by Chip Cheek
But she’d been drinking, and the next morning she apologized for snapping at him, and said no, nothing had been going on, she promised—he could ask Reverend Lyle if he didn’t believe her. But he told her he believed her, and put the matter to rest in his mind, and as far as he knew, Charlie Morrell never returned.
They still made love, occasionally, when he was home. He’d bumped up to engineer by then, and was seeing a girl in Atlanta, Genie Taylor, a waitress at the Shoney’s where he had breakfast before heading to the switchyard. She was twenty-four, and lived in an apartment by herself. But after a few months she said she loved him, and asked him to leave his wife, and he said he couldn’t do that, and broke it off.
It was a happy time, all things considered. Effie drank. She’d pour a full pint glass, half gin, half seltzer water, with a squeeze of lime, what she called her “fizzy drinks,” and she’d have four or five of these a night, and sometimes Henry would wake alone in the wee hours and find her sitting by herself in the den, muttering to herself. He couldn’t go near the subject with her, not even on the mornings when she woke chagrined and self-loathing. So he let it go, because he liked to drink too, and Effie was in her best moods when she’d had a couple. “I believe it’s fizzy-drink-o’clock,” she’d say gaily at six or seven in the evening, and at that hour the house often took on a celebratory atmosphere. They were frequent hosts. Dinner parties, barbecues. Friends would stop by to shoot the breeze and stay for supper and cocktails. J. P. and his wife, Nell; Maynard Givens and his wife, Helen, and their children; Bernice DuPont, who was now Bernice Clarke, and her husband, Jaime, whom everyone tolerated. (Hoke had enlisted in the navy and was stationed on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.) Sometimes, late on a Friday or Saturday night, Effie’s voice would begin to slur and something sharp and dangerous would enter her mood, and politely their friends would comment on the hour and take their leave. If the children were up, Henry put them to bed. (Kate was getting wise, and would linger, asking if everything was okay.) In those moods, Effie could start talking about anything—gardening, say—and the subject would veer into dark terrain. “Mrs. Jackson,” she once said, meaning their seventh-grade science teacher, who had once given her a C on a project involving bean sprouts, “that bitch—I never felt good about myself after that. She ruined my fucking life.”
Carswall had a stroke and died in 1975. By then Signal Creek had become a suburb of Macon, and a state highway ran through the town center. For years developers had tried to get Carswall to sell the land, but he’d refused, and as soon as he was dead, Effie hired a real estate agent and started taking offers. Within a few months she’d sold or rented out all the land, and within a few years the thousand acres of fields and woods had been transformed into subdivisions and strip malls, and Henry and Effie had become, by any measure of the word, rich.
* * *
In the year before Effie died, when she was in and out of the hospital, Kate told Henry that she and Joyce and Anne had always been certain that, as soon as the last of them had grown up and moved away, he and Effie would separate. It was a surprise, she said—a happy surprise—that they were still together.
Henry was shocked. “I never dreamed of leaving your mother.”
Of himself and Effie he’d sometimes said, with a grin, rolling his eyes, “We love each other, we just don’t like each other that much.”
Their friends, and the people at church, said, “They’re a good team. They lean on each other.”
They were old. Loving and leaving were no longer questions they asked of themselves. After Genie Taylor, and the unfortunate kiss with Vivian, Henry was never again unfaithful to her. He might have been, if the right woman had ever approached him, but none had. He was still handsome, he thought, though he’d lost his hair and developed a generous paunch. He and Effie barely spoke; they could read each other’s minds. He always made a big to-do for her birthday, which she pretended to hate. Whatever they said, whatever anyone said, they belonged together.
A few months after Effie died—she’d been just shy of seventy-three—Henry went through the things in her room. (They’d slept in separate rooms for more than twenty years. It was the secret to a happy marriage, he liked to say.) Under her bed he found a shoe box packed with letters—dozens of them, all from Charlie Morrell, addressed to no name, only to a P.O. box in Signal Creek. He flipped through a few of the envelopes, looking at the postmarks. 1971. 1976. 1985. A faint spicy scent rose up from them. He pulled one of the letters out, from 1974, and opened it, and read:
Darling,
It should be easy to tell Millie I have business that weekend, if you really think he’ll be away, but I’m not sure my heart can take it again if …
He folded the letter and slid it back into its envelope, put the envelope back with the others, and closed the shoe box, then slid the shoe box back under the bed.
