Although at the very moment that her honey-voiced neighbor had phoned, Lucy Rhoads was squeezing in her fist the key to her husband’s secret box of adulterous love letters from the deceptive Amorette, she had replied only, “All right, come on over, Amorette, because I’m having a real dark day here today.”
Still Lucy wasn’t getting ready. She was drinking black coffee in her dead husband’s robe and looking at the photos she’d found in the box. She was listening to the radio tell her to stay off the streets of Painton today because there was a chance that the streets weren’t safe. In general, the town of Painton didn’t like to admit to problems; the motto on the billboard at the town limits proclaimed in red, white, and blue letters, “THERE’S NO PAIN IN PAINTON. THE CHEERFULEST TOWN IN ALABAMA.” There was always a patrol car hidden behind this billboard with a radar gun to catch innocent strangers going thirty-six miles an hour and slap huge fines on them. If Deputy Sheriff Hews Puddleston had heard one hapless driver joke, “I thought you said there was no pain in Painton,” he’d heard a thousand of them.
The local billboard annoyed Lucy, as did the phrasing of this radio warning; she thought that a town so near the home of Helen Keller had no business suggesting life was “cheerful” or that the streets were ever safe. The reporter on the radio went on to explain rather melodramatically that there was a maniac loose. A young man had gone crazy at Annie Sullivan Mall on the outskirts of Painton and tried to kill his wife. Right now, live on the radio, this man was shooting out the windows of a florist shop in the mall, and the reporter was outside in the atrium hiding behind a cart selling crystals and pewter dwarves. No one was stopping the man because he had a 9mm automatic assault weapon with him, and he had yelled out the window that he had no problem using it. The reporter had shouted at him, “No problem,” and urged the police to hurry up. The reporter happened to be there broadcasting live at the mall because it was the Painton Merchants Super Savers Summertime Sale for the benefit of the Painton Panthers High School football team, 1992 state semi-finalists, and he’d been sent to cover it. But a maniac trying to kill his wife was naturally a bigger story, and the reporter was naturally very excited.
Lucy turned on her police scanner as she searched around for an old pack of the cigarettes Prewitt had always been hiding so she wouldn’t realize he’d gone back to smoking again despite his high cholesterol. He’d never hidden them very well, not nearly as well as his sexual escapades, and she’d constantly come across crumpled packs that he’d lost track of. Lucy had never smoked herself and had little patience with the members of the Gardenia Club’s endless conversation about when they’d quit, how they’d quit, or why they’d quit. But today Lucy decided to start. Why not? Why play by the rules when what did it get you? Lighting the match, she sucked in the smoke deeply; it set her whole body into an unpleasant spasm of coughing and tingling nerves. She liked the sensation; it matched her mood.
On the police scanner she heard the dispatcher rushing patrol cars to the mall. This maniac fascinated her, and she went back to the radio, where the reporter was explaining the situation. Apparently the young man had gone to the mall to shoot his wife because she’d left him for another man. According to the maniac’s grievance to the reporter, his wife was still using his credit cards and had been in the midst of a shopping spree at the mall before he caught up with her in the Hank Williams Concourse, where they’d fought over her plan to run off with this other man and stick the maniac with the bills. She’d fled down the concourse to the other man, who owned a florist shop at the east end of the concourse. It was here that the maniac caught up with her again, this time with the gun he’d run back to his sports van to collect. He’d shot them both but, in trying to avoid other customers, had managed only to hit the florist in the leg and to pulverize one of his wife’s shopping bags. Plaster flying from a black swan with a dracaena plant in its back gouged a hole out of his wife’s chin. He’d allowed the other customers to run out of the shop but held the lovers hostage.
Lucy could hear the sirens of the approaching patrol cars even on the radio. But by the time the police ran into the atrium with all their new equipment, the florist was hopping out of his shop on one foot, holding on to his bleeding leg and shouting that the husband had run out the back door. The police ran after him while the reporter gave a running commentary as if it were a radio play. As the florist was wheeled into the ambulance, he told the reporter that the maniac had “totally trashed” his shop “terminator time.” He sounded amazingly high-spirited about it. The reporter also interviewed the wife as she was brought out in angry hysterics with a bandage on her chin. She said that her husband had lost his mind and had nobody but himself to blame if the police killed him. She was then driven off to the hospital with the florist.
