“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It wasn’t fair. There isn’t even a record of where she’s buried.”
“So? It was a hundred years ago. You suck it up and write it down and then you work on something else.” Alison tensed at that; his voice—his actual voice, not his phone one—must have carried. Her hand rose to shade her eyes and when she spied him it rose again in an instinctive wave. She stood, stepping neatly back into her shoes.
“No. You stay where you are. Don’t come any closer.”
“I grew up with these three great, hulking brothers.”
“So what? They don’t have anything to do with this.” The music struck up again. Slowly, the couples did, too.
“It means I’m crap at the talking thing. When something’s wrong, you gut it out till it’s fixed. You fake it if you have to. That first time Dad got sick? The four of us kept smiling these stupid pumpkin smiles.” She meant Jack o’ Lanterns, hollow and glowing for outward show. He knew the smile in question. These days it was the only one he knew. “And you know what?” Ali’s voice thickened. “We came out fine. Great, even. Fantastic. I edged out Mattie Gibson for valedictorian that semester and Neil started to locate like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Well, good for Neil. He nabbed a sweet baseball scholarship. You got fired.”
“That’s not fair.” She was at the edge of the dance floor now and crossing.
“I said not to come any closer.”
“I’m sorry.” She stopped. The crowd had thinned during the break. He had no excuse not to see her.
“Don’t be sorry. Don’t pretend. Talk.”
“It’s like—”
“That’s pretending. Don’t say what it’s like. Say what it is.”
“You wouldn’t want to talk to you either. It’s like—”
“I said, no metaphors.”
“It’s like living with a caged wildebeest. You lash out every which way and you never forgive anyone anything.”
“It’s a damn sight better than running away.”
“That’s not what I’m doing—”
“What do you clock on the mile again?”
“The book said—”
“The books said. The books said. You don’t even let the books on the shelves.”
“Not the books, the book. The pregnancy one.” She said this last part at a whisper, like a child afraid of getting caught cursing. “You know,” said Ali, “the one with the crazy foot.”
Seth knew the book. A black-and-white photo on its cover. A great, waiting moon of a stomach, the small imprint of a foot pressing from within. The rest of the books—and they were the Colliers, so of course there had been many—had Madonna and child covers, rocking chairs, rattles, and the like. He said, “I didn’t know you’d been reading them. Rereading them.” He wondered where in the condo she had stashed them.
“Not now. God. But I looked through it, after. The first night home from the hospital.” He wondered how the hell she’d stood it. Her body swollen and scraped out, her breasts gone Playboy with wasted sustenance. “I had to find this aside. You know, in one of those little boxes?” As a teacher, Alison ranted about the side-box approach. Here, on the page, is real history. Here, in a sidebar blurb, is how it was if you weren’t white or a man or well-off. Ali said, “I don’t even know why I remembered it. One of those cute little did-you-knows. No, didja. They spelled it didja. Ninety percent of mothers retain fetal cells in their bloodstream for the rest of their lives.” She drew a shaky breath and adjusted an earring. “So I run now. I eat right. I was nowhere near this fit when I played varsity softball.”
“You could have said.” He could have asked. The obvious retort. Ali didn’t say it. A sign, maybe, that they still had a shot at something. Seth said it again, knowing it was bait, knowing she still could lash out and take it. “Alison. You could’ve said.”
“What, that this is the only way I have to take care of him? If you could see yourself, Seth. You wouldn’t want to share the hard stuff with you either. You crash through our life looking for ways to feel hurt, and you’re fragile and manic and fuck, my heart.” She gripped her chest where it was presumably beating. And hard. He thought he could see the pulse in her neck. “I wear earrings now,” she said. “I do foundation and I wear the right kind of bra. I thought if I did a better job at all that girl stuff, then maybe next time—” She folded in on herself as if pained. As if fetal.
Seth was adrenal-awake, comprehension solidifying like a clot. The slimming down. The gussying up. It wasn’t for Lobel or even for herself. It was for Timothy. The absurdness of it. The ice knife in the gut.