His heart ached. He spent the rest of the day in front of the television, paying no attention to it. But they had been through so much together. Joy and misery. Everyday comforts and complaints. They’d had a life together, and they’d loved each other. What did Charlie Morrell matter? Kate came by after work that evening with the groceries and sat with him for a while, and they chatted amiably.
He thought of the shoe box often, but never read the letters inside.
That fall he raked a pile of leaves in the backyard to burn them, and on an impulse, after he’d started the fire, he retrieved the shoe box from under the bed and threw it into the flames. The box smoked and caught and split open, the envelopes caught, the letters inside, but then the burning pages took flight in the draft and swirled up high over his head, dozens of fluttering sparks, lighting in the pine trees, drifting back, alarmingly, toward the house, before they burned out. Some pages were nearly whole, and these he caught and balled up and threw back into the fire, but most of the floating sparks were flakes and shards of paper, and they scattered all over the yard.
He finds the pieces still, months later, little white flakes singed around the edges, nestled in the crabgrass by the house or out along the far side of the yard, where the woods begin. Fragments of words and sentences, a man’s cursive in blue ink, blurred so much by the weather that most of them he can’t make out … sweet breath … your flower … every night I dream … He leaves them be.
* * *
They never went back to Cape May, and they never spoke to each other about their honeymoon. Sometimes, when they fought, he could feel it just under the surface—the knowledge of what they were capable of. “You’re no angel either,” he once said to her, in an argument he can no longer remember. But that was all. When Anne, planning her own honeymoon, asked them about theirs, Effie said only that the weather had been poor, and that they should have gone to Florida.
How young and foolish he once was. How naïve when, for a brief moment, he imagined running away with a girl he barely knew. He understands now the way desire spreads, like heat—how, when he and Effie discovered it in each other, they awoke to the swollen desirability all around them. He hadn’t been able to resist it. Neither had she. If she ever forgave him, he couldn’t say, but he could forgive her for Charlie Morrell.
Now he can feel her drifting away, when he looks through their photo albums: he feels the contours softening. The light surrounding them turns more flattering. Henry believes in heaven, as he always has, but lately it no longer comforts him. If it’s true that in heaven everyone will be free from sin, then in heaven all the people he has ever loved, though he may recognize their faces, will be strangers to him.
He imagines them all around him, a multitude—Effie beside him, divinely serene and pure.
This is better: they are back at the station in Cape May, boarding the train that will take them back to the rest of their lives. She’s ahead of him. He’s carrying both of their suitcases, struggling up the steps. He stumbles and she turns back and glares at him. She seizes his wrist. She will never let go.
Acknowled
gments
I’m indebted to a great many people for helping me bring this book into the world and for paving the way for me to write it. It’s been a long road.
Thank you, first of all, to my amazing agent, Katherine Fausset, who has been and continues to be an incredible advocate and source of reassurance, support, and editorial wisdom. I would trust her with my life (no pressure). I’m immensely grateful as well to all the team at Curtis Brown for their support and belief in this book, especially Holly Frederick, Jonathan Lyons, Sarah Perillo, and Olivia Simkins.
To Deb Futter, my wonderful editor at Celadon Books: you changed my life in a single day. Thank you for believing in this book and for taking a chance on it, and thank you for your guidance and unflagging enthusiasm. I’m indebted to everyone on the Celadon team, whose warmth and support have been overwhelming—especially Rachel Chou and Christine Mykityshyn for their marketing and publicity wisdom; Anne Twomey, for a beautiful cover; Alexis Neuville, for her mastery of schedules and logistics; and Randi Kramer, for clearly and kindly explaining things to me.
Thank you to my fabulous U.K. editor, Federico Andornino, and to all the people on the W&N team—and thank you as well to the editors at Blessing Verlag, Einaudi, Editions Stock, Lumen, and Lindhardt & Ringhof: I am honored to be on your lists.
This book would not exist without the support of my writing group, the Chunky Monkeys: Jennifer De Leon, Calvin Hennick, Sonya Larson, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Celeste Ng, Whitney Scharer, Adam Stumacher, Grace Talusan, and Becky Tuch. In addition to being intimidatingly sharp readers, writers, and disciplinarians, they are also some of my closest friends, and I would not have had the guts to see this book through without their encouragement and wildly inappropriate email chains.
Thank you to my teachers—especially Margot Livesey, who is a role model to me; Pamela Painter, my thesis advisor at Emerson College, who worked me to exhaustion; and Frederick Reiken, who among other things opened my eyes to Alice Munro. Thanks also to Andrea Barrett, Maud Casey, Maria Flook, DeWitt Henry, Katia Lief, Randall Kenan, Thomas Mallon, and Jessie Sholl.
