.

  “You don’t know that,” she says. “They could be putting them in right now and not be telling us. That’s how they do everything else.”

  “I’ll ask around.”

  “I’ll find out,” she says. “If they’re coming, we’re going to be first on that list, I don’t care what we have to do.”

  He adds nothing, as if to say she can try if she likes. She wants more of a reaction than that, but she’s gotten her point across.

  “How’s your money?” she asks.

  Casey’s quiet like always, sitting still like he’s being punished. He’s good though, he doesn’t tug on her arm and bug her for a treat, while across the room the vending machines ring like a casino. When he looks that way, Tommy cuts his eyes toward him and makes a sad mask of a face, and she softens. They compromise. She springs for popcorn, an old standby.

  “Easy there,” Tommy says as Casey stuffs his face. “It’s not a race.”

  A couple minutes later he has to tell him a second time.

  “I’m sorry,” Casey says.

  “Don’t be sorry, bud,” Tommy says, “just cool your jewels.”

  See? Patty wants to say, but holds off. She takes a handful. It’s light and fake-buttery, but she’s not hungry. She only eats her share so Casey won’t.

  BUTTERFLIES

  MAY, THUNDERSTORMS POUND THE VALLEY, SENDING THEM OUT TO clean up downed limbs, feeding the woodchipper in the leafy humidity. They can’t even move some of the bigger ones. Earphones muffling the high motorbike whine of the engine, Patty strips the smaller branches with a chainsaw, then cuts them into easily digestible lengths.

  It’s warm, steam rising from the asphalt, and her goggles keep fogging. She has to take them off and clean them with the tail of her shirt. One of the young guys isn’t wearing his, and she feels like a mother, yelling at him to put them on. The chipper whirs empty, then shears, drowning her out, sending a spray clattering against the metal bed of the truck. Another guy’s running up and tossing branches into the chipper like he’s hurling a javelin.

  “Hey,” she has to say, “let’s quit messing around before someone gets hurt,” and even after that she sees them grinning and joking behind her back.

  It seems she’s got a new crew every year, meaning she has to prove herself to yet another set of overgrown, macho kids. It’s not that hard—she knows the job inside out by now—but it does make her life rougher than it really needs to be. She’s been stressing safety since day one with these guys. She shouldn’t have to tell them simple stuff like this.

  That’s what she’s thinking as she revs the engine with her trigger finger and lowers the bar into the gnarled bark of an oak. It’s like holding on to something alive. She locks her elbows, the vibration buzzing up her forearms, her clenched fingers tingling. She doesn’t lean on the saw, just lets the chain chew through the wet wood. The cut parts, gravity widening the gap as the limb sags, the last couple of inches pinching the bar, almost stopping it. Patty backs off and gives it more throttle and goes in again, but she must hit a knot or a spike, an old braid of wire eaten by the tree—she doesn’t bury the tip like Russ warned, she’s careful about that— because the saw jumps in her hands, the bar kicking back at her. She sees it coming up and jerks her face away.

  She doesn’t have time to think of the chain brake. It’s disengaged because she’s squeezing back the front handguard; all she’d have to do is let go. Instead, she squeezes harder and tries to dodge the bar. It’s faster than her, catching her in the side of the face.

  It’s like a punch. Patty goes down, dropping the saw and grabbing for the hurt. On the ground, she realizes what happened and feels torn skin, a burn like a brand. She can’t see from the eye she’s covering with both hands. She’s afraid to take them away.

  She lifts one. She’s wearing gloves, so the blood on her fingers looks black as oil. The other glove’s worse. Her eye stings, but she can see.

  “Aw shit,” one of the guys is saying, leaning in and then turning away.

  “You’re all right,” another says—Brian, his name is. “It just looks bad. Can you walk?”

  Patty hadn’t even thought of trying. She just wants to sit here for a minute. She’s having trouble getting her gloves off. Her earphones are gone because she can hear. What happened to the saw?

  “The saw’s okay,” Brian says. “Don’t worry about the saw.”

  The blood’s red and slippery on her hand, filling a fingerprint.

  “Keep pressure on it,” Brian says, and covers her eye with her palm again, and then they’re lifting her under the arms and helping her to the truck. Her legs work fine; she can see. It’s just a cut. She feels stupid, like she’s screwed up. What will Russ say?

