What You Have Left

by Will Allison

  “I got Häagen-Dazs,” he says.

  “Great.” She opens the bag, glances inside. “Where’s the smokes?”

  “I changed my mind.” He shrugs. “Tomorrow would just be that much harder, and it’s already too hard as it is.”

  Holly assumes he’s joking—she pats his shirt pocket to see if the cigarettes are hidden there—and then, realizing he’s serious, she looks like she might haul off and hit him. “We had a deal,” she says.

  “Yes, we did. To stop smoking.”

  She clutches the bag and heads back inside. He figures she’s going for her car keys, but when he catches up, she’s shoveling ice cream into the kitchen sink with a wooden spoon. When she’s done, she grabs a bottle from the wine rack—a decent cab he’s been saving—uncorks it, and begins pouring it over the lumpy mounds. “You keep forgetting,” she says. “This is a lot easier for you than it is for me.” Maybe this is true, maybe not, but as he stares at the soupy mess, all he can think is how easy it would have been to take a seat on that bar stool.

  The next morning, as Lyle is hanging the Braves schedule on the fridge and putting an X through each day since they quit, Holly announces that she’s going out for a gallon of milk. This is the kind of errand she normally sends him on, so naturally he assumes she’s sneaking off to cop a pack. Sure enough, when she gets home, she heads straight for the bathroom and washes her hands forever. But it doesn’t stop there. Every night, she has a new errand to run—rent a movie, gas up the car, make a bank deposit—any excuse to get out of the house. She comes home smelling of spearmint gum, the door of her car flecked white with ashes.

  Lyle wants to tell her he knows, but he’s curious to see how long she’ll keep it up. Meanwhile, he makes a point of marking the calendar when she’s around. He asks how, on a scale of one to ten, she’s holding up, whether the patch and gum are helping, whether she wants to call the hypnotist. He encourages Claire to play with the half-deflated celebra-tory balloon. He insists they go running, and once they’re at the track, he pushes Holly to run faster, farther, pretending not to notice her sucking wind. At some point, it occurs to him he’s being cruel—and dishonest—but every time he makes up his mind to say something, he puts it off, telling himself he’s giving her the chance to come clean on her own.

  “Here,” he says, offering the pen. “Want to do the honors?”

  It’s Friday night, and Holly’s just back from returning a video. Lyle searches her face for a flicker of guilt as she puts an X on the calendar. “Two weeks and counting,” she says, reaching into the fridge for a leftover meatloaf. Lyle can’t help glancing down the front of her shirt. What they really need is a calendar to track their drought. The streak now stands at three months, four days.

  After dinner, they try to get Claire to practice counting, but she wants to do letters instead. She can bang through the alphabet in twelve seconds flat, “—now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you tickle me.” She loves to be tickled, so that’s what they do. The three of them end up in a pile on the sofa. When Claire’s had enough and scoots away, Lyle pulls Holly down for a kiss. “Stop!” she says, laughing. “You smell like a distillery.”

  “Are you saying you’d want to if I didn’t?”

  She squints at the blank TV screen. “No,” she says. “I guess not.”

  He disentangles himself, stands up.

  “Don’t I get points for honesty?” she says.

  “I think I’ll go shoot some pool.”

  “Good idea,” she says. “Why don’t you have a few more drinks while you’re at it? Maybe somebody else thinks that’s sexy.”

  He sits at the bar with a Heineken, not minding the fog of secondhand smoke. But of course the woman in the green dress isn’t there, and of course it’s not a bar where he might otherwise hope to get lucky. A few women are standing around the pool tables, but they’re with dates. The fact that he’s chosen this place, he decides, must mean he doesn’t really intend to cheat on his wife. On one hand, this is heartening, proof that there’s hope for them. On the other hand, it means he’s trapped. By now she’s put Claire to bed and is probably on the porch, living it up.

  After his fifth or sixth beer, Lyle asks Paul, the bartender, about the woman in the green dress. Paul knows exactly who he means. “Never seen her before, never seen her since.”

  “Too bad,” Lyle says, pushing his empty across the bar. “One more, please.”

