The Far End of Happy

by Kathryn Craft

  “Did he ever hit you?” the policeman asked Will.

  “Oh no, he’s a great dad,” Will said. “He’d make up soccer games with me in the side yard.” Tucked up against the ceiling, above his head, was an old mirror ball. So many ways of looking at any one thing. Will spun this singular moment of connection as if he and Jeff had played together all the time. She wasn’t sure if Jeff had ever done anything one-on-one with Andrew.

  The admiration in Will’s voice clawed at Ronnie. Once—once—he had made up a soccer game with Will. Jeff should have spent much more time with his sons. He’d have to, once the divorce went through and he was granted visitation rights. That was one of the reasons why, six weeks ago, Ronnie had chanced leaving the boys alone with him one weekend. Jeff had to see that he’d need his own relationship with the boys; Ronnie fostering one on his behalf could no longer work.

  She wanted Jeff to benefit from relationships with their children the same way she had. At least that’s what she told herself to try to ease her distress over the fact that she had left her precious children alone with a man who just weeks later would arm himself and stand off against local and state police. Thank god, thank god they’d been all right when she got home.

  And this morning she had almost sent her children out to him, again. What the hell had she been thinking?

  When Ronnie sat back down, Mr. Eshbach, waddling with his bowlegged gait, wound his way between tables and chairs to join her. His compact stature had suited him well for tucking into the tight spaces required of a plumber. Although retired, he still dressed each day in the navy short-sleeved shirt and navy pants that he would have worn to work. His clothesline suggested he owned seven sets. Jeff’s closet was filled with the black pants and white short-sleeved shirts required of his work too. What clothes would fill his closet once the farm store took off and his life at the hotel ended?

  If he lived beyond life at the hotel.

  Mr. Eshbach pulled out a chair and sat with a long sigh, more emotional expression than she’d ever before heard from the man. Their interactions were mostly limited to waves from the car and incidental meetings at the mailbox, although now that they had the farm store, she did know he had a weakness for beets. His features seemed carved into stone, as if a smile would require heavy lifting.

  “I gave my statement,” he said. “I could leave, but they won’t let me go back to my home just now, and I have nowhere else to go.”

  “I am so sorry you got caught up in this.”

  Mr. Eshbach let silence stretch between them. She’d heard he’d lost his wife years ago, before Ronnie moved in. She wondered what the two of them might have talked about.

  “What can you do,” he concluded, as if they had worked something through. His voice dropped at the end, shutting out all possibility for companionable exchange.

  His silence was an empty bowl Ronnie longed to fill. “We’re getting a divorce,” she blurted. He nodded. After a moment, she added, “The boys and I will be the ones moving out, as soon as we find a place, but for now it’ll be Jeff. So you’ll know. If you don’t see him.” He nodded. “Thing is, I love so many things about my life. It’s the drinking. If he’d just quit.” The words marched out of her mouth until their complete inappropriateness formed a clump in the air.

  Ronnie would make a terrible secret agent. Even sixty seconds of silence was enough torture to get her to spill secrets.

  It was the same way eight weeks ago, when years of questions, months of waffling, and weeks of hand-wringing resulted in Ronnie’s decision to file for divorce. She expected an emotional scene, and Jeff had provided one, pounding his fist against a front porch column, lips trembling, tears welling. And even though the dreaded words had scraped her throat like burnt toast, in the end, the emotional act of leaving Jeff had not required the Jaws of Life. It was more like separating two sticky notes. She had feared telling her children, though. Divorce would destroy their sense of family and home, even though they’d done nothing to cause it. Ronnie had lost enough fathers to know how that felt. But her sons had the right to prepare themselves as she had, so once she’d told Jeff, she hadn’t been able to sit with the knowledge for more than a day before she’d told them.

