Waiting to take that test, I knew I was done with the marriage.
After I got the results back, then I could see him, though I shocked myself by falling so immediately and with such relief into his bed. But even in the middle of that reunion, I knew.
While I was unwrapping the oh-so-necessary condom, rolling it onto him, I knew that whether I loved him or not, there was no way back from that level of careless betrayal. The next day I got both of us out of bed and dressed by nine A.M., and I drove us downtown so we could meet with a lawyer.
Now, looking at the bottle, I didn’t think I could say it all again, but Bernese was looking at me expectantly. “What’s that supposed to mean, that bottle?”
“It means he cheated on me.”
There was a long silence, and Bernese’s gaze on me was speculative, as if she was sizing me up. She blew air out between her lips like a horse and rubbed one hand across her mouth. Finally, she said, “Grow up.”
I leaned forward, certain I must have misheard her. “Excuse me?” I said. To Mama, I signed,
I think she just told me to grow up.
Mama answered,
Sounds like her, yes.
“I said, ‘Grow up.’ ” Bernese’s face was carved out of implacable wood.
“He cheated on me,” I said.
“I got that,” said Bernese. “So he cheated. It happens. It happens all the time. In almost every marriage, it’s going to happen.
You don’t get divorced.”
“Yes, you do,” I said, and then my eyes widened in compre-hension. I leaned forward even farther, and my voice softened.
“Aunt Bernese? Are you saying . . . Do you mean that Uncle Lou—”
She interrupted me with a rude snort. “Lou? Please. I didn’t mean it happened to me. Don’t be an idiot. But it happens, I am sure, to other people all the time. That doesn’t mean you let some whore win and take your husband. You drag him home and make his life a walking festival of hell until he wishes he’d cut off his own man parts before he let them go wandering.”
Mama’s hands felt stiff around mine as I interpreted, no doubt tense with the huge effort of not saying that she had told me so.
I said, “When you’re married, there’s a trust there. There’s this vow. If you break that, if you let yourself get intimate, in whatever form, with another person—”
My voice cut out abruptly. Over Bernese’s shoulder, through the gauzy sheers that covered the bay window, I could see Henry Crabtree advancing down Grace Street. He was too far away for me to read his face, but he was moving fast, with long, purpose-ful strides, and his shoulders were set forward and braced. His sinewy body, thin as a blade, was probably whistling as he sliced through the air.
“I’ve been married over forty years, Nonny. I have a notion of how it works.” She didn’t seem to notice my abrupt silence as anything more than a place where she could easily interrupt.
“Did you even try to bring that dog to heel?”
“He doesn’t love me,” I said. As Henry came closer, I could see his jaw was set and rigid. I tried to keep my eyes on Bernese, because I couldn’t imagine a worse time for the man I had kissed—
in, by the way, strict violation of my still-standing marriage vows—to come storming up on some romantical mission.
“Don’t be such a schoolgirl,” said Bernese. “Love-schmove.
This is your husband.”
I shook my head. “I don’t mean he’s not
in
love with me. This isn’t about romance.” I glanced at the golden-brown bottle and then back up to her face, carefully not watching Henry’s resolute progress toward the house.
Mama was signing again,
Forget this. You are supposed to be talking about Fisher.
I signed back,
I’m going to talk about Fisher, but until I settle my
divorce with her, she won’t hear me on any other subject. She always
drags it back to this.
Mama subsided, unconvinced.
“Why do you keep looking at that bottle? What’s that got to do with anything?” Bernese asked. She picked it up off the table and read the label. “Penicillin? What has penicillin got to—” The nurse in her kicked in then, and I saw her put it together in her head.
I said, “If he’d cheated, yeah, maybe there’s a way back from that. But he didn’t use a condom with her. With all the hers, for all I know, even though we’d stopped using them at home.”
Bernese flared her nostrils like a bull and said, “Why were you using condoms in the first place?”
I said, “Because the pill makes me crazy, and we weren’t ready to have a baby.”
“And you stopped?”
