by JoAnn Chaney
There was an elementary school down the street from her house in California, and in the afternoons Gloria would slowly walk past the chain-link fence and watch the kids playing, shouting and jumping, fighting. Their screams would give her a headache but she walked by anyway because it reminded her of Jacky, who’d always liked kids so much, especially the little ones in diapers, while she’d never had a knack for it. She still remembers the year Jacky dressed up as Santa Claus and went around to all their diners, carrying bags full of candy and toys for the kids, and how they’d shrieked when they saw him, sometimes in terror, but even then they’d refused to leave. And she’d come along, dressed as Mrs. Claus, but only because Jacky had insisted, and when he got an idea in his head there wasn’t any use arguing with him about it, he would never give in. And later at home, while Jacky was in the shower, singing Christmas carols in his off-key tenor, she’d looked through the handful of Polaroids deemed rejects because all the parents had passed on them, and saw that while Jacky was grinning like a kid in every one of them, her own mouth was screwed up so tight she might’ve been sucking air through a tiny straw. That was the difference between her and Jacky, though. He was always trying to be Mr. Good Times, always wanted to make everyone happy. Not that she didn’t want people to be happy, but she didn’t have the enthusiasm her husband did.
She was in California five weeks when she decided to leave, to move back to Denver. California was too much. Of everything. The stores were always too crowded, the lines at the gas pumps were always too long. The sun was too bright. It was too warm, and what a waste that was, since half her wardrobe was for winter. And there were so many different people everywhere she looked, men booming in Spanish and tiny women with black hair and slanted eyes, and plenty of blacks, more blacks than she’d ever seen in her life, playing basketball on the streets and braiding one another’s hair and laughing, big whooping laughs that bounced off the walls and came back to her ears again. A gay couple lived in the house across the street, two black men who were very kind, but she couldn’t even speak to them about the weather without imagining what they did in bed, how they enjoyed each other, so she tried to be extra careful about when she went out, not wanting to get caught in an extended conversation at the mailbox.
And besides, Denver was her home. She’d been born there, lived her whole life there. She hadn’t realized that a place could be a part of someone until she was in California, where everything seemed a smidge off, the brick in the wall that wouldn’t quite line up with the rest, and it was enough to make her miserable.
And she still wanted to be close to Jacky.
So she moved back. Bought a house in the Whittier neighborhood, where she was able to stretch the inheritance her mother had left her further. It was an area where the neighbors were less likely to care who you were as long as you didn’t cause trouble, where people still knew how to mind their own business. It wasn’t all that far from one of their diners, the original one her father had opened, although it wasn’t theirs anymore, or even hers, but had been sold off long before to pay for lawyers and fees and whatever else the courts had cooked up. She doesn’t leave the house all that often, and she tries not to drive past any of the diners if she can help it. She doesn’t want to see something that used to be hers and never will be again. So she stays home and watches the peach tree fighting for life in the cold.
* * *
She visits Jacky once a week. Visiting is allowed for only a brief window on Wednesday mornings, so she wakes up early to make it to Sterling on time. It’s a long drive. For a while she tried listening to audiobooks as she drove, but she’d found her mind wandering, and she’d realize that half the book was gone and she had no idea what’d happened. She started listening to music, any kind, and then to nothing at all, it never mattered, only the howling of the wind as her car sliced along the interstate ever reached her.
“How can you still care about him?” a girlfriend asked, not long after Jacky was arrested. She’d lived with her mother for a while after the house was torn down in the tiny apartment her mother had rented since her father had died. “You don’t have to deal with him anymore. File for divorce.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Gloria had said. She was tired of these phone calls, sick of being told what to do by women who barely knew her. She’d gone to church with them, had gone shopping and traded recipes and gossiped, but they didn’t know her, and they certainly didn’t understand her marriage.
“He’s a monster, Gloria. He could’ve murdered you in your sleep. Have you ever thought of that?”
She carefully replaced the phone in the cradle. When it rang again, she ignored it. She’d turned the voicemail off, so there was never an answer, and sooner or later whoever was calling would get tired of the endless rings and hang up.
“I’d like some tea,” her mother had said, from the armchair she hardly ever left. Almost a year later Gloria would find her in that chair, her head canted strangely to one side and her mouth twisted into a cruel maw, dead from a stroke during the night. Her mother had never said a word about Jacky since his arrest, never asked questions or tried to talk about it, and Gloria thought that it might’ve been because her mother understood. Her parents had been married for fifty-two years when her father passed, and she thought her mother had a good idea of what she was going through because her father was difficult; he could be terribly mean, but when you were married you made things work, that was your job, you dealt with what was handed out, you made the best of what you got. It was like that old country song. Stand by your man, that’s how it went, and it wasn’t that way anymore, people bailed and filed for divorce at the first sign of trouble, but she hadn’t been raised that way, she’d made a promise and she was going to keep it.