  The equation used to be so simple. Holly + Lyle = . Corny, but true as anything he’s ever known. Now the arithmetic is feeling more like algebra or trig or any of the other math he’d never quite got the hang of. Too many variables on either side of the equation. Her smoking cancels out his drinking. His drinking cancels out her disinterest. Her disinterest cancels out his being in this bar. The sum keeps getting closer to zero.

  He’s careful to drive the speed limit, careful to signal at every turn. Nearing downtown, he considers the lounge at the Marriott, but the chances of actually picking someone up are slim. He’s already on Two Notch Road by the time he admits to himself what he’s up to. He can see them here and there, on the corners, women in short skirts and tube tops who meet his gaze with a wave. He cruises the strip twice before spotting a slender girl in sandals and a white T-shirt loitering in the alcove of a laundromat. In the shadows, she looks younger than the others, less a professional. Lyle catches her eye, turns onto the next street, and watches as she hurries down the block. Cracking his window, he’s surprised to find himself face to face with a woman not much younger than he is. Up close, she looks all out of proportion, her mouth too big for her face, her face too big for her head, her head too big for her body. She glances past him into the car, probably looking for handcuffs, a gun, another man crouched behind the seat.

  “You the police?” she says.

  “No.”

  “You work for the police?”

  “No.”

  She winks at him, seeming for the first time like the girl he spotted in the alcove. “Then shut off those lights, baby.”

  Lyle does as he’s told, and suddenly nothing about what he’s doing seems safe. He’s parked on a dark street in what was once a respectable neighborhood of modest four-squares, but now the houses are mostly boarded up, the yards dotted with trash. There are no streetlights. He considers driving away, but the woman is already climbing in beside him. The smell of coconut fills the car.

  “I’m Denise,” she says.

  Lyle nods. “Nice to meet you.”

  She starts with the rules: money up front and nothing rough. “I don’t play,” she says, patting her purse. He’s trying to decide if she might be carrying mace or a knife when suddenly she ducks. A car has turned onto the street behind them. Lyle can picture a police cruiser, the white glare of its spotlight. Then, as a rusty sedan slides by, he imagines a different scene, the tap of a pistol against his window, an angry demand for cash. He can’t decide which would be worse.

  “Relax, baby,” Denise says. Her laughter is high and sweet, the laugh of a girl. She turns to him and asks what he’s looking for, pointing first to her mouth, then to her crotch. “Twenty for this, forty for that.”

  “That,” Lyle says. He feels ridiculous. She holds out her hand and he gives her two twenties.

  “Well, baby, let’s drive.” She says she knows a place they can park—“a safe place”—and directs him down three or four streets, but they look no safer than the first street. Somewhere in the distance a car alarm is going off.

  “Got a smoke?” she says.

  “I wish.”

  She shrugs. “If wishes were dollars.” She’s wearing terry-cloth shorts. Lyle glances at her bare thighs. He can do this. If he gets laid, he’ll at least feel like he’s not completely at Holly’s mercy. And if he gets laid, he’ll probably feel bad enough about cheating not to do it again. One time is all it’ll take. But his thoughts keep ricocheting like a pinball inside his head. What if she’s leading him into an ambush? What if she’s
a cop? What if she has a disease?

  “You’ve got a rubber, right?”

  Denise shakes her head. “Don’t worry. I’m clean.”

  Lyle tells her he can’t do it without a condom.

  “Okay, baby, no problem. Turn here.”

  They stop at a little service station with a CLOSED sign in the window. “Bathroom lock’s busted,” Denise says. “They got a machine.” She’s holding out her hand again. Lyle digs quarters from the console and drops them into her palm. Once she disappears around the corner, relief washes over him. He figures he’s seen the last of her and his forty dollars, and it seems a small price to pay. But as he eases back onto the street, she comes running, waving and yelling for him to stop. “Where you going, baby?” Pulling away, he hears the sharp report of a quarter against his windshield and for a split second thinks he’s been shot.