I felt myself flushing, and when I spoke, my voice came out barely above a whisper. “Because I thought we were ready. I don’t see a way back from going to your doctor’s office and being told that no, actually, you don’t have a urinary tract infection from all the sex you’ve been having, trying to conceive. You have syphilis.”
It was hard to meet Bernese’s eyes, but I forced myself. Over her shoulder, I could see Henry Crabtree drawing closer and closer. But then he turned abruptly, veering off to my left, and I realized he was heading for Mama’s front door, not Bernese’s. In four more long strides, he was out of sight.
I blew out a relieved breath and turned my full attention back to Bernese and signing for Mama. Of course he had no way to know I was over here. I would catch up with him later. Maybe he had been coming to say that the kiss was a mistake. To apologize.
To restore all our old ease. I needed that so badly right now, his friendship, but I didn’t believe it. He had moved with the unwa-vering gait of Prince Charming preparing to broach the witch’s tower.
Bernese, meanwhile, was suffering some sort of internal drama.
Her cheeks had reddened, and she threw the pill bottle down. It skittered across the coffee table and dropped to the floor. “That rotten piece of stinking meat,” she said. “And you didn’t know a thing until you went to your gynecologist?”
“No,” I said. It had been awful. Syphilis, of all things. Practically a dead disease. Jonno couldn’t bring home some regulation rampant campus animal like the clap or crabs. It had to be some bizarre throwback of an illness, one my gynecologist hadn’t seen in ages. “I wonder if we’ll get a rash of it now,” she’d said, considering me speculatively, and I had flushed at the implication.
Mama, who knew all this, patted my leg while Bernese regarded me with worried eyes. “Nonny, tell me you’re sure that is all he gave you.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I got tested. Twice.”
Bernese nodded, relieved. Her gaze flattened back into anger, and she said, “I can’t believe you’re going to divorce him.” I boggled at her until she added, “You need to track his sorry butt down and shoot him. Put him in the ground.”
Henry reappeared and headed back up Grace. But then he piv-oted and paused, staring speculatively toward Bernese’s house. He started moving in our direction again, looming larger and larger in the bay window.
Bernese had launched into a long anti-Jonno diatribe, threatening all manner of biblical vengeance. I tried twice to break her flow, but she overrode me. I signed to Mama,
Bernese is on a tear,
and Henry Crabtree is coming up to the house. I have to talk to him.
Then you should go. Because this conversation is worthless.
Yes. Bernese is talking at me, but she isn’t saying anything interesting,
I signed.
I’ll have to let her wind herself down. Do you want
to go home, or stay here, or come with me to talk to Henry?
Henry reached the bottom step of Bernese’s wide front porch.
He hesitated there. I could see his eyes burning with a bright blackness, as if he were trying to incinerate the front door with the intensity of his gaze.
Mama seemed to be thinking over her options, so I signed,
Bernese is going on about how Jonno should be taken out and hanged
with a loop of his own intestines, and you were right. I shouldn’t have
let her divert me. Now it won’t be about the divorce, it will be about
why I don’t kill him. It’s all smoke, because she doesn’t want to deal
with what she’s doing to Fisher.
I was signing to keep Mama abreast of the situation, but also so Bernese would think I was still interpreting and therefore probably listening to her.
Henry was standing completely still, his eyes on the door, and I tried to think of something softening to say to him. But honestly, considering everything that was going on with our families, the trouble between us was nothing. It was just a kiss. He was being ridiculous. I felt a stab of irritation. I didn’t have the energy for romantic drama today.
At last Mama said,
I will stay here and have a lie-down on
Bernese’s sofa. My hip is bothering me. Let me rest, and then we can
go to the hospital and check on Genny.
I nodded my hand in hers and then stood up abruptly while Bernese was in mid-sentence. Henry, frozen on the porch, caught the movement through the sheers. He peered through the window and then came toward it, and our eyes met.
I understood immediately that whatever his mission was, it had zero to do with romance. He hadn’t been standing immobile at the door because he was feeling at all uncertain. Henry Crabtree was angry. So angry he was practically vibrating. I saw his shoulders shudder, as if he were shaking a weight off his back. He pointed a savage finger at me and then jerked his whole hand back toward himself, telling me by gesture, “Get your ass outside.”
