The Stories We Tell (13 page)

The card, it's number two from the Ten Good Ideas line:
Tell Good Stories
. I open it slowly and a clipped
Savannah News
article falls out—it is the one I've already read about the homeless man's death on Preston. The note inside is cryptic:
Good Stories for you.

There's no name, no signature or return address.

Good mail, that's why I make these cards; that's my impetus. But this is anything but good. It feels downright sinister.

“Max,” I call out.

The air around me has a heartbeat. I hold out the card as he approaches.

“What's that?” he asks.

“Someone sent me our own card.”

“Well, that's a first. Nice, right?”

“No, it's not nice. I don't know what it means.”

Max takes the card and the clipping from me before he sits at the table. He shoves aside some early sketches for number seven and skims the article before looking up. “Why would someone send this to you?”

“I don't know.”

“Ignore it. People are crazy. We know this. Someone is bored and … has too much time on their hands.”

“No. It feels more than that. Why would someone take the time to do this?”

“I think that you have more than enough to deal with right now. Figuring out why some idiot sent you this article should not be on the list.”

I take the article back from Max and place it inside the envelope, as if I can undo the opening, put things back into place as they were. “We can't let Willa see this, okay?”

He agrees. “No. Not now.”

It's nice at times like this, the two of us, the silence made of whirring machines and rustling paper. But it never lasts. Not when we both, always, eventually need to be somewhere else.

*   *   *

Hours later with evening drawing near, I stand in the hallway of our house and call out. “Cooper? Gwen?”

It's funny how this goes—here I am shouting out to my family and I'm surrounded by family, too. Well, Cooper's family anyway. Our front hall is adorned with portraits of Great Morrisons. At least that's how I think of them. First are Cooper's grandparents, who stare at the camera wearing tight grins and tighter clothes. Louise and Averitt's wedding photo is framed in gold; Averitt looks at Louise with a beguiling smile while she stares vacuously into the camera. So many photos: Averitt shaking hands with the mayor; Louise at a fund-raiser, wearing a red ball gown, her hair in a chignon, posing with Ronald Reagan. Farther down is Gwen's last school portrait, with her insecure pasted-on smile. This ode-to-Morrison wall must be passed through to get to any part of the house and is a not so subtle reminder of all that came before me, what must be matched or exceeded. This wall, this display, existed when I moved into the house and Louise “graciously” let it stay. Photos of my parents, of Willa and me as children are in frames scattered throughout the house, but not here, not on this wall.

I climb the stairs to our bedroom. It's in the far corner of the house, the windows facing east, ready to receive the breezes, if so offered, in the days before central air. When I reach our doorway, I hear Cooper's voice coming, muffled and angry, from the bathroom. The shower is on and its river-rush sound is background music to his voice. I know he can't hear me with the door closed and the water pounding, but I hear him. I step closer.

“I don't give a shit what he thinks. He's a prick.”

Then silence.

“He's lying. The press didn't contact him; he's just being nosy and hoping for some kind of an exclusive. Son of a bitch.”

My diaphragm tightens under my ribs. I breathe in shallow sips of air. But I listen.

“I've told you this story over and over. It was raining. My sister in law, crazy and angry as hell, grabbed the wheel to make me take her back to the bar. I skidded; the car locked up. I hit a tree. The End. There is nothing else to say and I won't talk to some asshole who wants to make me look bad for doing the right thing.”

I step back from the anger, which isn't even directed at me. I return to the kitchen, pick out a bottle of Malbec, and open it with a swift twist. I call Gwen's cell and she answers on the first ring as I pour the wine into a glass. “Where are you?” I ask.

“Um … at the river with Dylan and some friends. We're out in Pete's boat. We'll be home after dark. Promise.”

I hear the slur of her words, the way she talks very slowly, articulating carefully. “You're drinking.” I close my eyes against the knowing.

“Nope.”

“You sound funny,” I say.

“You can test me when I get home. I'm not drinking. Whatever.”

“Be careful, okay?”

“Always. Gotta go, Mom.” She hangs up.

