Finally, on Christmas eve, as she lay in the tub and he stood next to it to pee, his face had suddenly beamed out that six-year-old’s delight.
“The little snake!” he cried. “You got me the little snake!”
Ray got better, left the hospital, and he still wrote to Abby often in a friendly way. Every night she dreamed they were still married, and he was there. She understood her subconscious might always be married to him.
One night, after such a dream, she got out of bed, opened the French windows in the dining room, and stood there, breathing in the night. It had rained that day, and the air was clear and fresh. A bright moon slowly crested the black hill above her, luminous and so big she could see dark seas in it. Beauty hurt, and it seemed as if it always would.
In the morning, she looked around the place. His study was still packed with shelves of books and CDs, his filing cabinets, a closet full of clothes. She went to a packaging store and spent some of her scarce funds on twenty white boxes, giant rolls of tape, and brightly colored markers. Ray’s Poetry Books, A to C, she wrote on the first one and started to pack them in. Box after box, she filled them up and labeled them.
She left the boxes in his study, with the furniture he wanted, moving everything else out of that room, so movers could make estimates. She got three, picked one, and scheduled it for early summer, when Ray might be well enough to receive it.
When she wrote and asked if June 1 would work for the delivery, he sounded alarmed. “Shouldn’t you show me the estimates and let me decide?”
“I’m paying for it,” she wrote back. It was the least she could do for him.
“Wow, Abby, that’s very generous of you.”
He never called her Beanie now, but it didn’t matter anymore.
Had she been ambivalent to him? Maybe. For sure when he was shouting at her, bossing her around. Did he treat Tory that way? She would be sad for him, if so—anyone would be ambivalent to that. But probably his new quiet self would not. And if Tory adored him, if she worshipped him the way that Sateesh and Gloria did, they would be home free forever.
Before the end of that school year, Abby lost her platinum pen. One minute she was walking with it on the fourth floor of Wheeler Hall, down a long shining brown corridor, thinking, “I shouldn’t have this in my hand,” and the next it was gone. She reported it lost to the campus police, but though it had “A. McCormick-Stark” engraved on it, no one ever turned it in. Someone, somewhere, was now writing with her lovely thousand-dollar pen. The one Ray Stark had given her for twenty-five years of faithful service, before he retired her from his life.
Sometimes she opened a cookbook and found a note that he had left. He hated quiche and claimed that girls used to feed it to him. Abby didn’t like it, either, but one day she noticed a recipe for it, annotated in Ray’s print: As a final preparation step, he wrote, “Smother in pork chops, bake two hours.” Another recipe called for canned tomatoes, and her own writing said, “Use fresh.” The next ingredient was basil, and Ray had written, “Use hundred year old.”
One brilliant, sunny day in June, she backed her car out of the garage and used the clicker to try to close the door, but it popped back up repeatedly. Finally she got out and used her hand to steady it as it went down. It closed.
As she walked back up the slope of driveway, something caught her eye, carved in the sidewalk—curious, she bent over to see what it was. It was a heart, crudely drawn with a stick, and in it were the letters
RS
+
AMcC
Abby got onto her knees and traced the lines with a fingertip. When did he do that, and why had she never noticed it? She could not recall when the sidewalk was redone, but it must have been long ago. They had been married seventeen years when they moved here, and Ray had left this small romantic gesture for her to find some day. It was amazing she had never seen it—she often worked in the garden next to it, planting and weeding. Her condo had come with one of the three parking spaces in the building’s garage, and she went in and out of it by car and bike every day. She ran on this sidewalk. She must have been willfully oblivious.
Now the cement heart was the last of them that was permanent. She imagined Ray younger, handsome, mischievous, his chest unscarred, his heart intact, finding a stick and drawing it. She stayed on her knees for a long time, as dog walkers stepped around her, headed for the park. Then she got back in the car and drove away.
The Use of Fame Page 21