  To make sure Jeff wouldn’t overhear, she’d taken Andrew and Will out to the side yard, beneath the broad canopy of the mimosa tree. Its hearty trunk and low branching offered accessible footholds for young climbers—and their mom and barn cats as well, as several of Jeff’s photos had proven. Swallowtail butterflies and hummingbirds flitted among its fragrant, silky flowers while its leaves, like collections of green feathers stitched into an array of headdresses, caught the breeze. An invader from the south, the mimosa was nothing more than another beautiful weed. Its lifespan in Pennsylvania was typically short. But this one had been here for as long as Jeff had been, he’d said, and when she left the farm, she would miss this idyllic spot. They’d wedged the hammock’s stand between the tree’s shallow roots, and in rare moments of repose, it was a favorite place to curl up with a book.

  Ronnie sat the boys on the hammock before her. But that felt wrong. She needed to be talking with them, not at them. So she climbed into the hammock too, and each of them redistributed their weight to accommodate the new balance. The boys looked at her, the sun dappling their skin with gold expectation. In her rush to remove the barrier of hidden truth from between them, Ronnie had not thought ahead.

  When at last the words formed, they came out in a tumble: “I am going to divorce your father.”

  Ronnie braced for their shock. After all, she and Jeff rarely fought. To preserve the marriage this long, she had fluidly readjusted her expectations and diverted energy toward her and Jeff’s one great point of connection—the country lifestyle they shared. She looked around at pears hanging heavy on a nearby tree. Chickens clucked and scratched in the dirt, sun glinting off their iridescent neck feathers. The horses peeked out over their stall doors as if they too were listening to Ronnie’s news.

  “I suppose you are pretty surprised by this,” Ronnie said. She certainly was. Divorce, while repeatedly embraced by her mother, went against Ronnie’s beliefs. She was determined to do it better than she had. Give her kids the stability she’d never enjoyed.

  But there was no longer anything stable about Jeff.

  Will, Daddy’s little helper, arranged a blank face. Andrew answered, “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “You and Dad don’t even act like you’re in love.”

  Hmm. Ronnie had needed several sessions with a therapist to come to this awareness. She’d also plunked down twenty-four dollars for a book that told her that her marriage exemplified the predivorce state. She could have saved her money and asked her ten-year-old.

  “Explain what you mean,” Ronnie said.

  “You never spend time together.”

  He was right on that point. Ronnie was usually on the run with the boys, and Jeff rarely attended Andrew’s Tae Kwon Do events or Will’s soccer games. She’d ask other couples at these events: Do you always come together? How do you work that out with your employers? Jeff was never able to clear his schedule. Ronnie joked that when it came to sports, she was a single mom. Over time, it felt like less and less of a joke.

  “Plus,” Andrew had said, “you are way more creative than Dad is. He’ll never understand you the way I do.”

  No, Ronnie couldn’t hold secrets. Not from Jeff, the boys, or, as her conversation with Mr. Eshbach in the fire hall had just shown, her next-door neighbors.

  As if he’d needed the time to free each word from rusting vocal cords, Mr. Eshbach told her he knew all about Jeff’s problems with alcohol.

  “You do?” Jeff had always enjoyed his cocktails, yes, but it had only been during this last year that Ronnie finally suspected his problem, and she lived with him. “How?”

  “Oh, it was back before you got to
gether. He’d had that other girl.”

  “Fay.” Fay Sickler. They’d had to track down the divorce papers in order to apply for their marriage license. Jeff had bought the house from his mother for Fay, not Ronnie. She and Jeff had married the year before Ronnie and her mother moved back into the area, when Ronnie was entering high school. By the time Ronnie had graduated from college and moved back from New York City, Jeff’s marriage to Fay had ended. Crazy Fay stories had filled her and Jeff’s early years with laughter and, by comparison, made Jeff’s choice of Ronnie seem so sane.

  Because Ronnie had never had to deal with Crazy Fay directly, it was easy for her to pretend Jeff’s life had started anew when they married. Ronnie had never stopped to think of what it must have looked like to someone like Mr. Eshbach, who would have watched from his house next door as Jeff swapped one woman for the next.

