They sat quiet for a while, sipped the cold beer. Veronica could tell that Carol didn’t know why they were meeting. She didn’t know how to get into it.
Carol sighed finally. “Look, I’m very nervous. Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“It’s about Lowell and you and fucking.” Veronica stared straight into her face.
Carol turned red.
Veronica said, “I don’t want you fucking him anymore. He was drunk that night, but if I had my way you’d move on to another counselor in some other state, like Ohio for instance.” Veronica went too far with that one, she realized. “Somebody else’s husband, not mine. You are trouble for our family.” She felt herself coming loose from her pins. She almost stood up in the booth. “I won’t stand for it if it happens again. I’ll raise holy hell and ruin you.”
People in the bar looked in their direction.
“Well, I––”
“I don’t care whose fault it was.” She was whispering loudly. “He was drunk. Just stay the hell away from Lowell when he gets back.”
Carol looked her in the eye. “I’ll try, Veronica.”
Veronica stared into her beer. “Nice. You know my name. You know who you’re fucking over.”
“I’m just saying it’s a small town, and there aren’t that many counselors.”
“Well, you’ve been seeing Lowell for a number of years, and I think it’s time to pronounce yourself healed from whatever the hell your neurotic little problem was.”
Carol didn’t blink at the insult. “It’s true, I’m feeling better.”
“How do you think I feel?”
“My guess is you’re feeling pretty good. I can see it in you. A nice blush in your skin. You seem taken care of, I must say. Lowell will come home and you’ll have a newly painted house, and Misty will be feeling better because the two of you are, and you’ll have a new start.”
“Stay the fuck away from my family.”
“You’re strong. You’re muscling through it.” Carol, too, eyed the bar. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I wanted it all to be secret, one time, and like it never happened.”
“Yeah, right.”
“That’s rarely how things play out, though. I rationalized because I wanted to go through with it. I really wanted to. There’s something broken in me.”
“So now what.”
Carol reached across and touched Veronica’s hands. Veronica snatched her hands back.
“I’m sorry. Do you hear me?” Then Carol pulled her hands back and wiped her tears with a napkin. “You’ve made your point very well.” She looked around for her purse. “Are we done?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Great. It was really fun.” Carol gathered her things, tossing her hair from her eyes. She tried to clear herself. “So go back to your perfect lives. Press on and relax. Oh. One more thing. I’ve been meaning to say: You’re not perfect either, are you?” Carol was sliding out of the booth. “You aren’t perfect either, Mrs. Wagner, are you? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re perfect either.” She smiled like they were co-conspirators. “Are you?”
Veronica stared at her, not acknowledging the question. Very pretty, Carol, without another word, went out the open front door.
•
The morning of the Monday Lowell was due home, Veronica was nervous. Vasco and Lowell would go to a Cardinal ballgame and wouldn’t be home until around twelve that night. By then Monique would be home to greet him. Veronica scrubbed and worked in the kitchen and bathrooms with Creedence Clearwater Revival banging off the walls all through the house. Starting around nine in the evening, she listened to the ballgame on the radio, hoping they had stayed for the whole game. It was a two and a half hour drive home. The night was like a bell ringing, a clear fine tolling of a bell. The moon was crystal white—full, it was a new month. She stood in the backyard, looked in the windows at the beautiful colors, a new vibe in the house. She hoped he would be happy with what she’d done.
In the middle of Lowell’s absence, Veronica had driven over to the retreat in the new Camry, with Vasco’s help had found his room, knocked on his door, lured him out to the parking lot to show him the car, made love to him in his room at four in the morning, all of it without saying a word and departed before the crack of dawn. Driving home on two-lane highways, she cried and the sun was in her eyes. She stopped to buy sunglasses in an all-night Walgreen’s.
Yesterday, Sunday, she’d gone to mass to try to purge the feelings she had. That night, she found Howie walking home from the shelter and asked him to sit with her in the car a few minutes. She let him know that Lowell would be coming home and so it was over. He thanked her for the work she’d asked him to do, and he thanked her on behalf of Jed Penny, the old vet who had helped Howie with the driveway. Veronica felt her life had gone off-center, but Howie was pragmatic about it, like war can make a person. He’d killed people in his life, so this probably wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever done. She was scattered. She knew this might be how Lowell would feel about Carol Brown—tormented, possibly a temptation to go over again.