A shaky sound from Ali, and it registered. Next time. His wife had said next time and it wasn’t the first thing he’d latched onto. That had to bode well for the two of them.
Alison righted herself. She’d been doubled over and no one had stopped their cha-cha to help. This place. This cold, selfish construct of a place.
“I can’t do this on the phone,” she said. “You know I can see you, right?” A hollow laugh. “C’mon. All these happy couples between us? It’s like we’re points in someone’s bad term paper.”
He could’ve said his newest, purest truth: He hated Arizona. Instead, “I miss the bad term papers.”
“I miss a lot of things.”
“Chettenford.”
“Yeah, Chettenford.”
Their bathroom had a freestanding tub. From October through March the pipes sounded like demonic possession. God, he missed it. The racket of a place well lived in, the chalk-dust seasonality of the school year, and the weekly tromp home from The Book Croft. “You know what gets me?” he asked. “We got the books from the same place. Both sets.” The Book Croft. Nine months apart and three shelves over. How to bide your time while hoping and how to get over having hoped in the first place. “It’s absurd,” he said.
“Not really. We were in and out all the time. We worked right around the corner.”
“Even so. That one little store can hold that range.”
“I don’t know.” Their minds held it, their lives, every day they breathed through.
“Do you know what they named the new cat?”
“At the Croft? How would I know?”
“You keep in touch. You’re the extrovert.” She was their social curator. People were drawn to Alison and she held them fast. But not here. They had no one but each other in Arizona.
“You can’t honestly expect me to know that. The cat, really?”
“I wondered, that’s all.”
“You’re a strange one.”
“I’m sorry about Adah,” he said, like he was offering condolences on a recent loss.
“What are we going to do?” She didn’t sound panicked. She sounded simply tired, like all the sleep she hadn’t gotten since Timothy had caught up with her.
Seth knew it didn’t say much about him that he had waited for this show of weakness before stepping toward her. “I can get you your job back,” he said. It sounded chauvinistic to his own ears. A puffed-up shot at playing the hero. He said it anyhow. This small slice of past he had a balm for.
“And a pony, too? I’d like a pony.” She didn’t stir, waiting for him.
“It wouldn’t fit in the condo. Besides, I’m serious. I can get Lobel to change his mind.” That headline. Slow Sale of Rosko House Due to Internal Error. He’d quoted Lobel in the piece; he had the man on the hook for the lies. He was an arm’s-length from Ali now; she zipped her phone into her purse. She reached for Seth’s next and her fingers grazed his cheek. She powered it down and slid it into his back pocket. It had been so long that he couldn’t tell if the touching was deliberate. “He’ll take you back,” Seth said. “At least for the length of the contract.”
“I don’t think so. He was really pissed. I think mostly because he wasn’t the one to figure it out. All those letters I quoted from a man who couldn’t write his name.” A breathy snort. “Sorry,
but it’s funny.”
“You’ve got balls, I’ll say that.”
“Ovaries, please.”
They let the word sit there, awkward in its potential.
Seth said, “I can be persistent. With Lobel.”
“I know that, but no.”
“I’ve got dirt.”
“No.” She didn’t ask what and he was grateful. He didn’t want her knowing.
“Okay, then.”
“We can’t have kids here,” said Alison, a hand waved to indicate the festival midway, the architectural fakery, the overcultivated greens beyond.
“It’s a weird place,” he agreed.
“It’s a freaky nowhere town, and I’d be thinking about Adah on top of it all. How scared she had to be. All that blood and dirt.”