  “He didn’t take it so well when she left,” Mr. Eshbach said. “One night while I was walking the dog, I bumped into him. He tripped right over the leash. He was so blind with drink, I wasn’t sure he’d live the night. Had no clue I was even there, I don’t suppose.”

  Had despair been entrenched in Jeff’s life even before they’d gotten together? It couldn’t be. One of the things she’d loved about him was that, compared to the high seas of her emotional life, Jeff had always seemed so serene. He was her even keel, she always said. Had his contentment always been an illusion? Or was there some turning point to his decline that Ronnie missed? She couldn’t believe Mr. Eshbach had been sitting on the story all this time.

  “I’ve wondered, through the years, what would have happened that night if I hadn’t found him and steered him home.” His voice softened. “So, however this turns out, well…”

  Ronnie looked at him, eyebrows raised, fearing he had run through his quota of words and was done speaking. “Yes?”

  “He seemed real content once you two wed. To my way of thinking, you may have given him an extra dozen years.”

  Ronnie lowered her eyes. She’d blamed herself so much lately that this kindness threatened to undo her.

  The officer returned to the room and headed to Ronnie’s table. Mr. Eshbach stood.

  “I’m so sorry for all this…this…” Ronnie couldn’t find words. Inconvenience was an understatement.

  The old man, who over the course of twelve years had never encouraged neighborly interaction, reached over and patted her on the hand with his stubby, callused fingers. “Been lonely since the wife passed. After your storm blows through, I won’t be a stranger.”

  Her storm, whose winds were whipping at her neighbors. Like Heather Beam, the young woman who’d stopped in the farm store last week while Ronnie was typing up interview notes for her aquaponics article. Raised in a city on frozen vegetables, Heather had asked Ronnie for a full tour of New Hope Farms’s produce. She’d taken one of everything, it seemed, even handfuls of nuts and seeds and copies of Ronnie’s shelf tag recipes. Heather and her husband had just bought a place up the road. “I want to taste every new experience country life has to offer,” she had said.

  Ronnie too had once felt that way. She had planned to meet Heather today so Ronnie could advise her on what she could do now to prepare soil for her own spring garden. The references Ronnie had assembled were sitting under the store’s front counter.

  What a welcome Heather and her husband must be receiving today. She hoped it wouldn’t taint the fresh-faced enthusiasm that Ronnie had found so endearing.

  The policeman filled the spot Mr. Eshbach had vacated. “They’ve tried the doors to all of the outbuildings on the property, but they’re locked.”

  “I know. For the past few weeks, Jeff has been kind of paranoid. He added locks to buildings that have always stood open: corn cribs, the tractor shed, the barn, the tool shed.” Ronnie shook her head. “It’s weird. When I met him, he always left the house unlocked at night. He even left his keys in the car out in the driveway.” Why was he now so afraid?

  “Do you have any idea where he might go?”

  “You mean to hide from the police? How can you expect me to think like that?”

  “Or where he’d go to hole up and consider taking…a final action. A place with a certain significance or meaning.”

  His woodworking shop? Its hardware, tools, and machinery all poised to spring into service, awaiting only Jeff’s imagination and skilled hands to achieve their creative potential. He kept the outbuilding as organized as a small hardware store—except for the dark corner with the filing cabinets and his desk. Once the boys’ allergist had put an end to Jeff smoking in their home, Jeff had moved all of their financial records from the upstairs sitting room out to the desk in his shop so that, on his nights off, he could enjoy a cigarette and a cocktail while he paid bills. His record keeping had broken down until the mess artfully disguised its secrets. From Ronnie, and perhaps from Jeff as well.

  But those records were no longer in the woodworking shop.

  They were in New Hope Farms. After he and Ronnie had completed their home renovation last winter, Jeff had planned the farm store as another project to work on with Ronnie. It was the perfect confluence of their combined skills, he’d said. Meant to be. It would bring them even closer to the farm they loved and to each other. Ronnie hadn’t been as sure. She had more than enough on her plate with the boys, the animals, and her magazine writing. But the project energized him, and after the store was built, he’d moved all their financial records into its office, as if from the dark to the light of day. So he could organize the records while he wasn’t waiting on customers, he said, and give her the sum of the credit card debt that she’d been awaiting.