“I’ll miss you,” Howie said, looking at her even if she wasn’t looking back. “If you ever think of me, just know that I’m somewhere out here missing you.”
They kissed, because it was dark out and they could.
The Cardinals were ahead two runs. Veronica sat at the kitchen table a while, savoring her beer and sinking into the music. The rest of the liquor cabinet had been handed off to friends. She got up and strolled through the house trying to see it through Lowell’s eyes. She took a long hot shower for purification. She wore his favorite dress. Lowell had always described her as a dark-haired beauty. Now there were streaks of gray, and her eyes were tired. Nothing to be done about any of it. Who was she before and how could she find her way back to that person? Though her heritage was French, she knew Greek because her father was Greek. She loved music, she kept a journal—and knew what to put in it and what not to—and she drank one beer a day, something she would have to give up since Lowell was for sure on the wagon again. What if Lowell sensed what all had happened?
Back in the kitchen, she grabbed another beer. Her hand shook as she raised the icy beer glass to her lips. She switched from CCR to Wilco, “Misunderstood” on repeat. “Nothing, nothing, nothing…” The strong drums, delicate touches of the guitar, the understated bluesy lyrics. She was restless. Another beer and she’d settle, she imagined, and poured a last one. They would kiss and Lowell would pick up the alcohol on her breath.
She walked out the front door, looked up in the sky. Stars bright even with the brilliant moon. Bats flitting as though it were dusk. An owl in a tree across the street, and off somewhere the eeeeeek of a hawk brooding in the top of a dying tree. An occasional car would sizzle by on the damp street. The town did have a night life; people moved in the shadowy business district like cats, and unknown cars prowled the avenues. Adulteries and subsequent intrigues did take place; there was almost nothing else to do. Police parked in alleys and monitored who was out. The light in the homeless shelter stayed on all night. The Dairy Queen stayed open late, and the late movie at the Strand, “Reds,” went until one in the morning. Squeak’s and the other bars in the area closed at two on weeknights, midnight on the weekends by ordinance. Late at night new couples found their way to bed.
She thought of getting in the Camry and driving the streets for a while. Maybe Howie was out there, but she reeled herself in. Now the owl was on a telephone wire, staring at her. She stared back. She walked across the street to view the house from there, and with that the owl took flight, its amazing wing span, its silence. Veronica was proud of the changes she’d made. The house was fundamentally improved. She took a couple of deep breaths, and in a moment her throat tightened and tears streamed down. She crossed back to her house and went into the carport, sat down at the picnic table. A car came by and deposited Monique at the curb. She ran into the house, her greeting trailing behind.
At the stroke of midnight, a cab pulled in the driveway and a very skinny Lowell got out with his duffel bag. Veronica ran out the front door to him. He was thinner and somehow holier. They hugged and kissed, and then he pointed to the driveway, smiled, and said, “What’s this?”
“It’s concrete,” she said to him. “Like real people’s houses.”
TRUTH
In a night that registered the rhythmic coos of birds and the dripping of dew from the gutters, a night when cats padded across the dark streets without a sound and stray dogs roamed the downtown alleys banging over garbage cans in search of food, in a night when the night trains came through with their lonesome whistles on the approach and then faded away quickly down the long tracks into the dark, in a night when truth weighed on Veronica, and Lowell was back at last and in deep sleep, a night a few weeks after his return when nothing much was expected, Veronica turned on her bedside lamp and sat up, waiting for Lowell to awaken. She listened to his even breathing. She looked at his face. Whatever was dogging her, she could no longer resist it. When Lowell did wake up, she spilled all: “While you were gone, because I knew you’d slept with Carol, I fucked Howie Packer—twice in fact, in the Inman Hotel in Champaign. At the Kopi, we sat and talked, and planned the paint and the concrete, and then, without a word of discussion, we went to the hotel. It was odd. We didn’t talk about going, we just went. It was what I wanted.”
