As Wide as the Sky

by Jessica Pack

  “. . . in a dramatic display, Amanda Mallorie wielded a sledgehammer early Thursday morning, just hours after Robert Mallorie was pronounced dead from lethal injection by the state of South Dakota. According to sources, the purpose of her act was to destroy a set of some type of impressions made in the concrete there many years earlier—one neighbor claimed they were handprints belonging to Robert Mallorie himself. Why she would want to publicly destroy such a thing is a matter of speculation.”

  Steve shook his head and only just held back a snort. She wanted to destroy the handprints to keep someone from cutting them out of the driveway with a cement saw and selling them on eBay. Why did she obliterate the cement in front of the cameras, though? For a woman who had been so private for so long, it seemed out of character. He wanted to ask her. To know how she balanced the son she’d raised with the man he’d become. She seemed so normal, and Robbie had seemed so normal. Those two things put everything he’d ever believed about killers on its ear. He didn’t understand, but wanted to.

  He pulled up another article—each one might have a line, maybe two, about her, then go on to talk about Robert Mallorie. Of course, he understood why Amanda wasn’t the focus of the articles, but he wanted to know more about her and had to read five articles to get five tiny details. So far he knew that she’d been born and raised in South Dakota, in the town of Watertown. She’d attended USF and married Dwight Mallorie, who now lived in Pennsylvania. Robbie had an older sister. Steve had the vaguest memory of Robbie having talked about her once or twice. Amanda had been a teacher at the same high school Robbie had graduated from, but she’d resigned after the shooting. She must work now—someone had to pay for that Lands’ End coat—but he couldn’t find anything about her current occupation. Her hairdresser, Robbie’s prom date, a Sunday school teacher, numerous members of the faculty at the high school where she’d worked, and half a dozen family friends had put their two cents into the fray at some point or another. He read what they shared with a wince, all but certain that Amanda would have felt betrayed by these people even though he did not know Amanda. At all.

  “Whatcha reading?”

  Steve blinked back to the present; the austere employee lounge that smelled like metal and oil and tuna because of his sandwich. Tara blinked at him from the other side of the Formica-topped table, her long nails tapping the Diet Coke can in her hands. He put his phone down as though she might read it from three feet away. “Just catching up on some articles.”

  “Oh yeah, articles about . . . ?” She cocked her head prettily to the side and smiled at him as though genuinely interested.

  Why not tell her? “Robert Mallorie.”

  Tara drew her eyebrows together, then lifted them in understanding. Her forehead moved funny and didn’t wrinkle the right way—Botox? “That guy who was executed last week?”

  Her familiarity caused Steve to perk up. “Yes,” he said. “What do you know about him?”

  Tara pulled back slightly. “Um, well, I know what they said on the news. That he shot up a mall in South Dakota.” She paused and smiled. “I didn’t even know they had malls in South Dakota.”

  “I’ve, uh, been trying to follow his case. I didn’t pay much attention to the shooting when it happened.”

  “But now you’re all interested?” She smiled again, flirty and carefree. She was the kind of girl who would want to go get sushi. Steve had never had sushi.

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those anti–death penalty types?” Tara said, taking a sip of her Diet Coke.

  Steve just shook his head. A week ago he’d have said he supported capital punishment. Now he felt sure he didn’t know enough about it. “His mom tried to stop the courts when he dropped his appeals,” Steve said, still grasping for . . . something. Information? Opinion?

  Tara laughed in a single breath. “Maybe she should have tried harder to keep him from shooting a bunch of innocent people.” She shrugged. “A little late to start fighting to save his sorry ass, if you ask me.”

  Steve stiffened and looked back at his phone. “I guess she moved after the execution—like the day of.” He’d learned that from the sledgehammer article. None of the articles seemed to know where she’d gone, though.

  “Huh, well, anyway. I was wondering if you have plans tomorrow night. My sister’s got some extra tickets to the Wildcats game.”

  The hopeful look on her face helped Steve focus on this moment and he wished he dared ask her why she’d set her sights on him. There had to be a hundred forty-something men in a one-mile radius who would welcome her attention, many of them far more handsome and financially stable than he was.

  “Ah man, thanks for thinking of me, but I’ve got a bunch of stuff I’ve got to get done before I head out of town to see my mom for the weekend. I’m really sorry.” But he wasn’t sorry and the lie clawed at him. Part of his sobriety was telling the truth, all the time, and he’d been fudging the last few days. It was dangerous.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she said with forced ease. Her eyes had left his, though, and she turned the can in her hands nervously. “It was just a thought.”

  He should say “Another time” or “I’ll be back on Monday—maybe we could grab dinner instead.” He could feel her waiting for it. Instead, he pulled back the top of his pudding cup—tapioca.

  “Well, I think it’s awesome you’re going to see your mom,” Tara said, extracting herself from the chair. It scraped across the floor when she pushed it back under the table. “I guess I’ll see you when you get back.”