  That long-anticipated accounting, which he delivered seven weeks ago on a torn scrap of paper, had signaled the end of their marriage. He’d given it to her in the store office. She’d found him there again, distressed, yesterday.

  For two weeks, since he’d agreed on the October 20 move-out day, he’d been banging pans around in the kitchen when he got home from work, waking Ronnie every night. So they could talk. Again. She’d argue for divorce; he’d argue against it. She wasn’t getting much sleep. Her therapist had cautioned her to stop entertaining such requests; Ronnie needed to guard her health and make it clear to Jeff that her mind was made up.

  Refusing him at night had only inspired Jeff to find ways to monopolize her daytime hours instead, constantly interrupting her writing for help with house repairs. From replacing a water heater coil to securing an unmoored downspout to adding those unnecessary locks, the list of projects requiring four hands had grown and grown.

  When they’d taken the air conditioners out of the windows the previous day and stowed them in the barn, it seemed their work together had come to an end. Jeff pulled out a swollen key ring to double lock the barn door, but his hands shook so badly he fumbled several times in selecting the right key. Big tears rolled down his face.

  “I’ve tried to stop drinking,” he’d confessed, looking out over the cornfield’s stubble. “I can’t sleep. I’ve been vomiting. You know I never do that.”

  Muscling through on his own—a prospect doomed to failure, and so unnecessary with support available. He looked pale, and thinner than ever. How easy it would be for her to pull him into her arms. But Ronnie knew all too well that her solace wouldn’t change a thing.

  They went their separate ways.

  Finally alone for an hour, Ronnie started to think of chores that only Jeff had ever handled. She very much wanted to be able to manage the place without calling Jeff at the hotel every day to find out how she’d know if the ultraviolet lightbulb on the water purification system needed changing or how often she’d need to add water softener salt, so she collected her questions and went in search of him. Down in the store, Amber was closing up shop.

  “Jeff in there?” Ronnie said, nodding her head toward the closed office door.

  �
��Yep. I’m heading out. See you tomorrow?”

  “I might be a little late. I’ve been having trouble finishing an article. I’ll try to get here by ten, though. Barney will be dropping off more apples and cider, and we owe him money.”

  Ronnie knocked once and opened the office door.

  “What now?” Jeff had snapped, flipping down the yellow page from the legal pad on which he’d been writing. Covering it with his hand, as if Ronnie might steal his test answers. He lit a fresh cigarette. This fluid, practiced movement, which had ignited pheromones when they met but now suggested potential lung cancer and hardening arteries and I don’t love you enough, had taken on a substantial quiver. He took a long drag, then set it in the ashtray.

  Beside it sat a drink in a cocktail glass.

  The sight of it struck fear in Ronnie. “I thought you had work tonight,” she’d said. Jeff never, ever drank before a shift at work. Not even one cold beer with lunch on a hot summer day.

  “And?”

  And nothing. Soon, such issues would not be hers to worry about.

  She tucked her list into the pocket of her jeans. If she could get away with asking only one last question today, it wouldn’t be about housekeeping. He hadn’t mentioned his offer to move to the hotel for some time. Why would he? He didn’t want the divorce.

  Ronnie hated like hell to press him. She should be the one to go. He needed this home more than she did, and not just because it had been in his family for generations or because he’d lived there for years before Ronnie moved in. Ronnie had put her share of sweat into this house, it was true, but that sweat had evaporated. She could rehydrate, live elsewhere. But it was as if Jeff bled into the house, and it owned a part of him.

  A few weeks without his frantic eyes tracking her every movement and she’d be able to find a place for her and the boys, she was sure of it, and Jeff would be able to reclaim his home.

  She’d said, “I’d like to keep the boys up-to-date on what’s happening. Are you moving out tomorrow like you said you would?”