You Could Be Home by Now (22 page)

But the thing was, he was fine. No matter what his wife believed. He coped. He could drive under overpasses no problem. He didn't flinch when ragged men approached him for change. He could stare at a window display of boots, brutal and ready, and count the grommets till his heart rate slowed. It was
time
that healed, not incessant rehashing. He and Ronnie went their forty rounds on that and then he moved south.

He coped here, too.

Lily was speaking. “—wasn't my fault. I was all the way across the room.” The hurt she'd done him felt long ago and laughable. Bumper cars.

“Lily, hush.”

“She's okay.”

Sadie shook her head. Her profile was unlovely and he was glad. Her neck was ever so slightly fleshy, her straight nose masculine at this angle, and there was an unappealing slant to her forehead. He couldn't have stood it if she'd looked delicate. She said, “I'm guessing it was all that shoving up front. The pair of them should be put in a zoo.”

“It wasn't their fault.” It should have been. If anything in that room were going to cross his wires. Instead, he admitted, “It was the gal on the chair.” His eyes felt alive with salt and shame. To Sadie's credit, she didn't say, what, that dumpling of a woman?

“She belongs in a zoo, too. Zoos for everyone.”

He tried to explain. “I can't have feet above me.” He hadn't known it till now. It wasn't the kind of fact you picked up simply going about your business. Sadie accepted it as if he'd said something as common as I-don't-particularly-care-for-refried-beans. In the back of the cart Lily had gone very quiet. Ben fumbled for the right words. “They kicked me. Even after I was on the ground.” Veronica was right. The beating had been savage. There was still a modicum of humanity to a punch; we're primates, after all. We work with our hands.

“Oh, Ben. I'm so sorry that happened to you.”

“I'm sorry you saw me that way. Everyone, actually. But especially you.”

“That's the last thing you should worry about.” She squeezed his knee and he didn't flinch at the contact. He felt tentatively normal, heading home beside her. A kid in the backseat, that was normal, too. The clouds were doing something new. They hung striated and staticky, as if projected on the screen of a television in need of a sound whack.

Sadie pulled into his driveway.

A woman rose from the stoop.

The mind is a trickster.

The mind fills in the heart's blanks.

And it
was
a face he knew. A beloved face, bare in unfiltered light. For one wild moment that bastard hope flared and Ben thought it was his daughter and not his ex stepping forward to greet them.

I
N THE HOSTILE QUIET OF
her office, Alison said she was going for a run. There was a gym bag beneath her desk, a battered thing with her unmarried monogram. She opened it with an angry zip. “When I get back, I'm getting out the Yellow Pages. Whether I call for a divorce attorney or a psych referral very much depends on the next few things you say to me, so I'd recommend you grow up and
think
before you speak.”

No one used the Yellow Pages any more. He didn't point this out. He wasn't going to say a thing. He didn't know what words would sway her decision and he didn't know in what direction he wanted her decision to sway.

Ali didn't speak either. She shrugged out of her jacket. She yanked down her skirt. Seth lunged to close her office door. The hem of her blouse just reached the top of her thighs. Anyone could be standing in the hallway. Anyone could see. Wordlessly, she peeled down her stockings.

Alison.

She had come to him once in silence, in his dorm room one winter afternoon. He'd been at his desk, formatting footnotes. Ali had held a finger to her lips. Mutely, she had shucked her jeans and raised her grubby sweatshirt over her head. She'd clapped a hand over his mouth and he'd bit her palm. They'd gone at it furiously. The dying light had lanced the air around them.

And now.

He counted her buttons as she undid them. The shirt pooled on the floor. Her bra joined it. The ugliness between them had him nearly immune to her nakedness. She put on running shorts, a sports bra, an ancient T-shirt with the name of their alma mater. Some letters had flaked away entirely. If he hadn't shared her history, he wouldn't have been able to read it. Ali put on socks, little booties with a lavender pompom. His grandmother had worn the same kind. Her feet were always cold in hospice. Alison laced her shoes and shot out the door. Her feet pounded down the hall. She was at the stairwell. Her pace picked up with his first footfalls in pursuit. They were on the second floor, and then the first, and then out in the corridor, where the sounds of the meeting they'd bailed on carried. Down the sprawling front steps, where an older woman and a young one steered a shaky-looking man toward the parking lot.