  He looked up, smiled carefully, and nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  23

  Amanda

  Six days

  Amanda went back to work Tuesday morning, relieved to have a lot to do—online teachers didn’t get substitutes, they extended deadlines and got caught up on their own time. Amanda was grateful for the familiar inbox within this new and unfamiliar life she was living. Sunday had been emotional; Monday was exhausting. Amanda and Melissa talked all day about feelings and hurts and memories. It was cathartic and good, but overwhelming. They agreed that when Amanda needed space, she’d say so, and Melissa would do the same. They were going to be pragmatic, and Amanda was relieved that she wasn’t expected to step into June Cleaver’s sensible heels and pretend the last four years hadn’t happened. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been before, but she loved her daughter, and both of them wanted a future in each other’s lives.

  Tuesday evening, she pulled her garbage can out to the street for her first Cincinnati garbage day and the inevitable happened.

  “Hi, you must be the neighbor.”

  Amanda looked up like a deer in the headlights as a plump redhead crossed the street toward her wearing purple velvet sweatpants and a matching jacket. Don’t panic, she told herself while digging deep for her best polite-but-uninterested-in-friendship smile. It was out of practice and hard to find.

  “I’m Emily Shaw,” the woman said. She waved over her shoulder. “My husband Joe and I live in number 16.”

  Number 16 looked exactly like number 21, which was Amanda’s.

  “I’m Amanda Stewartson,” Amanda said, taking the woman’s hand. “Number, well, you probably already know, number 21.”

  Emily laughed for what seemed to be no reason at all. “Of course, I know,” Emily said. “I know pretty much everything that goes on around here. For instance—” She leaned in and proceeded to share gossip on her neighbors. Those two were getting a divorce, that one drank too much on the weekends, and that one had a whole litter of puppies in her upstairs bedroom she was trying to keep under wraps until they were old enough to sell—the HOA said you could only have one pet per unit. She would be fined “up the wazoo” if management ever found out. She was lucky Emily knew how to keep a secret. In exchange for a puppy, of course. Laughter.

  Amanda kept smiling, but her knees were wobbling by the time Emily ran out of things to talk about and said they wo
uld have to go to lunch one of these days—Emily knew the cutest place. Amanda gave a noncommittal answer, then bolted the door as though the woman would come in after her. She tried to buoy herself up with the reassurance that the encounter was now over and she could learn to avoid this woman. And everyone else. Right?

  She took several deep breaths, trying to get the panic to go away, and then had a thought she hadn’t had for years—I should call Melissa.

  “Hi, Mom,” Melissa said on the other end of the line.

  “I just met a neighbor.”

  Melissa paused for a moment. “Oh, really? Is everything okay?”

  “I was stuck outside talking to her for twenty minutes.”

  “The redhead?”

  Amanda paused. “What? You know her?”

  “She came over when we were looking at the condo.”

  “And you didn’t warn me?”

  Melissa laughed and it loosened up the tension coiled in Amanda’s chest. She dared a smile. “I can’t believe you didn’t warn me.”

  “Well, I didn’t want you to change your mind,” Melissa said. “And, well, I hoped maybe she would spare you.”

  “Are there more of them in this complex? I need to know what I’m up against.”

  Melissa laughed again—this was exactly what Melissa had wanted when she’d invited Amanda to move to Cincinnati. Amanda had met her daughter’s expectation. Even Emily Shaw couldn’t take that away. They chatted a few more minutes and then Melissa had to go—she was finishing up dinner. She didn’t invite Amanda to join her, and Amanda was relieved. This was her first evening alone and she needed to get centered, so she put on her coat and gloves and hat and went for a walk through her new neighborhood. People waved, and once she realized they were waving to her, she waved back.

  She found a pizza place around the corner and ordered a small black olive pizza. During the ten minutes it took for the pie to bake, she walked through a strip mall, pausing outside a gym. It had machines in the front and then a floor area surrounded by mirrors at the back of the narrow space where a yoga class was taking place. Amanda had liked yoga once—she and Brenda went every Tuesday night—yet it made her chest tingle to imagine going to a class again.

  “Hi, what’s your name?” the cute, fit instructor would ask.

  “Amanda,” she would say as she rolled out her mat, looking around nervously in case anyone had recognized her. Could she do sun salutations as though she were just another middle-aged woman wanting to get in shape? Could she interact with the same seven people every week without telling them anything about her life? It would feel like she was lying to them.

  “You coming in?”

  Amanda took a startled step back from the window and looked at a woman in her thirties with her hair up in a messy knot on her head. She wore flip-flops and capris—a huge down coat made up for the exposed skin.

  “They’ve only just started,” the woman said, nodding toward the class. “You coming?”

  “Oh, um, no. Thank you.” She turned and fairly ran back to the pizza parlor. Her heart was still racing as she left with her pizza in hand and headed straight home. She watched Gilmore Girls on her laptop while she ate and reviewed the evening. What if she went to that class next week? She got anxious thinking about it, but excited too. It would be something new and different. Then she instantly felt guilty and laid down her pizza. Robbie was dead—tomorrow it would be a full week. She was starting over without him and it made her heart ache in her chest. She’d already made too many changes; she wasn’t ready to make more.