Alison’s skin had come alive with gooseflesh. He slung an arm around her. In Chettenford, he’d said, we have to leave. She was the one to say it this time. There were states with serious teacher shortages; she’d been doing her research. Western states, with serrated mountains and ferocious skies. States whose histories held real Adahs. She might even think about writing a book. In job interviews they could spin their stint in Arizona as a mistake; they had left the classroom only to discover it was their true calling. Alison said, think. They could live in a place with weeds and proper seasons again, find a snug house with a wood-burning stove. They’d buy in a good school district and hang a tire swing. Montana, she said. Wyoming. One of the Dakotas. We’ll buy us a pair of matching cowboy hats. Seth listened, first to her words and then to that rhythm, to her repeated use of we. Now and then his synapses sparked with the collective nouns that went with the plans she was making. A disagreement of states. A quiz of teachers. A huddle of houses. A fascination of hats. He squeezed Alison’s shoulder, said something about putting in a garden plot or maybe adopting a dog. For the first time in ages, he felt the full wrongness of the next collective noun that came to mind. The list he’d hung in his Chettenford classroom had its two reductive options: a multiply of husbands or a suffering of them.
THE THALESES OF MILDEW STREET
BEN’S KITCHEN SPONGES SMELLED WET and dank. He’d been meaning to replace them a while now. He grabbed the biggest one and attacked a nonexistent counter spot. He knew how Veronica’s mind worked. One whiff would mean a thousand capitulations. That she was right and you had to wring out damp sponges for a full thirty seconds. That on some level he missed their life together in which she’d replaced the things before they grubbed apart at the corners.
The back of his ex-wife’s calves were pink with faint sunburn. The tips of her ears, too. It was evening now, time for a late dinner. Cooking together was preferable to the courtship implicit in a meal out, to the apathy of a pizza in. There was also a guaranteed course of conversation, as Veronica didn’t know where anything was. He tasked her with peeling garlic. Ronnie seemed surprised he had a head of the fresh stuff on hand. She separated skin from cloves by smashing them with the flat of a knife.
Ben went to the pantry for olive oil. He didn’t have the kind that she liked, but you couldn’t taste the difference. He laid a pair of chicken breasts on the cutting board, glad he had the makings of a full meal on hand; how’s that for an aging bachelor? Blackened chicken, sliced thin. Pasta, a pack of that baby spinach, shaved parmesan, and a dollop of cream to cut the heat. He wrapped the chicken in plastic film, pounded it thin, and worked in a generous dose of Cajun rub. Veronica asked if the garlic was chopped finely enough. He nodded without really looking; she rinsed the knife. The recipe didn’t actually call for garlic, but its scent would mask the sponges nicely.
The chicken went out to the grill; the pot on the stove came to a boil. Ronnie rattled the spaghetti in its box. “I don’t know how much you need.”
“Eyeball it.” Ben was iffy at guesstimating, but she didn’t have to know that. He always wound up with either a Tupperware of clammy noodles or an overabundance of sauce.
She shook the box again, testing its weight, then added its contents into the pot, brushing a few starchy splinters from the counter. “What? Why the look?”
“Don’t you need to break them first?”
“Huh?”
“The noodles.” He mimed snapping them along the middle.
Ronnie gave a great, merry, masculine bray. He’d always liked that. There was something about a pretty woman with an ugly laugh. “What?” he asked. “You always used to.”
“Maybe back on Mildew Street, when we only had the one little pot.” Her hands spanned the remembered circumference. Mildew Street was what they’d called their first place together, a sublet on Mildred Street, clean enough despite the moniker. They hadn’t been married their first year in that apartment, just engaged, and at the time that had felt very daring.
“I guess I thought breaking them made it cook faster.”
“That’s salt, Benji. It raises the boiling temperature.” She rifled through the cupboards to find some. Ben stood very still; with Ronnie in his kitchen the slightest movement could wind up fraught. Touching was impossible without the crowd to chaperone, the music to dictate for how long and in what way. Tonight’s recipe called for onions, sliced lengthwise and seared on the grill, but it was probably best they skip them. Neither he nor Veronica should chop onions tonight. Neither of them could risk tears.
When they sat down to eat, Veronica said, “All in all, I quite like your girlfriend.” She said this with an air of ceremony, a sommelier with a bottle of something especially fine.