  They put her in the middle of the front seat and give her a wet wad of napkins from lunch to hold against her eye like a poultice, and she remembers the game she and Shannon used to play, taking turns standing at the bottom of the basement stairs while the other dropped the basketball at the top and how once it came off a step too fast and hit her in the forehead before she could get her hands up. She fell so hard she smacked the hack of her head against the stone wall, but they weren’t supposed to be playing that game anymore, and when her mother came down to find out what the sound was, Shannon said the door and Patty just went along with her.

  Brian’s driving, taking over the situation,
and she’s grateful, even if she hates being saved.

  “I think I’m okay,” she says, and dabs at her face with the mass of napkins—sopping now, bright red against the white.

  The nearest hospital’s Robert Packer in Sayre, where she had Casey, where her father died. By the time they get there the napkins are dripping down her wrist and arm, and a nurse guides her straight through the emergency room to a stretcher-bed in the back. The guys have to wait outside.

  The young doctor with the scruffy beard holds Patty’s head in both hands, tilting the wound to the light and leaning in like he’s going to kiss it. It’s shallow. He says they can get away with some butterflies instead of stitches and let it mesh naturally, especially where it is. He cleans the cut and swabs it with some ointment, then sticks the strips on to hold the skin together, and writes her a prescription for some antibiotics. They’ve got her insurance, they’ll mail her the bill.

  Russ is in the waiting room; he’s sent Brian and the guys back to work. He inspects the butterflies like he’s a doctor.

  “I guess I must have hit a knot or something.”

  “It happens.”

  He’s brought the best of the town pickups. They slide down the ramp onto 17 and head east. The sun’s shining, the road’s dry except the edges. There’s a good two hours till quitting time, and Patty wants to go back and finish the day.

  “I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” Russ says.

  “If you were me and you had to work with these guys, what would you do?”

  The crew’s surprised when they pull up and Patty gets out. They stop the chipper to look at her butterflies.

  “I’m lucky it hit me in the head,” she jokes, but no one laughs.

  She thanks them and they shrug it off. Cars are passing, heads turning.

  “Okay,” Russ says, “break’s over. These people already think we don’t do anything.”

  Her goggles are in the truck, and she’s freaked to find a white gouge in one cup of her earphones. She gets a new pair of gloves, Brian surrenders the saw to her, and they set to work again, seriously this time, no grab-assing.

  Patty primes the engine, pushes in the choke and yanks the cord, and the saw buzzes. She doesn’t check to see if they’re watching her. She steps up to the limb and starts in on it, lopping off the green branches as she goes, careful of the tip, her head just that much out of line with the bar so if it kicks it will hit her in the shoulder instead.

  Punching out back at the garage, they all say good night to her, see you tomorrow.

  Even in the truck, driving home, she doesn’t give in, or when her mother acts horrified, telling her she’s been worried all along that Patty might get hurt, the job’s just too dangerous. She tells Casey she’s fine, that the butterflies are like having a band-aid. It’s only in the locked bathroom, turning her face to inspect the damage, that she feels sorry for herself and angry at Tommy, though she knows it’s not his fault.

  The next morning, she goes to the mirror hoping her head will look better, only to find she has a black eye on that side, the pooled blood under her skin the color of raspberry jam.

  “You look like you’ve been in a fight,” her mother says at breakfast.

  Casey stares until she tells him he’s being rude.

  There’s no way to hide it.

  “Husband do that to you?” jokes the lady at the drive-thru at Dunkin’ Donuts. It amazes Patty how many people say this like it’s funny. It’s almost a relief to get to work, where the guys know what happened.

  As the week passes, the eye softens and darkens like a bad pear, brown surrounded by yellow. Saturday, while she’s out shopping with Eileen at the mall, a saleslady kids them, “Little sibling rivalry there?”

  “It doesn’t look that bad,” Tommy says, but it’s been five days and she’s prepared him for it. His first reaction is to touch it, but of course he’s not allowed.

  The rumor about the trailers is true, he says. They’re starting a program this fall, but it’s only for guys who’ve done five full years. He’s still got a whole year to go before they can sign up.

  Patty’s careful not to pick at the cut, once the doctor peels off the butterflies. Every night before bed she uses the tube of ointment he’s prescribed to keep the new skin flexible. As June passes, the seam’s barely noticeable, a faint scratch in her tan. She glops on sunblock to protect it when they’re patching asphalt, and soon she’s her usual overall bronze, her eyes a raccoon mask from her sunglasses. By the end of July she has to search her temple for the telltale line. In the mornings, before work, she turns on the light above the sink and leans in close, ignoring the deepening creases beside her eye, the stray gray hairs. The scar only shows if she turns her head a certain way, and even then it fools her sometimes, flashes, there and not there, a visible badge of her toughness one minute and then gone the next, as if nothing ever happened.