Lucy made herself eat a tuna sandwich, although she never seemed to be hungry anymore. When she finished, the maniac was still on the loose and still in possession of the 9mm gun that he’d bought only a few months earlier at the same mall. News of the failure of the police to capture him was oddly satisfying. Lucy imagined herself running beside this betrayed husband through the streets of Painton, hearing the same hum in their hearts. The radio said that neighbors were taking care of the couple’s four-year-old triplets, Greer, Gerry, and Griffin, who hadn’t been told that their father had turned into a maniac in Annie Sullivan Mall. The couple’s neighbors on Fairy Dell Drive were shocked; such a nice man, they said, a good provider and a family man. “I’dah never thought Jimmy’d do something like this in a million years, and you ask anybody else in Painton, they’ll tell you the same,” protested his sister, who’d driven to the mall to plead with her brother to come out of the florist shop but had arrived too late.
The reporter was obliged temporarily to return the station to its mellow music program, Songs of Your Life, playing Les Brown’s Band of Renown doing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” Lucy twisted the dial to OFF. She did not believe that life was a bowl of cherries, and she never had. In her view life was something more along the lines of a barefoot sprint over broken glass. She felt this strongly, although she herself had lived a life so devoid of horror that she might easily have been tricked into thinking life was the bowl of sweet fruit that her husband Prewitt had always insisted it was. The surprised reaction of the Mall Maniac’s neighbors and family annoyed her. Why hadn’t they suspected? But then, why hadn’t she suspected Prewitt and Amorette of betraying her? At least the maniac had noticed what was going on around him—that his wife was stockpiling possessions on his credit cards while planning to run off with the florist. Lucy herself had been such an idiot that when years ago she’d wanted to leave Prewitt and start her life over, he’d talked her out of it with all his pieties about commitment and family values and the children’s happiness, when at the exact same time, he’d been secretly sleeping with Amorette Strumlander!
Lucy smashed the smiley mug against the lip of the kitchen counter until it broke, and her finger was left squeezed around its yellow handle as if she’d hooked a carousel’s brass ring. There, that was the last one. She’d broken all the rest this morning, and she still felt like screaming. It occurred to her there was no reason why she shouldn’t. She didn’t have to worry about disturbing her “family” anymore.
It had been twenty-one days now since the death of the perfidious Prewitt. Last Sunday the Rhoadses’ son and daughter had finally returned to their separate lives in Atlanta after rushing home to bury their father and console their mother. These two young people, whom Prewitt had named Ronny after Reagan and Julie after Andrews, took after their father, and they thought life was a bowl of cherries too, or at least a bowl of margaritas. They were affable at the funeral, chatting to family friends like Amorette Strumlander about their new jobs and new condo clusters. They liked Amorette (and had Lucy not distinctly recalled giving birth to them, she could have sworn Amorette was their mother, for like her they both were slyly jejune). Ronny and Julie were happy with their lifestyles, whic
h they had mimicked from trendy magazines. These magazines did not explain things like how to behave at a father’s funeral, and perhaps as a result Ronny and Julie had acted during the service and at the reception afterward with that convivial sardonic tolerance for the older generation that they had displayed at all other types of family functions. Amorette later told Lucy she thought “the kids held up wonderfully.”
