You Could Be Home by Now (28 page)

The festival was still in full swing, which felt strange. More time should have elapsed. He threaded through the crowd, gathering quotes as Lobel had directed. The couples he chatted with could just as easily have been brother-sister as husband-wife. A breeze started up without warning. Strings of paper lanterns bobbed. One mariachi song bled into the next and the air felt battered and fried. He passed a display of chili pepper wreaths, their colors tradition reversed. A booth of purportedly authentic Navajo dream-catchers whose dangling peacock feathers belied the claim. A floor of dancers who weren't much better at it than the kids back in Chettenford and, beyond it, the mariachi-filled festival stage where in an hour or so his wife would regale them with the mighty frontier deeds of Adah Chalk. And there, beside the stage, in the sparse shade of a cultivated palm, was the lady herself. Ali.

He was too far away to read her face, or even to make out its individual components. He knew her by body type and by the clothes she had worn in The Homeplate. Add a list of distinguishing features—her appendectomy scar, the navel piercing she'd allowed to close up years ago—and you had exactly what the police would note if she simply vanished. What a terrible mind he had. Alison kicked off her shoes. She rummaged through her bag for something. Her phone. His rang a breath later. The anachronistic jangle his wife liked best, saying phones should sound like phones. She could be such a goddamn snob. He answered, shrinking to the far side of the dance floor, knowing he could watch without her seeing him watching.

Ali asked, “Where are we on that amnesty?”

“What?”

“The amnesty thing. The game.”

“You never took the bet.”

“Pretend I did. Where are we?”

“It's hard to say.” He knew what happened and Ali did not. His wife, who could rattle off the names of pitchers like they were the names of all the saints. This was what power felt like. Power, and also pettiness.

“It's simple, Seth. A game is either perfect or it's not.”

But it wasn't. He explained, looking deliberately away. This was the intersection of history and baseball, absolutely the kind of thing she'd get off on. He didn't want to see how much more it meant to her than real life. All along Main Street, McCains drifted from one booth to the next. The Mrs. McCains did, too. Seth couldn't recall the name of the senator's wife.

His own said, “So. No amnesty then.” She sounded less keyed up about the blown call than he'd expected. Seth checked. Alison wasn't even on her feet.

“I don't know,” he said. “Does it become a perfect game in the moment he pitches it, or does it become one when the umpire says so?” They used to talk like this, debate; they used to actually talk.

Alison only said, “You should have studied philosophy.” She stretched and did something fidgety in the neighborhood of her shin. Stockings in need of smoothing, maybe. She'd put on the whole getup for her big Adah speech.

“I don't know,” Seth said. “Maybe. I'd probably have talked myself in circles.”

“I guess we'll have to decide ourselves. About the game. The clean slate. All of it. Make up our own minds. That's what the grownups do.”

“Or so I'm told. Okay, then. Amnesty.” Who knew what he'd have said if he was close enough to read her face. Who knew what message she'd have spelled there.

“Don't say that yet.”

“Huh?” A Mrs. McCain brushed past him toward the line for frybread.

Ali said, “I'm stalling. I have something to say. Full disclosure, before you make up your mind.”

“Amnesty, Alison. Period.” God knew Seth needed it. He'd come inches from hitting a man. He'd daydreamed of U-Hauls and harbored visions of her copulating with their boss.

“I've been fired,” she said.

“What?” The dance floor couples kept dancing. He must not have been as loud as he thought.

“Let go. Laid off. Made redundant. Shit-canned. Just now, in Lobel's office.”

“With the lead pipe.”

“I'm not joking.”

“Please. Hoagie loves you.”

“Loved.” She didn't shrug, but she used a shrugging sort of voice. Perhaps she would have shrugged if she'd known she was being observed. She didn't look like someone who'd been sacked. She was crisp and coiffed and didn't have the requisite cardboard box.

He said, “I call bullshit.”

“Call it what you want.”

It was possible that she hadn't taken anything with her. Her still, spare office hadn't had much in it. The orange on her desk. The overly bright stuff of still lifes. “Did you take the orange?”