  She turned up the volume on the show and took a sleeping pill so that it would kick in by the time she retired to her inflatable bed.

  24

  Steve

  Ten years, five months, ten days

  “Stephen? Phone.”

  Steve looked up the basement stairs of his mother’s house Friday morning. “Coming!”

  The old, cement-enclosed basement was filled with twenty-year-old jars of peaches—at least he thought they were peaches—and something dead in that east corner behind bins of who knew what. Steve was making his way in that direction, but had already hauled up four loads of garbage—he’d have to borrow some space in the neighbor’s can for the rest. If he’d thought ahead he could have ordered a Dumpster.

  He wiped his dusty hands on his shirt while walking up the stairs that creaked beneath each step. If they hadn’t always creaked this way he’d be concerned, but they’d sounded just like this when he was seven and weighed fifty pounds. He wondered during his ascent how much longer Mom would be able to stay in the house. She was seventy-six and every time he saw her he was surprised by how much she’d . . . diminished. She was getting smaller, her skin thinner, her hair fluffier. Dad had been gone a full ten years now—he’d died during Steve’s lost years and Steve hadn’t found out until after the funeral.

  At the top of the stairs, Steve turned right and moved past the circa 1950 built-in shelves and drawers set into the hallway. Mom had remodeled the kitchen a few years ago and while it was nice—with granite countertops and recessed lighting—the modern lines didn’t fit the rest of the house, which hadn’t been updated in sixty years.

  Mom had left the phone—a curly corded thing that had been on the wall for at least three decades—on the kitchen counter and gone back outside, apparently. She wanted to prep her flower beds since today was warm. The cycling of Steve’s thoughts hadn’t even brought him around to think of who could be calling him at his mother’s house until he was lifting the phone.

  “Hello, this is Steve.”

  “Hey there, number seventy-six!”

  Steve paused just a moment and then smiled, leaning his shoulder against the wall. “Coach Miller,” he said with a bit of a laugh in his voice. “How’s my favorite teacher?”

  “Still kickin’,” Coach said, then added, “well, shuffling I guess. Can’t kick much of anything these days.”

  “Oh, I bet you kick up plenty of trouble,” Steve said. “How are you?”

  “Good, good. Heard from your sister you were visiting when I went into Millie’s this morning for coffee. Thought I’d see how you’re doing.”

  Steve paused. Had Coach ever called to see how he was doing on prior visits? Steve didn’t think so. Once a year or so Steve would stop in on his way out of town after visiting with his mom and catch up with the coach over some diet root beer—Coach knew Steve’s history and was one of those distant supporters who were safe and comfortable. They would talk old days and new days, and Coach always told Steve he was proud of him. More than once Steve had wondered if Coach was the only person who was. “I’m doing well, Coach. Better than I deserve.”

  “Ah, don’t talk like that. The kids are good?”

  “Yeah,” Steve said, then gave a quick rundown on his boys.

  “Well, that’s just wonderful,” Coach said after Steve told him about Emma’s birthday. “Grandchildren are the payoff for raising up your own kids. Or, well, so I hear.”

  “Everything okay with you, Coach? I was planning to stop in on my way out of town Sunday morning. Will you be around?”

  “Sure, sure, I’d love to see ya. When I heard you were in town I was hoping you’d planned to stop, but then I couldn’t keep myself from calling anyway. I wanted to hear how things went with Amanda.”

  Time froze and seemed to hitch backward a step. “Amanda?” Steve repeated, an odd sense of vertigo causing him to lean more heavily against the wall into which the phone was set. “Amanda Mallorie? How . . . how do you know about her?”

  “Didn’t she tell ya she stopped by here? I gave her your address so she could drop off your ring.”

  Steve blinked again. What? Several seconds of silence lapsed. “Sorry, Coach, but you’ve got the better of me. You gave her my address?” Steve hadn’t even thought about how she’d found him. Why hadn’t he wondered about that?

  When Coach spoke, his tone sounded dejected. “I guess she just dropped off the ring a
nd went, then. Is that it?”

  “What else would she have done?” Steve asked, but his thoughts still felt disordered. “She came to you? I’m so confused.”

  “I’d really hoped she’d have told you all that, preferably over dinner,” Coach said. “I just had this feeling . . .”

  Steve’s chest prickled and a rush of heat or anticipation or something washed through him. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Amanda or looking up articles about Robbie, and the more he looked the more he realized that he wanted to find her. Talk to her. Return the sobriety chip he’d found in the grass by the curb. But he’d hit a dead end trying to find her and convinced himself it was because he wasn’t supposed to. Instead he needed to focus on real life. Yet here she was again. In spirit, at least, and there was a whole story about her search for him that he didn’t know. His ears felt warm. “You home right now, Coach?”