* * *
“There’s a good sale on squash right now,” Gloria says. “I have to go back tomorrow, pick up some more before it goes off.”
“What kind of squash?”
“Spaghetti. And acorn.” She pauses. “Some college students moved in across the street last week. They’ve been throwing parties every night, and it keeps me up.”
“Why don’t you call the cops?”
She makes a face, picks at a loose thread hanging off the bottom of her skirt.
“It’s not that bad,” she says. Of course, Jacky doesn’t know that someone broke into her home a few months ago, stole everything of value. Her TV, her phone, even her clock radio. And the paintings Jacky made in prison, the ones she brought home every week and piled up in the garage—most of those were gone too. She’d filed a police report, and two cops had come out, they’d laughed when they realized who she was, then left without taking any notes, without taking her seriously, and she knew she’d never see any of her stolen belongings again. “I’m sure the police are busy with much more important things than my silly complaints.”
This is how it is every Wednesday with Jacky—an hour of boring conversation about nothing at all. About the grocery shopping she did the day before, the TV shows they both watch. He tells her about the menu in the cafeteria for the week, and about the guy two cells down who’d had a heart attack the week before and still isn’t back from the hospital wing. It’s exactly how they’d be talking to each other if Jacky wasn’t in prison, the mundane conversation of marriage, one week’s worth of talk compacted into sixty minutes over two old rotary phones as they look at each other through a pane of bulletproof glass. It’s the only way Jacky can get visitors, because he’s considered dangerous; the guards think Jacky might hurt her if he got the chance, they treat him with special care.
She still wears her wedding band. Jacky can’t.
“Have you gone into any of the restaurants?” he asks. He asks this same thing every week, but she can understand. They were a big part of Jacky’s life for so long—owning and operating half a dozen successful restaurants was no small feat—so she usually tries to be gentle. She decides to ignore the question this time, acts like she hadn’t
heard it at all. “Are they clean inside? Have the menus been changed?”
“Have you been painting?” she asks. Jacky blinks. He was always the talkative one in their relationship, the one who’d lead the conversation. Years before, they’d be out for dinner and they’d meet another couple, or some acquaintance, and Jacky would introduce his wife, and then Gloria would fade quietly into the background. But things have changed, and she’s the one steering the ship, jumping from one subject to another, asking questions, pushing Jacky to talk. He’s severely depressed, the prison doctor says. He has heart problems, weight problems. He’s on a cocktail of medications, they keep changing it up, and he’s sometimes blurry, faded. Confused. She has to take control during most visits, or he’d sit there like a lump, or end up repeating the same story. “Do they have a package for me at the front?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“How many did you do this week?”
“Four, I think.” Jacky pauses. “I need paint.”
“What colors?”
“Red, mostly.”
The artwork started as a kind of therapy, because Jacky needed something to do behind bars, and he wasn’t a reader, he’d never been much for exercise. So she’d brought charcoals and paper and paint and sponges—Jacky wasn’t allowed access to paintbrushes, they were too sharp and could be used as a weapon—and she’d thought it might be a complete failure but it was worth a shot, because Jacky wasn’t doing all that well, in fact, he wasn’t doing well at all. During his first six months at Sterling, Gloria had been in a terror that she’d get a call from the prison, telling her that Jacky had hanged himself, or that he’d managed to drown himself in the toilet. And maybe things would’ve been better that way, God knows there were plenty of people who would’ve danced in the streets and set off fireworks if Jacky Seever were dead, but he was her husband, and she loved him. She still worried about him, she still found herself in the men’s section at the department store, shopping for undershirts and socks, even though Jacky didn’t need them anymore, the prison supplied them. It was old habit, but that’s what every marriage is. Habit.
“Red? Black too?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Okay.”
The whole art thing was an idea, nothing more, but it’d worked, and Jacky turned out to be good, he had an eye for it. And there was a market for paintings made by men like Jacky, especially the nasty ones, and Gloria had found an art dealer up north who specialized in those sorts of things, although she’d sell him only one at a time, when she needed the money, because selling the paintings had been like admitting Jacky’s guilt, like flaunting to the world that it was all true, he’d killed and he’d loved it, he was reliving it through his art and she didn’t care. The paintings were awful but they were also a godsend, because she suddenly had money again, and there were no more long days of wondering how she’d be able to provide for herself once her inheritance ran out.
She kept selling to the art dealer until the rest of the paintings were stolen from her house, and he still occasionally calls and asks if she has anything new, but those calls are few and far between. People have lost interest in Jacky; they’ve moved on over the last seven years.
What we need is someone connected to your husband to get murdered, the art dealer had told her once, and she’d actually laughed at that, although the memory of that laugh kept her up for most of the next few nights. That would move his work, put some cash in our pockets.