Alison was a block ahead on Main Street.

Two blocks.

Some kind of bird call split the air. Seth began to wheeze as if that had been his cue.

Alison was three blocks ahead of him now. Three and a half. Four.

He couldn't remember if shallow breaths or deep ones were the way to avoid a side stitch. Alison passed a series of flimsy carnival booths and then the bus stop. Seth's belt cut into his stomach. He fumbled with the buckle and cast it aside. He reached the bus stop; in the distance, Ali veered left, off toward the Sun Wren Pool and Spa. He had to sprint to simply keep her in his sights. His shirt was soaked from pits to ribs. He undid the buttons and let it hang. Air eddied over the slick on his skin. Alison passed the gym and loped out onto the golf course's open green. Seth panted, his breath outpacing his feet. Ali arced around the kidney-shaped water hazard, launched over the decorative wall, crossed a thin ribbon of tended grass, and tore off into the scrubland.

Seth's feet ached in shoes he was never meant to run in. His lungs were aging, desperate bellows. He slowed to a sad half trot and crossed into the thirsty wild, where even the shadows were barbed. Dust dulled his shoes. Perhaps the same particles that Ali'd churned up as she passed. He sat, hacking. There was a hole in his pants below the knee. His phone jangled. Lobel. Like an idiot, he remembered that he could've simply not answered the instant he picked up.

“You dying, Collier?”

“Nuh-uh.” Seth struggled for an even breath. He rubbed his eyes. It made no sense the way that sweat burned them. Tears were just as salty, yet they came gliding on out without pain.

“Well then, what the hell excuse you got, son?”

Seth had sweat in his
ears
. He began to shiver, hard, his bones in contention with their joints. “That man was talking about Ali. Saying things.”

“That
man
was Ray Preble and I don't care if he was talking about your sainted mother. That's no way to conduct yourself.” Lobel said Ray Preble like it was a name Seth ought to know. Lobel said every name like that, which made him, in his way, the most democratic man Seth had ever met.

“I apologize,” he said.

“Tofu. Save it for Preble. You track him down tomorrow, you hear? See if he'll shake your hand. That's what you do.”

Seth said yes and stopped himself before
sir
. He tracked his wife, a distant cloud of dust.

“I'd say print a little something in the
Crier
, sincere like, but the less attention this all gets, the better. So not a peep. Christ almighty. I'm drinking downstream from the herd here.”

“I'll talk to Ray Preble,” said Seth. “I'll shake his hand.”

“Make sure you do.”

“I am sorry.”

“Enough. I reckon we can still blow this Mona thing over without my breaking out the old checkbook. But, son, you shouldn't have done that to your wife. Her stage fright and all.”

“She doesn't really get stage fright.”

“Well, she sure as shooting won't get it tomorrow.” Lobel had missed the possessiveness of Seth's assertion. “She can hop right up on stage knowing it can't go over any worse. So hey, you distracted her. Got to give you that much.”

“I really am sorry.”

“Tell it to the missus. The missus and Ray Preble. Now get yourself home. Grab a beer, get your beauty rest, do whatever it is you do to yourself. I'm going to want you out and about tomorrow, getting juicy quotes.”

Tomorrow. Founder's Day. Lobel's Commons-wide celebration of himself. Seth felt too frayed to even be annoyed. “Sure. Yes. And Happy birthday.”

“
Mañana
, Collier. Not till tomorrow.”

“Happy birthday tomorrow, then.”

“That'll do. And mind you sit tight for the wife's big Adah speech. I don't care if Ray Preble shows up in Miss Piggy panties. You sit tight. I like you. I like both of you kids and I hope you know I'm cutting you a country mile of slack.”

“I do. And I thank you for that. I mean it.”

“‘Cause I hired you to write the news, not be it.”

When Seth said yes this time, the
sir
slipped out. Lobel. This place. This job. Of all the things for him to get a second chance at.

“And listen,” Lobel said. “Bit of advice?”

“Sure.”

“Wife like Alison, you got to get used to remarks. My Josie was like that too, God bless. Back in the day.”