  • • •

  It’s past one, and the house is dark. The car still reeks of coconut. He leaves the windows down and makes a mental note to get a car wash first thing in the morning. He’s managed to unlock the kitchen door and is fumbling for the light switch when a silhouette looms over his shoulder. He spins around. His hands come up instinctively, ready to punch and pummel, then drop to his sides. In the loamy moonlight, Claire’s balloon sways above a vent, the bulbous head of a clown. Lyle leans against the counter, adrenaline firing in his veins. He can feel his pulse in his hands, his face. He has to get hold of himself. He finds Holly’s purse on the dining room table, the cigarettes in a zippered compartment beneath her compact. On the back porch, he smokes quickly, checking the bedroom window. By the fifth drag, he’s light-headed and nauseous, and then he has to worry about how to hide the evidence. He ends up stubbing the cigarette out in the grass, then wrapping the butt in a paper towel and stuffing it into the kitchen garbage.

  It isn’t until he’s lying in bed next to Holly, sleep overtaking him, that he realizes he should have flushed the cigarette down the toilet, and starts wondering if he really stubbed it all the way out. After a while, he’s convinced he smells smoke. He’s convinced he can hear the crackle of flames. But this is just his imagination, because if he were really hearing the crackle of flames, he’d also be hearing the smoke detector in the kitchen. Assuming it works. Assuming the battery isn’t dead. Didn’t he replace the battery a few months ago? Or did he just remove the old one when the alarm began to chirp? Again and again, he drags himself from bed and sloughs downstairs to peer into the garbage, only to wake and find himself still in bed, half dreaming. And then, when he finally manages to drift off, the house does catch fire, choking black smoke everywhere, Claire screaming for help.

  “Bad dream?”

  It’s morning. The sheets are damp with sweat. Holly’s leaning in the doorway, arms crossed.

  “The house was on fire,” he says.

  “God forbid.” She comes over and takes a seat on the bed. Only then does he notice the pack of cigarettes in her hand. In his rush to hide the butt, he’d forgotten about the pack, left it in plain sight on the table. Holly looks at him looking at the cigarettes.

  “I found them in your purse,” he says.

  “I haven’t quit.”

  “I know.”

  She stretches out beside him, and for a while they just lie there, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the uneven plaster, the twinkly chandelier they spent months picking out. “So,” she says, “any luck last night?”

  Lyle closes his eyes. He can still see the house blazing, can still hear Claire’s cries. He starts to tell a lie about spending the night losing his shirt at pool, then gives up.

  “I almost fucked a hooker.”

  Holly props herself up on an elbow to see if he’s telling the truth. She almost looks impressed. “How about that.” She goes to the window and stares out at their front yard. “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  She’s still got her back to him, but he can imagine the concentration in her eyes, the weighty computations she’s wrestling with. “I guess that’s not so bad,” she says, turning around. “I mean, I don’t have to throw you out. I don’t have to divorce you.”

  What freezes Lyle is her robe hanging open. She stands like that beside the window with the morning light on her skin, luminous as ivory, staring hard at him until he has to look down, away from her eyes, but her breasts are shaming him, too, and her unblinking navel, and the sunlit patch of hair below. He can feel the weight of her against him all the way across the room. She’s cinching the robe before he remembers to inhale again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1979

  Wylie

  When Wylie doesn’t see Tracy Evans’s car in front of the boutique, he figures he’s already missed her; he’s driven all the way to Pawleys Island this morning for nothing. He picked up the packet of custody papers from the Myrtle Beach clerk of courts weeks ago, and this is what he gets for putting it off. By now, Ms. Evans and her 280ZX are probably halfway to Columbia, part of the migration inland, fleeing the hurricane.

  The boutique is just off Highway 17 in what used to be a general store—a whitewashed building whose raised-seam roof and sloping porch have been painted a cheery orange. Out front, where crushed shells give way to scrub grass, there are rocking chairs, two joggling boards, hammocks strung between live oaks. It’s no surprise the place is almost deserted. People aren’t buying saltwater taffy and polished seashells today; they want flashlights, bottled water, batteries, canned goods.