Lucy was not surprised by her children’s lack of instinct for grief. Their father would have behaved the same way at his funeral had he not been the one in the casket. “The kids and I are day people,” Prewitt had told his wife whenever she mentioned any of life’s little imperfections like wars and earthquakes and pogroms and such. “You’re stuck in the night, Lucy. That’s your problem.” It was true. Maybe she should have grown up in the North, where skies darkened sooner and the earth froze and the landscape turned black and gray, where there wasn’t so much southern sun and heat and light and daytime. For life, in Lucy’s judgment, was no daytime affair. Life was stuck in the night; daytime was just the intermission, the waiting between the acts of the real show. When she listened to police calls on the radio scanner, the reports of domestic violence, highway carnage, fire, poison, electrocution, suffocation, maniacs loose in the vicinity of Annie Sullivan Mall always struck her as what life was really about. It suddenly occurred to her that there must have been a police dispatch for Prewitt after she’d phoned 911. She’d found him by the opened refrigerator on the kitchen floor lying beside a broken bowl of barbecued chicken wings. The scanner must have said, “Apparent heart attack victim, male, Caucasian, forty-eight.”
Prewitt had died without having much noticed that that’s what he was doing, just as her day children had driven off with whatever possessions of Prewitt’s they wanted (Ronny took his golf clubs and his yellow and pink cashmere V-necks; Julie took his Toyota) without having really noticed that their father was gone for good. If Prewitt had known he’d be dead within hours, presumably he would have destroyed the evidence of his adultery with Amorette Strumlander since marriage vows and commitment were so important to him. But apparently Prewitt Rhoads had persisted in thinking life a bowl of imperishable plastic cherries to the very last. Apparently he had never seen death coming, the specter leaping up and grinning right in his face, so he had died as surprised as he could be, eyes wide open, baffled, asking Lucy, “What’s the matter with me?”
Amorette Strumlander had been equally unprepared when she’d heard about Prewitt’s sudden demise from their Gardenia Club president Gloria Peters the next morning. She had run up the lawn shrieking at Lucy, “I heard it from Gloria Peters at the nail salon!” as if getting the bad news that way had made the news worse. Of course, Lucy hadn’t known then that Prewitt and Amorette had been having their long affair; admittedly that fact must have made the news harder on Amorette. It must have been tough hearing about her lover’s death from Gloria Peters, who had never once invited Amorette to her dinner parties, where apparently Martha Stewart recipes were served by a real maid in a uniform. In fact, that morning after Prewitt’s death when Amorette had come running at her, Lucy had actually apologized for not calling her neighbor sooner. And Amorette had grabbed her and sobbed, “Now we’re both widows!” Lucy naturally thought Amorette was referring to her own dead husband Charlie Strumlander, but maybe she had meant her lover Prewitt.
Honk honk honk pause honk honk. Honk honk honk pause honk honk.
Amazingly it was two in the afternoon, and Lucy was still standing in the middle of the kitchen with the yellow coffee mug handle still dangling from her finger. She quickly shoved the photographs she’d found in the bathrobe pocket as Amorette came tapping and whoohooing through the house without waiting to be invited in. She had never waited for Lucy to open the door.
“Lucy? Lucy, oh, why, oh, good Lord, you’re not even ready. What are you doing in a robe at this time? Didn’t you hear me honking?” Mrs. Strumlander was a petite woman, fluttery as a hungry bird, as she swirled around the table in a summer coat that matched her shoes and her purse. She patted her heart as she was always doing to remind people that she suffered from a murmur. “I have been scared to death with this maniac on the loose! Did you hear about that on the radio?”
Lucy said that yes she had and that she felt sorry for the young man.
“Sorry for him?! Well, you are the weirdest thing that ever lived! You come on and go get dressed before we’re late to the play. I know when you see that poor little blind deaf-and-dumb girl running around the stage spelling out ‘water,’ it’s going to put your own troubles in perspective for you, like it always does mine.”
“You think?” asked Lucy flatly, and she walked back through the house into the bedroom she had shared with Prewitt. She was followed by Amorette, who even went so far as to pull dresses from Lucy’s closet and make suggestions about which one she ought to wear.
“Lucy,” Amorette advised her as she tossed a dress on the bed, “just because this maniac goes out of his mind at the Annie Sullivan Mall, don’t you take it as proof the world’s gone all wrong, because believe me most people are leading a normal life. If you keep slipping into this negative notion of yours without poor Prewitt to hold you up, you could just slide I don’t know where, way deep. Now, how’bout this nice mustard silk with the beige jacket?”