The wineglass, red and round, is in my hand, and then it isn't. I've smashed it on the hardwood floor. Droplets and splashes of bloodlike liquid are everywhere: on the lower cabinets, on the bar stool cushions, on the hem of my white jeans. And I don't feel any better; only worse. The tears come hot and mean. Furious. Heat rushes into my face, under my eyes.

Cooper's voice: “Eve, what happened?”

He's staring at the floor, wiping his hand back and forth across the air.

“I threw the wineglass,” I say.

“Threw?” His forehead lifts and his bandage puckers. His hair is still damp and he wears jeans and a black T-shirt, smelling like the Savannah Bee Company soap I keep in the shower.

“Yes. Threw. Tossed. Hurled.”

“Okay.” He walks to the storage closet, where he grabs towels, a broom, and floor cleaner. “Want to tell me why?”

“I wish I'd just drank it.” I reach into the sink for a dish towel. “I heard you on the phone upstairs. You want to tell me what is going on?”

“So we're switching subjects?” he asks with a broom in one hand and a dish towel in the other.

“Yes, we are.”

“It was Matthew, from the
Savannah News.
Thank God we're friends. There's some nosy reporter who wants to write about the things that go down on that street and in that neighborhood. He wants to add our accident to the list and interview me. Hell, no way.”

“Why would he want to interview you?”

“I just explained it, Eve.”

“What things go down on that street?”

“The drugs. The death of that homeless guy. The shoddy construction. The false ‘historic homes.' Those kinds of things.”

“I still don't see why your accident should be included.”

“Your sister's accident,” he says, correcting me.

I close my eyes and wish I could hear the lovely shattering of another glass of wine, see the redness burst onto the floor, watch the slivers of crystal fly into the corners of the kitchen. I didn't pay enough attention the first time to fully enjoy it.

Cooper's voice interrupts my vision. “Want to help me clean this up?”

“I got it,” I say.

“Why would you throw this?” He bends over and picks up the stem of the Riedel glass.

“I didn't realize I'd done it until I'd done it.”

“What's wrong with you?” He comes closer, stepping around the broken fragments.

“I'm not sure,” I say. “I'm mad. I'm sad. I'm worried. All of the above.”

“So you're taking it out on our stemware?” He smiles, an attempt at unity. I smile in return.

When the glass is swept up and the wine wiped clean, I continue cooking lasagna, and Cooper goes into the living room to watch the news. I turn on the house music system, switching from Rihanna (Gwen was obviously the last to use it) to the Lone Bellow, singing about the two sides of lonely. I cook to their lonesome sounds, sipping a new glass of wine, one I will not throw.

Cooper makes a tentative entrance back into the kitchen. “You better?”

I nod.

“Do I get a kiss?”

He does this thing where he asks me to walk to him for a kiss, when he could just as easily walk over and kiss me. I don't get it. But I go to him. “So, remind me what this trip is for tomorrow,” I say.

“I'm securing funding for the new ‘Home Place' section. I have a couple of ideas I think will really work this time.” He sits on a bar stool and watches me place the cooked noodles on the bottom of the pan. “Tell me, how is Willa since she lost it at the fundraiser?”

It's been two days since the party and this is the first time Cooper has said her name. “She's getting better. The swelling around her eye is almost gone, but she's … confused sometimes. But I'm not even sure
confused
is the right word. Things are all mixed up inside her head.”

“Tell me what you mean.”

“Like things don't make too much sense to her. She cries over something small. She can't remember where the bathroom is. Things like that.”

“Oh, well, that's okay. Those are small things.”

“I don't know. Like today, she talked about that old homeless guy and she cried again.”

“Willa's always been sentimental,” he says. “Always emotional.”

“But this is different,” I say.

“Different how?”

“I don't know.” And I didn't. Not really. “I guess with the accident and all, well, of course Willa is feeling vulnerable. Lucky, but vulnerable.”

“Okay.” He draws the word out.

“While I was reading about the dead man in the last page of the “Metro” section, I was thinking that if you or Willa—God forbid—had been injured more seriously in that accident on that same street, you'd have had a front-page spread describing everything about you. But what happened with this poor guy? Barely a mention, and hidden at that.”