“What?”

“The orange on your desk yesterday.”

“That's what you ask me?

“Fine. I'll play. What happened?”

“Your intern spent the day at county records. Acting on some kind of tip he got at the HOA. Anyhow, he found the paperwork. Adah Chalk died two and a half years into her marriage.” Alison sounded grim and pissed about it, like the woman had let her down. “Hoagie wasn't pleased.”

Seth should be doing frantic math, tallying their savings and monthly expenses. Instead, he thought,
Good for Nicky
. The kid had chops after all.

Alison said, “I really fucked up.” She stood then. The edge of her slip showed. Even at a distance he could see it, a frail, white strip of lace. He should tell her. Ali wasn't vain, exactly, but she liked to look put together in public.

“Seth. At least say something.”

“Adah's got to be a pretty common name. Back then, anyway. So you made a mistake. Once Lobel has a chance to calm down—”

“I didn't make a mistake. I made it all up.”

“You can't have. There were letters. You quoted from Susan B.—”

“Everything. The letters. The schools. The clinics. The lemon pie.” Thank God for the square of dancers separating them. The hours she'd gone on about Adah. He could've slapped her. “The snakebite cure. The English lessons. The fight for women's suffrage.” She made it sound like a game, like she was back in the café, naming pitchers.

“This is our
life
, Alison.” A nearby McCain tightened his grip on his wife. A reasonable enough response, if he recognized Seth from the HOA mess.

“I said I was sorry.”

“You didn't. You said you fucked up.”

She sighed, breath blasting through speakers. “You should've been a lawyer.”

“You don't get to make this funny. Fuck, Alison.” The music had stopped. The band opened bottles of water. The books all said it was toxic to score-keep. Even so, the emotional calculus. His fistfight. Her fraud. Stick it out and one of them was going to wind up with enough ammo to win all the fights, forever.

Ali said, “It's not—not a disaster.”

“It's one whole income we're down.”

“The contract was up in a few months anyhow. We knew that. Our rent's dirt cheap.”

“You lied. You got up in front of everyone and lied.”

“I—I couldn't write it the way it was. Adah Chalk.” Her voice. She had more tenderness for the dead woman than she'd had for him in months. “She died in childbirth. Twenty years old and no doctor for miles. Stuck in this nothing with a husband who couldn't even write his own name. And that wasn't even her first child. There'd been a daughter the previous year. Breach. She didn't make it. I wanted to fix things.”

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”

“It wasn't fair. There isn't even a record of where she's buried.”

“So? It was a hundred years ago. You suck it up and write it down and then you work on something else.” Alison tensed at that; his voice—his actual voice, not his phone one—must have carried. Her hand rose to shade her eyes and when she spied him it rose again in an instinctive wave. She stood, stepping neatly back into her shoes.

“No. You stay where you are. Don't come any closer.”

“I grew up with these three great, hulking brothers.”

“So what? They don't have anything to do with this.” The music struck up again. Slowly, the couples did, too.

“It means I'm crap at the talking thing. When something's wrong, you gut it out till it's fixed. You fake it if you have to. That first time Dad got sick? The four of us kept smiling these stupid pumpkin smiles.” She meant Jack o' Lanterns, hollow and glowing for outward show. He knew the smile in question. These days it was the only one he knew. “And you know what?” Ali's voice thickened. “We came out fine. Great, even. Fantastic. I edged out Mattie Gibson for valedictorian that semester and Neil started to locate like you wouldn't believe.”

“Well, good for Neil. He nabbed a sweet baseball scholarship. You got fired.”

“That's not fair.” She was at the edge of the dance floor now and crossing.

“I said not to come any closer.”

“I'm sorry.” She stopped. The crowd had thinned during the break. He had no excuse not to see her.

“Don't be sorry. Don't pretend. Talk.”

“It's like—”

“That's pretending. Don't say what it's like. Say what it is.”