Lucy put her hand into her dead husband’s bathrobe pocket. She touched the photos and squeezed the key to the secret letters into the fleshy pads of her palm. The key opened a green tin box she’d found in a little square room in the basement, a room with pine paneling and a plaid couch that Prewitt considered his special private place and called his “study.” He’d gone there happily in the evenings to fix lamps and listen to vinyl big band albums he’d bought at tag sales, to do his homework for his correspondence course in Internet investing in the stock market. And, apparently, he went there to write love letters to Amorette Strumlander. Lucy had never violated the privacy of Prewitt’s space. Over the years as she had sat with her black coffee in the unlit kitchen, watching the night outside, she had occasionally fantasized that Prewitt was secretly down in his study bent over a microscope in search of the origins of life or down there composing an opera or plotting ingenious crimes. But she was not surprised when, the day after her children left for Atlanta, she’d unlocked the “study” door and discovered no mysterious test tubes, no ink-splotched sheets of music, no dynamite to blow up Fort Knox.
What she had found there were toy trains and love letters. Apparently Prewitt had devoted all those nights to building a perfect plastic world for a dozen electric trains to pass through. This world rested on a large board eight feet square. All the tiny houses and stores and trees were laid out on the board on plastic earth and Astroturf. In front of a little house, a tiny dad and mom and boy and girl stood beside the track to watch the train go by. The tiny woman had blonde hair and wore a pink coat, just like Amorette Strumlander.
Lucy found the love letters in a green tin box in a secret drawer built under the board beneath the train depot. There were dozens of letters written on legal pad, on pink flowered notepaper, on the backs of envelopes, hand-delivered letters from Amorette to Prewitt, and even a few drafts of his own letters to her. They were all about love as Prewitt and Amorette had experienced it. There was nothing to suggest to Lucy that passion had flung these adulterers beyond the limits of their ordinary personalities, nothing to suggest Anna Karenina or The English Patient. No torment, no suicidal gestures. The letters resembled the Valentines Prewitt sold in his gifts, cards, and party supplies shop in downtown Painton. Lacy hearts, fat toddlers hugging, fat doves cooing. Amorette had written: “Dearest dear one. Tell Lucy you have to be at The Fun House doing inventory all Sat morn. Charlie leaves for golf at ten. Kisses on the neck.” Prewitt had written: “Sweetheart, you looked so (great, stretched out) beautiful yesterday and you’re so sweet to me, I couldn’t get through life without my sunshine.”
Beneath the letters at the bottom of the
box, Lucy had found the two Polaroid pictures she now touched in the bathrobe pocket. One showed Amorette in shortie pajamas on Lucy’s bed, rubbing a kitten against her cheek. (Lucy recognized the kitten as Sugar, whom Prewitt had brought home for Julie and who, grown into an obese flatulent tabby, had been run over five years ago by a passing car.) The other photograph showed Amorette seated on the hope chest in her own bedroom, naked from the waist up, one hand provocatively held beneath each untanned breast. After looking at the pictures and reading the letters, Lucy had put them back in the box, then turned on Prewitt’s electric trains and sped them up faster and faster until finally they’d slung themselves off their tracks and crashed through the plastic villages and farms and plummeted to the floor in a satisfying smashup.
Now, in the bathroom listening to Amorette outside in the bedroom she clearly knew all too well, still rummaging through the closet, Lucy transferred the key and the photos from the bathrobe pocket to her purse. Returning to the bedroom, she asked Amorette, “Do you miss Prewitt much?”
Mrs. Strumlander was on her knees at the closet looking for shoes to go with the dress she’d picked out for Lucy. “Don’t we all?” she replied. “But let time handle it, Lucy. Because of my murmur I have always had to live my life one day at a time as the Good Book says, and that’s all any of us can do. Let’s just hope this crazy man keeps on shooting people he knows and doesn’t start in on strangers!” She laughed at her little joke and crawled backward out of the closet with beige pumps in her hand. “Because there are sick individuals just opening fire whenever and wherever they feel like it, and I’d hate for something like that to happen to us in the middle of The Miracle Worker tonight. Here, put that dress on.”
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