I would have been lost at sea after my MFA program without the amazing community of writers, teachers, and students at GrubStreet, the literary arts nonprofit in Boston where I taught fiction and worked on staff for nearly a decade. Thanks, especially, to Christopher Castellani, who has become a mentor over the years, as well as a great friend. Thanks also to Eve Bridburg, whose belief in me and encouragement of my career have been invaluable. And thanks to all my friends from the staff, current and former, whom I love like family—Sonya Larson and Whitney Scharer (again), Alison Murphy, Sean Van Deuren, Rowan Beaird, Sarah Colwill-Brown, Jonathan Escoffery, Dariel Suarez, Lauren Rheaume, and Ian Jude Chio—and to my fellow instructors, who have taught me so much, among them: Alysia Abbott, Howard Axelrod, Jenna Blum, Lisa Borders, Michelle Hoover, Ron MacLean, Ethan Gilsdorf, and many, many more than I can name here, as well as the Grub-adjacent Ryan Scharer, whose home, with Whitney, has been the scene of many sloppy cocktail nights and insufferable discussions of craft. And finally, thank you to all my students at GrubStreet over the years, who inspired me every week and made me a sharper writer and a better person.
I’m deeply indebted to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which changed my writing life and broadened my horizons. Thanks to Michael Collier and Jennifer Grotz, and especially to the calm presence of Noreen Cargill, whom I was fortunate enough to work with in the back office for a couple of years. Thanks also to Mike Scalise and Cara Blue Adams, my beloved head waiters, and to all my fellow waiters of 2011.
Thanks as well to the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation—organizations that each gave me support and encouragement when I needed it—and to Emerson College, for my MFA, and to the New School, where I took my first writing workshops.
My friends are everything to me, and they have supported me and my writing life in more ways than I can count. Thank you to my dear friend Lizzie Stark, whose family’s beach house in Cape May inspired the setting for this book, and to George Locke, her husband, who taught me everything I know about noise music and kettlebells; thank you to Cam Terwilliger, who for months met me at six every morning at Diesel Café in Somerville to write; to James Scott and Urban Waite, with whom I wish I were sitting right now around a pit fire, sipping bourbon; to Laura van den Berg and Paul Yoon, magical, otherworldly beings; to John Cotter and Elisa Gabbert, fellow book-club members; to Benjamin Allen and Ashley Peterson, with whom Katie and I will always be tubing down the Deerfield River of our hearts; to Dan Pribble, my DM for life, and to Marianna Hagbloom, who taught me everything I know about whale penises; to Scott Votel (a.k.a. Gregor Hategood) and Moira Mannix, whose calm advice helped Katie and me in our first months of parenthood; to Amanda Dykstra, who needs to keep writing, and to Greg Esposito, whose recipe for haddock has strengthened my marriage; to Sean Lanigan, who also needs to keep writing, and Cami Hennekens, beloved former roommates; to Jaime Clarke and Mary Cotton, owners of the indispensible Newtonville Books; to Jennifer Olsen, Christen Enos, Kathleen Rooney, and Abby Beckel, who welcomed me at Emerson and have been good friends ever since; to Julia Cadieux, who informed me that balls smell like pancake batter; to Elizabeth Souder, whose sofa allowed me to move to New York many years ago; and to my oldest friends, Iain Campbell, Carlos Chavez, and Vicky Tsai, who have always loved and supported me.
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for raising me right and always encouraging me, even when my decisions haven’t seemed sensible, and thank you, Wes, my brother, for being my best friend all my life—and to my sister-in-law, Cindy, and my nephews, K.C. and Ben: I love you all.
Thank you, Aunt Jackie, for more than I can say here.
And thank you, finally and most of all, to Katie Hunt, my wife, my love, and to our baby daughter, Audrey, whose due date provided the deadline I needed to finish this book. My tender sweeties, I love you both so much.
About the Author
CHIP CHEEK’s stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Washington Square Review, and other journals and anthologies. He has been awarded scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. He lives in El Segundo, California, with his wife and baby daughter. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CAPE MAY. Copyright © 2019 by Chip Cheek. All rights reserved. For information, address Celadon Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.celadonbooks.com
Cover design by Anne Twomey
Cover photo by Richard T. Nowitz / Getty Images
Library of Congress Control Number: 201861341
ISBN 978-1-250-29715-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-23110-9 (international, sold outside the U.S., subject to rights availability)
ISBN 978-1-250-29716-7 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250297167
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmi
llan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First U.S. Edition: April 2019
First International Edition: April 2019