  A FRESH START

  THE FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN, SHE TAKES PICTURES OF CASEY on the front porch with his lunchbox. He stands at the top of the stairs and hangs his head, condemned. Last night he cried. She doesn’t remember being terrified like this. To her, getting to ride the bus with Shannon was a big deal. Eileen was the one that cried because she was stuck at home. Maybe he thinks they’re sending him away.

  “Come on,” Patty says, “smile.”

  “I don’t want to,” Casey mumbles.

  “Come on, the bus is going to be here soon.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well I do,” she says. “I want to be able to show your father a nice picture of you, so quit with the whining. Look up.”

  He looks at her, miserable. “I don’t feel good.”

  “You felt good enough to eat your breakfast. Now smile.”

  Just getting him to look at the camera is a victory. She’s taken a half day to see him off because she knew he’d be like this. She reels off some shots, then has her mother take some of them together. Patty lays an arm over his shoulders. He submits to it, and she imagines how sour he’ll look beside her smile, the mismatch funny to someone who doesn’t know them. But it’s true too—she’s glad to have him in school, finally; daycare was expensive and he hated it there.

  “I don’t feel good,” he says.

  “You said that already.”

  “Really, Mom,” he says, “my stomach hurts,” and he clutches it with one hand.

  “You’re just nervous, it’s natural. Let’s go wait by the mailbox.”

  She takes his limp hand in hers and swings it between them as they walk down the driveway. It’s still summer, the sun through the trees a bright lemon-lime. In the distance, she can hear a diesel gearing down to climb the hill, and thinks it’s perfect timing.

  “It’ll be fun,” she says, and turns toward the noise of the bus. Beside her, Casey makes a strangling sound, his throat hitching like he’s going to throw up—a tactic he uses at the dinner table when he doesn’t want to eat his beans.

  “Don’t you dare, mister,” she threatens him, sticking a finger in his face.

  He hitches again, his neck stretching forward, his mouth opening, loosing a yellow gush of vomit that splashes over her sneakers. She keeps ahold of his arm as he bends at the waist and retches again, a blurt of Apple Jacks and milk and orange juice.

  “Is everything all right?” her mother calls from the porch.

  “Does everything look all right?” Patty shouts back.

  The bus clears the crest of the hill and flashes its amber caution lights and then the reds, the hinged stop sign extending as it slows. Patty catches the driver’s attention and waves him past, but he stops anyway.

  “Go,” Patty tells him. “We’re not ready.”

  He folds the door closed and a strip of faces slides by above them, pointing and laughing.

  Casey’s sobbing in hiccuping gulps, his face red. Finally he subsides, wiping his eyes with the back of a hand.

  “Are you all done?” she asks.

&nbs
p; “I think so.”

  “Feel better now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  She walks him back to the house without a word. “Go brush your teeth. I’ll drive you.”

  He doesn’t argue with her, just trudges upstairs, still carrying his lunchbox.

  “I don’t think he did it on purpose,” her mother says.

  “I know. He just got himself worked up.”

  “I can watch him if you want to go to work. It’s no problem.”

  “I don’t want him to miss the first day of school.”

  “I was just offering,” her mother says, and turns away, breaking off the conversation. It’s not the first time Patty’s been outnumbered in her own house. Over the years she’s stopped letting it bother her. If she’s wrong, she’s going to be wrong following her instincts, not someone else’s.

  When she comes back from getting her keys, Casey’s standing in the front hall.

  “Are you ready?” Patty asks.

  He dips his chin and they head out to the truck.

  “Have a good day,” her mother calls after them, and Patty has to prompt him to wave back.

  At the bottom of the drive, she swerves so the wheels straddle the splotch of vomit, knowing her mother will have it hosed off by the time she gets back.

  They ride in sunny silence for a while, the truck holding the hilly curves, the creek off to their right peeking through the guardrail, then crossing underneath them and following on the other side. An open shed of a bus stop passes—the stop where Margie and Peter Holman got off—and she remembers school being a place to meet her friends and escape the boredom of home, a place she could make herself into someone else. She glances at Casey, slumped and glum.

  “So you’re not talking, is that it?”

  He doesn’t take the bait.

  “Think you can go the whole day? I bet Mrs. Parrish would love that.”