“Well, he wasn't Willa or me.”

“That's maybe what Willa was crying about,” I say. “Because it could have been.”

“But it wasn't, and I was trying to help. We had nothing to do with that drunk in the alley.”

“I know,” I say, and then swallow the apology, the one that comes so easily. “Cooper?”

“Yes?”

“We are going to have to figure out what happened that night. It's important to Willa. She wants to talk to you.”

“I've already told you everything.”

“She wasn't drinking. And it's important to her to know why she was acting that way. She doesn't remember anything. Wouldn't you want to know that about yourself?”

“No,” he says, “I wouldn't.” He takes a few steps and then turns again. “Do you so badly need her to be right that you want me to be wrong?”

He doesn't stand still long enough to hear my answer.

He leaves, and then the TV's muffled sound fills an empty space in our home.

Again I feel misplaced, dropped into a life not my own. I'm watching: Oh, look, there I am, cooking. There I am, being wife and mom. There is the lasagna and the preheated oven. “Bloom where you are planted,” Mom would say. Okay, okay—I'm alone in the kitchen, trying to bloom.

Go in there and sit with him, a voice inside my head tells me. Be sweet.

Yes, be sweet. The southern epitaph I wanted to put on my mom's gravestone: the catchall phrase meant to solve conflict.

But what was going on with us, between husband and wife, wasn't conflict. It was something much deeper, and more troubling. Conflict is when Gwen wants to wear a skirt so short that I can see the bend where leg meets butt and I tell her to go upstairs to change. Conflict is when I want to go to eat seafood and Cooper wants steak, or when I forget to pick up the dry cleaning.

But this—what we're going through now? I'm not sure what to call it. The changes in personality I catch out of the corner of my eye and ear; the insults called “jokes”; the adamant aversion to my work; the weakness in defending me to his parents; the flash of anger that paralyzes me until slowly Cooper, the kind man, returns and I love him. Waiting for the return of the warm Cooper is a breath-holding time that always pays off. It is worth the wait. Or so I've always thought.

And love conquers all.

Dingle.

“Cooper,” I call out.

“Yes?”

“Dinner is ready.” I toss chopped tomatoes into a bowl of lettuce for the salad.

He appears in the doorway. “Where's Gwen?”

“I'll call her.” I pick up my cell and hit her name on my favorites' list. She answers on the first ring.

“Mom, relax, I'm pulling up the driveway right now. Dylan is joining us.”

“Okay, love you.”

I set the phone on the counter. “She's pulling up now. Be nice to Dylan.”

Cooper rolls his eyes. “Just what I need tonight. We have this delinquent over for dinner, and meanwhile my parents have been asking to come for dinner for a week now.”

“I know. I'll call your mom tomorrow. I promise.” I pause and a question, a smaller one, below the others, niggles at me. “What investment was Fritz talking about the other night?”

Cooper waves his hand in the air and yawns, turning away from me. “You know, he's always into something nutty.”

“Were we? I mean, did we invest also?”

He laughs. “No.” He sits at the round kitchen table and cuts into the pan of steaming noodles.

Gwen and Dylan come through the back door, flush with sun, water, and July adolescence. Devouring the food as if she hasn't eaten in weeks, Gwen finally settles back in her seat, a satiated grin on her face. “So, Aunt Willa is home, right?”

I nod.

“But don't go bother her,” Cooper says.

“Oh, she won't care if I go see her. She'll be happy.” The surety of Gwen.

“Did you hear your mom say not to bother her?” Cooper asks.

“I heard her for sure. If she's asleep, I won't wake her.” Gwen looks to Dylan. “Want to go walk with me to Aunt Willa's?”

Dylan's smile spreads across his face and then upward, as if in a slow-motion short called
How to smile
. His dark Elvis hair, whipped by river and wind, is tangled. “Yo, Mrs. Morrison, how is your sister? Gwen won't stop worrying about her, but I told her I've seen lacrosse players knocked unconscious and they've healed quickly.”