It was terrible, but it was also true, like most terrible things are. People died every day, and if that person happened to be connected to Jacky, well … It was an awful thought. But it would sell paintings, even the ones of flowers and mountains and bowls of fruit and blocks of smeared color that were all Jacky seemed to make these days. So she still stops at the front desk every week when she leaves the prison, where the guard with the mouthful of big plastic teeth is always waiting with Jacky’s newest canvases, all bundled up, ready to load into her trunk, and she’s considered telling him to throw them away, that she doesn’t need more junk in her house, but she doesn’t. She takes them, every time. Another old habit that won’t die.
She goes straight home after visiting Jacky—she skips the squash at the grocery store, doesn’t feel up to it, her eyes hurt and her legs are tired—and opens the package of paintings. There are five canvas squares. More landscapes. Flat gray land and swirling skies, full of color. Oranges and reds, mostly, swirled together, so they look like madness. She thinks the paintings are probably the view out Jacky’s cell window, the thin slice of the real world he can still see.
The paintings end up stacked in her garage, where they stay, collecting dust.
* * *
“You’re that Seever woman.” It is the next morning, and Gloria is at the supermarket, although it’s not her regular grocery day, because what else does she have to do? She’s tapping the squash, picking it up and smelling it. She doesn’t know how to look for a ripe one, isn’t sure that it matters, and the woman who walks right up to her catches her by surprise. She is young and plain-looking—not at all pretty, not with the dark circles under her eyes and the spit-up stains on her shoulders. “Gloria, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gloria says before she can think to deny. Jacky’s lawyer had suggested she change her name, but she’d never gone through with it, and after a while it had seemed silly.
“How could you do it?” the woman asks, and Gloria knows exactly what she means, right away, it was a question she’d heard before. So many times over the years.
“I never did anything,” she says quickly. It’s the same old response, the one she gives everyone. “I never knew what was going on.”
“You’re as guilty as he is,” the woman says, and her baby starts whimpering from its seat in the cart, glassy-eyed and flailing. “You should be right next to him when he gets the needle. That’s what you deserve.”
The baby cries out suddenly, and throws its bottle so it hits the floor and goes rolling away. Gloria goes after it, her face hot. This isn’t new, she’d been approached like this before, heard it all. But it isn’t something a person gets used to. Not in a million years.
“Here. Your baby dropped it,” she says, holding out the bottle, but the young woman shrinks away, her face horrified, as if Gloria had taken a shit in her hand and was offering it up like a gift.
The woman won’t take it but hurries away, and Gloria is left with the bottle in her hand, the milk in it still warm.
* * *
She grills a steak for dinner that night, even though she doesn’t like red meat all that much and she’ll spend the whole night suffering with heartburn. She drinks a beer with the steak, although she would’ve preferred wine, and has a bowl of ice cream for dessert. Because it’s what Jacky would’ve eaten. She still sleeps on the left side of the bed. She keeps three extra rolls of toilet paper beneath the sink in the bathroom, stacked in a small pyramid, because that’s how Jacky liked it. There is no part of her world that doesn’t revolve around him still. There must’ve been a period in her life when she was her own person, when her entire identity wasn’t wrapped up in being the wife of Jacky Seever, but she can’t remember that time. Not anymore. She doesn’t exist as her own person anymore. After Jacky’s arrest, people were always asking if she knew, how she couldn’t know what he was doing, and they treated her like she was guilty of a crime too, even if it was a crime of ignorance. Because that’s what marriage does. It locks two people together, forever and ever, until they’re dead, and even after.
SAMMIE
Lies Sammie regularly tells:
That she wants to have kids.
That she’s glad she doesn’t work at the paper anymore, that the stress was too much for her.
That she’s considering going back to school.
That she never eats dessert.
That she always takes her vitamins.
“Are you feeling okay?” one of the girls asks her. She should’ve had a
coffee during her lunch break, something choked with caffeine, because this is an important question at this job. If you’re sick, you cover it up, make yourself radiant. You can’t sell makeup to anyone if you look like shit.
“I’m fine.” Lie.
“You sure?”
“I’m just tired.”
This is the truth, although she knows everyone will assume she has the beginnings of the flu, because it’s winter and it’s retail and no one uses enough hand sanitizer or sneezes into their elbows like they should. She’s tired, although she went to bed early and slept like the dead, and the truth doesn’t seem like a good enough excuse, but it’s all she’s got.
“You didn’t get enough sleep?”
“I don’t know.” Sammie looks at her hands. The nail on her thumb is cracked all the way down to the bed, sore and swollen, but she can’t stop fiddling with it. She wishes the girl would shut up because her thoughts are all a jumble, she can’t get them straight. She wishes she were at home, looking through her files on Seever, figuring out what to write about.
“Everything okay at home?”
“Yeah, everything’s good.” That’s the thing about working with all these women, she’s come to realize. They never shut up. They never stop asking questions. They want to know how you’re doing, if you’re angry, if they’ve done something wrong. And if there’s a juicy bit of gossip there, something they can use against you, they’ll do it. It’s like snake handling. You never know if the damn thing is going to turn on you, sink its fangs right into your hand, and watch you die.