“She’s not my girlfriend.” He couldn’t chance a look out the window. What lights were on at Sadie’s place were on without his knowing.
“If you say so. But I do like her. Surprise, surprise.”
“She’s a widow. Her husband passed last year.”
“Yes. She said. And I’d have figured it was something like that. You’re hardly the sort to cuckold someone.” Veronica gave a dry, mirthless caw at the anachronistic word. She reached for her wineglass, swirled the contents, and set it down without a sip.
Ben made a big show of drinking his. Deeply. Too deeply. He sputtered.
And then Ronnie was laughing, really laughing, the length of her neck alive with it.
“What?”
“I don’t know what’s funnier, that that girl ran you over—”
“It was a minor collision.”
“Or that you’re sweet on someone who’s an actual grandmother.”
“Stephen and Anjali might—”
“Someday, yeah, but that’ll be a baby. Sadie had to be what when she had that kid’s mom, twelve?”
“Lily’s dad, actually.”
“That’s not the point and you know it.”
The point was, Veronica was jealous. A proprietary thrum filled his chest. “I’ll tell Sadie you think she looks as young as all that.” It never got old, that adolescent thrill of hearing your girl praised.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Veronica drew her arms close to her sides. The contrary woman he’d spent his life with. Everyone else he knew flailed about when mad, or stood, chests puffed and hands on hips, making themselves bigger, as if for some evolutionary advantage. “She’ll think I’m ridiculous.”
“She won’t think—”
“I am ridiculous. Coming down here like this. I don’t know what I was thinking.” The pasta was soft enough to cut with the side of a fork. The chicken, he’d chopped bite-sized. Veronica still went to town with the knife.
“Ronnie. You’re not ridiculous. It was a—it was a kind thing to do. Coming here. You and I—we haven’t always been kind.”
“No. We haven’t.” She set the knife across her plate like she was waiting for a waiter to clear it. Forget kind. They’d been vicious bourgeois brutes, toxic when they should have been tender. That was a hell of a thing to know about yourself. Whatever was budding with Sadie he probably didn’t deserve.
He said, “I looked crazy. I did. I’ll give you that much.”
> Veronica raised a hand to her mouth to cover what had to be a smirk. “Cunt.” The word was pensive, soft, divorced from connotation. “When I first met you, you couldn’t even say goddammit.” She shook her head. “The small-town boy who blushed. God. I stayed awake nights thinking about how to make you do that.”
They’d met at twenty. She’d been haunting in autumnal light. He remembered the clean slope of her forehead bowed low over textbooks. The cottony flash of a worn summer dress. He did the math to stop himself from saying something soppy. They were forty-eight years times three hundred sixty-five nights from the time Veronica had lain awake. He said, “I wanted the story to blow up. Bigger even than it did. I thought our girl might be out there somewhere. That she’d see it.”
“Oh, Benji.”
“I know.”
“You’re an imbecile.” She said the word like it meant something else. My love. You remain my love.
“I didn’t exactly think it through.”
“I’ll say. What exactly about that showing would make her want to come home?”
“Like I said, I didn’t think it through.”
Veronica sighed.
He said, “You’ve given up on Tara, haven’t you?”
“Not on your life. I’d never. But—you could’ve died in the ICU.” Ben would’ve said Chicago. You could have been killed in Chicago. It was either a symptom or a disease that they no longer had the same shorthand. If something terrible befell the Thaleses of Mildew Street, they would’ve held a common stock of words with which to speak of it.
Ben said, “I think maybe we’ve both given up.” He felt his heart hammer. He’d felt it that night under the Chicago footbridge, too, in the second before the thud of boot to chest.
Veronica scowled. “I’m still in the house.” One woman, four bedrooms, three and a half baths. Ninety dollars a week to their housekeeper, and all on the impossible chance of a late-night knock.
You Could Be Home by Now Page 22