Lowell, suddenly wide awake, didn’t say anything.
“So,” Veronica said. “There it is.” This level of frankness was more their style than the long silences, which had taken over after Lowell’s return from rehab and were, in effect, lies. She loved Lowell and didn’t want the whole thing to blow up. Still, she did mean to push hard, to deaver tell the truth brutally, which was how brutal truths needed to be told.
“Okay,” Lowell said. He rolled onto his side and turned on his light. Rolled back onto his back and took a big breath.
She stared at him. “Okay? That’s all you’ve got?”
He was quiet a moment. Then he whispered: “I saw her scars.” He stared into his bedside light. “He really cut her up.”
“Why did he do it?”
“We’ll probably never know.” Lowell yawned. “The theory is, he did it because she was fucking Nick Bellinger, and he deduced that from her phone calls. Or maybe Rachel Crowley told him—how she knew we’ll never know. Also of course Wally was prone to going off his rocker and, here’s where I come in, he was a poor match for the Prozac Doc Landen had prescribed for him at my request.”
“So you think you figured in the stabbing scenario.”
“Yeah. I saw there was a problem with the Prozac, but I didn’t call Landen to get Wally on something else. I had too much going on. I kept putting it off, never dreaming that something really awful would happen. I never called him.” He tossed himself over, flipped a pillow. “I never called Landen about the Prozac.”
Veronica considered at what level of detail these truths should come out. There was such a thing as too much. “Interesting,” she said, “because I had a chance to see Howie’s scars, too. He was shot in the back in Vietnam. Through his shoulder blade, then a huge exit wound out the front.”
Lowell nodded. “Yeah.” He turned his head to look at her. “He told me all about it. I’m his shrink.”
“Used to be.” Howie had also recently begun ducking Veronica.
“What?”
“You used to be his counselor. I doubt he’ll be back.”
Lowell sighed. “Ah. Yeah. Probably not. I noticed I haven’t heard from him to get started up again.” Lowell thought for a minute. “If you’re behind him when he’s running, talking Howie here, you can tell something’s up with that shoulder.”
“In my experience, he can work circles around about anybody. He paints perfectly with both hands. He can paint a straight line, steady as can be, without tape. And he’s good with concrete, too.”
“Yeah.” Lowell sighed again. “He’s a good guy, many talents. He’s trying to raise enough money to pay tuition at the college. I never know how to tell him being a volunteer at the homeless shelter doesn’t raise a lot of cash. A pure soul, for sure.” Lowell took in a huge breath. “I’m glad the two of you hit it off.”
“What?”
“I said I’m glad the two of you hit it off.”
“We did one whole helluva lot more than just hit it off. Don’t be glad I was unfaithful.” She was near tears for a moment, and then the moment passed. “Anyway. He painted the interior of the house in a week, which was a new land record. He worked with his headphones on, without saying a thing to me.”
“Did you fuck him in our house?”
“No. It crossed my mind, but no.” She’d reckoned that was going too far. She rolled away from him. “I wanted him to seduce me in our bedroom, but he was all business with the painting, and also I think he thought—though he never said anything about it—that he’d done enough damage. I doubt if he’ll be able to face you again. Just remember, I was the aggressor.”
Lowell chuckled. “Yeah. How could he resist?”
“I mean to say, don’t blame him.”
“I know what you mean to say, Veronica. I’ll make it easy. I won’t let him know I know.”
“Yeah, well, okay, just so you know, that never works.”
“Why did you tell me all this now?”
“I wanted to. The truth has its way with us. Somehow it’s mathematical, like gravity.” She was staring at the wall. “I couldn’t sleep. I decided to try to control when you found out.”
He flipped his pillow again. “I can stand you. I love you, but…Jesus.”
“What bothers you? The Howie part or the Carol part or the meknowing-everything part?”
“All of it,” he said. “Though, as you must suspect, you don’t quite know everything.”