Seth hobbled his painful way toward the bus stop. The belt he'd discarded coiled, snakelike, beside the bench. There were real rattlers out with Alison in the brush. Even now, one might be hissing out, a quick unspringing, a pinprick at her ankle. He looked out toward the horizon for the rise of dust to mark her fall. A daydream of fleet-footing it to her side. The Wild West heroics of drawing out the venom. The contact of his lips on her skin. The bus arrived. He limped on, rebuttoning his shirt against the air conditioning. He was still shivering when he got home. He took stiff-kneed steps up the drive. He made for the shower, then slumped on the cool bathroom tile. The grief books were still under the sink. Seth read their indexes, alphabetical, page by page. He fingered the sticker on one front cover: a New England barn, red, its roof a tented hardback, the words “The Book Croft” spelled out on its spine. Seth had loved The Book Croft. The august Chettenford bookstore occupied a hundred-year-old barn. A café had been done up in the hayloft, dappled with sun from an anachronistic skylight, and a pair of aging cats—Aslan and Tybalt—patrolled the stacks. The week before he and Ali lost Timothy, the owners had acquired a third, a tiny, mewling stray. There'd been a running contest to name it. Seth peeled off the sticker. He rolled it between thumb and forefinger until it lost its tack.

The only bookshops within thirty miles of The Commons were a pair of rival Barnes & Nobles.

He thought about ringing Ross Henry. They'd had a standing Wednesday chess date at the Croft. He didn't want to apologize or coo over the twins and he sure as hell didn't want to catch up. He simply wanted to know what name had been selected.

B
EN STAGGERED FROM THE CART.
Veronica took a few quick steps toward him and stopped. She pivoted back to the house, phone raised to her ear. “Steve-o, Duckling.
C'est moi
.” Their son had been a solemn, sturdy, almost professorial child. He'd grown into a solemn, sturdy, almost professorial man. The last guy you'd call either Steve-o or Duckling. Veronica said, “Your pops is fine. No, no, no. Don't trouble yourself. He's been out on the town. Tooting about with his new friends.”

“Tooting about, Veronica? Why the hell are you here?”

She turned to him. She'd bought new eyeglasses. She wore the gray, belted, un-wrinkleable dress she always wore for air travel. The sweater that went with it lay pooled on his front steps. At first glance he had taken it for a shadow. “I'm at his house, Snickerdoodle. He looks a-okay, Scout's honor. No gaping head wounds. No convulsions. I didn't even have to follow the vultures to track him down.”

“That Stephen? Let me talk to him.”

Veronica held up a single finger, signaling him to wait. “I'm sure he never intended you to fret. There's so much to do around here. His own puny Eden.”

“C'mon, Ronnie. The phone.” Ben held out a hand.

“Oh, so we care about phones now? That's terrific!” She beamed and tossed hers. Ben lunged and missed. A laugh floated in from the periphery. A sibilant
hush
followed. Lily and Sadie and thank God for that. He and Veronica could usually tone it down when they had an audience. He fumbled with Ronnie's phone and clicked send. The number that filled the screen was his own.

“You weren't even talking to Stephen.”

“And that, of course, is the salient point.”

He'd told someone, once, that he liked the way Veronica's vocabulary seemed to improve with anger. Ben couldn't remember who. Maybe Veronica herself, back when his compliments were still accepted as interpersonal tender. Ben scrolled through her recent calls. His cell and his home dominated the log, punctuated with the appearance of Stephen's cell, six times, Anjali's, twice, and an unfamiliar number with an Arizona area code dialed earlier this morning five times in quick succession. Back in the golf cart, Sadie kept her hands placid on the wheel. Lily had the dull, lolling look that girls her age got sometimes, caught up with some televised stupidity. Sadie raised a hand in too-casual farewell and the cart sprang forward.

“Wait!” he called. Ever the coward. “I'd like you to meet Veronica.”

Sadie had been a debutante and Lily had a grandmother to teach her by example how to behave. So the Birnams parked. They approached. Sadie extended a mannerly hand. “Sadie Birnam.”

“Veronica Corbin.” Ronnie's smile was lean and on the prowl.

Ben was not an unintelligent man. Four years of college, four years of vet school, the internship, the two book clubs, the daily crossword; his brain should be more than a mute machine, churning out comparisons. Yet: Veronica was taller. Sadie was slimmer. Veronica's lips were fuller. Sadie's white teeth more even. Beside her grandmother, Lily jittered up and down as if her joints had been surgically replaced with rubber balls. When Sadie introduced her, Lily offered her hand in a passable imitation of her grandmother.