  Wylie parks in the shade between the only other cars, neither of them Tracy’s Datsun. He half hopes she’s long gone. In the four months he’s worked as a process server, this is the lousiest job yet, worse than the restraining orders, the divorces, the cease-and-desists. Custody papers. How perfect is that, considering Wylie hasn’t laid eyes on his own kid in more than three years? He dropped Holly off at Cal’s farm the day after Maddy’s funeral, and now that he’s finally back on his feet, back to where he could be a father again, the old man won’t give him a break. Cal’s way of thinking is that people can’t change. Well, they do change, just like circumstances change. One day your wife is alive, the next day she’s dead from a blood clot. And for the Wylie of three years ago, Maddy’s death had been like an opening, an unexpected tear in the cloth of his life. He’d simply let himself slip through. Didn’t plan it that way, but so it goes.

  That’s Hugh’s phrase, Hugh the lawyer Wylie works for. So it goes, my friend, so it goes. Of course, that’s easy for Hugh to say. He’s never been a father; he’s never had to deal with a father-in-law like Cal. To Hugh, a custody case is the same as any other—a cash cow waiting to be milked. The thing about this case, though, is the cow’s not in the barn. Hugh called Wylie this morning to remind him that midnight is the deadline for good service. If Wylie doesn’t find Tracy Evans by then, the hearing will have to be rescheduled. Hence, thus, and therefore, he has to track her down today and deliver the return-of-service to Hugh this afternoon, at the pier in Garden City.

  The last thing Wylie wants to do now is drive the twenty-five miles back to Tracy’s house in Myrtle Beach— a wild goose chase—but it’s no use wasting time on a stake-out if she isn’t even coming to work. From where he’s parked, he can see a dumpster peeking around the back corner of the building, but no Datsun. Still, it’s possible she’s inside—maybe she got a ride to work, maybe her car’s in the shop. At this point, he’s got no choice but to make like the wolf in grandma’s clothes, stroll in there with a big, friendly smile, and try his luck.

  Which he will, just as soon as he hears a weather report. Hurricane David is supposed to make landfall tonight, maybe the biggest storm in twenty years. Eight hundred Dominicans dead in its wake, the coast of Florida like a parade nobody cleaned up after. They’ve already started evacuating the barrier islands, setting up shelters in every church and gymnasium between here and Savannah. Wylie’s trying to tune in a station out of Charleston, thinking about the damage the next twenty-four hours will b
ring—thank Christ he won’t be the one who’ll have to settle all those claims—when he glances up and sees something that makes him forget all about the storm. A boy has come out of the shop, maybe ten or eleven years old, carrying a wooden crate. Right off, Wylie knows it’s Tracy’s kid, the boy she’s going to lose. As if serving papers on the mother wasn’t enough, now he gets to do it while the son watches.

  Hugh had promised that the kid would be out of the picture this week, staying with his dad. It doesn’t look like he’s staying with his dad. It looks like he’s come outside to do a chore for his mother—unhook the hammocks and pile them in the crate. Wylie has half a mind to leave. If it weren’t for the money, he would. But he needs the thirty bucks. Every penny is one penny closer to getting out of the By the Sea Motel and into an apartment where he won’t be ashamed to bring his daughter. So he slips quietly from the car and cuts through the grass, hoping to avoid the boy. But just as he reaches the porch, the kid spins around, startled, as if Wylie has materialized from thin air.

  “You must be Ted,” Wylie says. It never hurts to be sure. He tries for a neighborly smile, would offer his hand if he thought he could keep it steady.

  “Yes, sir?” The boy studies his face. Wylie knows it’s not a pretty sight, what he’s done to himself these past few years. After the funeral, when he left Holly, he’d meant to be gone only a couple of days, a little time to figure things out. He didn’t plan on staying gone. He was only a few years shy of making district claims manager at State Farm, was already saving for the down payment on a nice little house in Forest Acres with room in the driveway for a bass boat, maybe a deck out back. You don’t plan to ditch a life like that. But two months later found him in Atlanta, passing afternoons in the cheap seats at Fulton County Stadium. Another month and he’d begun a string of jobs that were easy to get, easy to leave—tending bar in Bamberg, pumping gas at a Beaufort marina, driving a mill truck out of Greenville. What he did mostly, though, was drink, every single day for almost three years, a stretch of time that bends and ripples in his memory, as if seen underwater, or through a glass. In the end, it took a DUI and ninety days in the Horry County Jail to dry him out; if he still looks like a drunk stumbling off the highway, so it goes.