CHAPTER 13
HENRY STOOD IN the driveway, staring at Bernese’s tires. It had taken me a few minutes to extricate myself from the derailed conversation with Bernese and then get Mama settled on the sofa. In that time, Henry had become contained, if not calmer. He waved a hand at the tires. “Those are shredded.”
“Yeah. It’s a mercy Bernese hasn’t seen them yet.”
His head jerked up, and I watched some of the fury leach out of his black gaze.
“Henry, what’s going on with you? What were you doing standing on the porch steps for so long?”
“I wasn’t sure I could see Bernese yet without beating the living shit out of her,” Henry said. I raised my eyebrows, puzzled, and he stared back at me. At last he said, “Come and see. Because you won’t believe me if I tell you.” He started stalking back up Grace Street.
“Henry?” I called after him.
“You have to see it,” he said, pausing to wait for me.
I trotted to catch up. “I can’t be gone long. I need to take Mama to the hospital soon. Genny’s going to get nerved up if we aren’t there when visiting hours start.”
He nodded curtly, and we walked up the street side by side until we came up even with the fence that surrounded the Crabtree parts yard. The dogs didn’t appear, and when I looked ahead, I saw that the chain was swinging loose and the gate was open.
I stopped, staring. “Holy crap! Are they out? Henry? Did someone let them out?”
Henry responded by grabbing my hand and pulling me on to the gate. We went inside. I hadn’t been in the Crabtree parts yard in years. Not since I was a child. Even then I never spent a lot of time there. In the brief period when Ona had unsupervised visitation with me, I’d been told at home that on no account was I to play in the yard. Genny said it was a death trap filled with rusty sharp things that dripped tetanus. The refrigerators and chest freezers looked to her like suffocating coffins, even after Ona went out there with a hammer and broke every latch so that the doors gaped open obscenely on the uprights.
From what I remembered, it looked very much the same.
Rusted-out bodies of cars and partial cars, heaps of old lawn mowers, fridges, gas stoves, and chunks of various engines lay in disarray. A narrow path wound through the mountains of gears and scrap metal and spark plugs. Henry led me toward the other side, near the back entrance to the gas station.
The two male dogs were there, lying together in a stiffening heap in front of a wall of used tires. Their eyes were open and glassy, and their mouths were ringed with white foam. All eight of their legs were stiff and curled, and their spines were bowed, making them look like they were in midleap, though they were lying on their sides. A large fly with a swollen bottle-green abdomen was marching across the closer dog’s face. It walked straight out onto one of the open eyes. I flinched, but of course the dog did not.
“She was going to get rid of them,” he said, almost to himself.
“Oh, no. Henry, has she called her brother or his boys? Are any of them coming?”
Henry shook his head. “I think I’ve talked her out of calling them in. So far.”
I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Bernese couldn’t have done this.”
“I know,” he said. “I was so sure it was Bernese. I came down to see you so you could stop me from killing her. And then I decided to go straight to her house and kill her anyway. But then you told me she hadn’t seen what they did to her tires yet.”
“Wait,” I said. “You thought she’d killed the dogs because of her tires? How did you know about her tires?”
“I saw Lou at the diner this morning. He was telling Trude about the tires. I thought he was hiding out because Bernese was in a rage, but I guess he just didn’t want to be the one to tell her.
Can’t blame the man. I got home from breakfast and my phone was ringing. It was Ona calling and asking me to come down to the parts yard. She was a wreck.”
I cursed under my breath. If Lou had moaned to Trude, then everyone knew. Everyone except Bernese. And finding out last would do nothing to soothe her when she finally did clue in.
The whole town, including Henry, must be assuming one of Ona’s sons had slashed the tires. I was about to tell Henry about Lori-Anne’s nocturnal visit, but he started talking before I could.
“If she hasn’t seen the tires . . . And Bernese isn’t a poisoner. She would have marched up here in broad daylight and shot them.”
At last he met my eyes, genuinely baffled. “So who did this?”