“You wouldn't want to talk to you either. It's like—”

“I said, no metaphors.”

“It's like living with a caged wildebeest. You lash out every which way and you never forgive anyone anything.”

“It's a damn sight better than running away.”

“That's not what I'm doing—”

“What do you clock on the mile again?”

“The book said—”

“The books said. The books said. You don't even let the books on the shelves.”

“Not the books, the
book
. The pregnancy one.” She said this last part at a whisper, like a child afraid of getting caught cursing. “You know,” said Ali, “the one with the crazy foot.”

Seth knew the book. A black-and-white photo on its cover. A great, waiting moon of a stomach, the small imprint of a foot pressing from within. The rest of the books—and they were the Colliers, so of course there had been many—had Madonna and child covers, rocking chairs, rattles, and the like. He said, “I didn't know you'd been reading them. Rereading them.” He wondered where in the condo she had stashed them.

“Not now. God. But I looked through it, after. The first night home from the hospital.” He wondered how the hell she'd stood it. Her body swollen and scraped out, her breasts gone Playboy with wasted sustenance. “I had to find this aside. You know, in one of those little boxes?” As a teacher, Alison ranted about the side-box approach. Here, on the page, is real history. Here, in a sidebar blurb, is how it was if you weren't white or a man or well-off. Ali said, “I don't even know why I remembered it. One of those cute little did-you-knows. No,
didja
. They spelled it
didja
. Ninety percent of mothers retain fetal cells in their bloodstream for the rest of their lives.” She drew a shaky breath and adjusted an earring. “So I run now. I eat right. I was nowhere near this fit when I played varsity softball.”

“You could have said.” He could have asked. The obvious retort. Ali didn't say it. A sign, maybe, that they still had a shot at something. Seth said it again, knowing it was bait, knowing she still could lash out and take it. “Alison. You could've said.”

“What, that this is the only way I have to take care of him? If you could see yourself, Seth. You wouldn't want to share the hard stuff with you either. You crash through our life looking for ways to feel hurt, and you're fragile and manic and fuck, my heart.” She gripped her chest where it was presumably beating. And hard. He thought he could see the pulse in her neck. “I wear earrings now,” she said. “I do foundation and I wear the right kind of bra. I thought if I did a better job at all that girl stuff, then maybe next time—” She folded in on herself as if pained. As if fetal.

Seth was adrenal-awake, comprehension solidifying like a clot. The slimming down. The gussying up. It wasn't for Lobel or even for herself. It was for Timothy. The absurdness of it. The ice knife in the gut.

A shaky sound from Ali, and it registered. Next time. His wife had said next time and it wasn't the first thing he'd latched onto. That had to bode well for the two of them.

Alison righted herself. She'd been doubled over and no one had stopped their cha-cha to help. This place. This cold, selfish construct of a place.

“I can't do this on the phone,” she said. “You know I can see you, right?” A hollow laugh. “C'mon. All these happy couples between us? It's like we're points in someone's bad term paper.”

He could've said his newest, purest truth: He hated Arizona. Instead, “I miss the bad term papers.”

“I miss a lot of things.”

“Chettenford.”

“Yeah, Chettenford.”

Their bathroom had a freestanding tub. From October through March the pipes sounded like demonic possession. God, he missed it. The racket of a place well lived in, the chalk-dust seasonality of the school year, and the weekly tromp home from The Book Croft. “You know what gets me?” he asked. “We got the books from the same place. Both sets.” The Book Croft. Nine months apart and three shelves over. How to bide your time while hoping and how to get over having hoped in the first place. “It's absurd,” he said.

“Not really. We were in and out all the time. We worked right around the corner.”

“Even so. That one little store can hold that range.”

“I don't know.” Their minds held it, their lives, every day they breathed through.

“Do you know what they named the new cat?”

“At the Croft? How would I know?”

“You keep in touch. You're the extrovert.” She was their social curator. People were drawn to Alison and she held them fast. But not here. They had no one but each other in Arizona.

“You can't honestly expect me to know that. The cat, really?”