“Will you at some point think ‘What the fuck have I done to my marriage?’ or ‘Oh well, what can it hurt to betray her again?’”
“Most likely both.” Lowell stared at the ceiling. “But I’d never do anything like that again. It’s serious trouble, and I’m messed up about it. I’m phobic about it.”
“I don’t know everything?”
“You don’t seem to have internalized how horrible I felt afterwards. You seem to have forgotten that I felt bad about it. I have a feeling you didn’t feel as bad as I did once it was over.”
“Well, you’re right about that. I felt justified. Do you love her and want to marry her?”
Lowell laughed. “No. I didn’t have control. As you will recall.” He laughed again. “You want to marry Howie Packer?”
“Not really.” Veronica had known for a long time that he was vulnerable to Carol Brown. “Did I just hear you blame the alcohol?”
“Oh no, I’m not doing that. I own what I did. I’m not pushing it off on anybody or any one thing.”
The bedroom was full of tension. The curtains at the open window stirred. Even the lights flickered. Lowell got up for a drink of water, then slid back into bed, turning off his light.
“And it only happened once with Carol? I find that hard to believe.”
“Of course you do,” he said sleepily. “You thought it was going on for years.” He looked her in the eye.
Veronica slid down into the covers so she was lying flat.
Lowell put his arm behind his head. “But we got through it,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. They got through it because of her, because she soldiered on no matter what happened, because she loved Lowell and Monique and wanted everything to turn out fine. This Howie behavior wasn’t who Veronica was.
But, as Carol said, she was far from perfect.
How they’d actually got to making love was unclear to Veronica. Maybe they just did it because it was a ritual they understood and there was nothing else to do. After sex they slept. It was mid-morning by the time they showered and made coffee. Very late that night, Monique’s friends
had picked her up and she went back out to the college. She didn’t know any of this was going on.
Around noon, an unusual thing happened. Carol called. Veronica recognized the number. Lowell probably did, too. He picked up.
“Hello.”
“Hi, it’s Carol. Hope you’re fine. Could I please speak to Veronica?” She was being all bubbly and bouncy. It was the first he’d heard her voice since the call before he was kidnapped into rehab.
Lowell was quiet a moment. Veronica could tell there was something he wanted to say, but with her in earshot it couldn’t happen. Finally he said “Sure” and waved at his wife, pointing to the phone.
Veronica picked up in the kitchen. Carol jumped right in. “I wanted to tell you that I got a letter from Wally. He and I don’t talk on the phone because phone calls are monitored in the pen, so this letter is precious rare communication. First, he told me that he has colon cancer, probably terminal since it’s all through his system, and they are going to release him from prison. Good behavior, he says, because he wrote his book in their rather marginal psych ward and was never a problem for anybody and his meds are squared away. He said when he gets out he’d like to see me.”
“I’m sorry to hear Wally’s sick,” Veronica said. “That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, I…”
“Will you see him?”
Carol kept going. “But there’s also news. He has a letter from Ben Carlyle, sent before he shot himself. Ben apparently died a few hours after putting the letter in the mail. Ben’s dead, you know.”
“I didn’t know, no.” She spoke to Lowell. “Hey, did you know Ben shot himself?”
“I heard,” Lowell said. “Did it at his ex-wife’s house.”
Carol went on: “Anyway, Ben wrote Wally from up in Rockford to confess to burning down the administration building. It was a giant accident, he said, having something to do with a ritual Ben was conducting in his office, something perverted and private with the filing cabinet in front of the door and pictures of Barbi Benton he’d gotten on eBay taped on all three walls and the window. Wally knew something was going on because he and Ben were in their offices, next door to each other, and Wally smelled smoke. Wally knocked on Ben’s door, tried to open it, but couldn’t because of the filing cabinet. You know the whole town thought Wally burned the building down. He said Ben apologized for letting Wally take the fall. He said Ben knew he’d been an asshole his whole life, and that was why Barbi Benton was his only true love—Playboy, January, 1970.” Carol was jumpy, sounded like a squirrel. “Isn’t that about as sick a thing as you ever heard? I wanted you to know, because you’re my friend now.”
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