Pam said nothing as they drove. Their daughter must have felt the tension in the air. Everett whistled “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” for lack of anything more sensible to do.
At the house, he parked the Jimmy and started untying the tree. Pam pulled the boughs out of the back, dumped them on the front deck, and took Anne Marie inside. Everett carried the tree around to the sliding glass door and tugged on the handle. The door didn’t open. He thought it might be frozen and he tugged again. They never locked the doors. He went around the corner of the deck and pulled on the other sliding glass door, the one to the kitchen. It was locked, too. He rapped on the glass, and Pam came to it.
“The door’s locked,” he said, pointing to the handle.
“Say you’re not going back for them,” she said, her voice muffled by the glass.
The tree was heavy on his shoulder, and he stood it up on the deck, holding the slender trunk through the branches. He studied it. It was a fine tree. He turned back to his wife. “It’s Christmas,” he said.
“I don’t want them here,” she said through the glass. “Say you won’t go.”
“Did you lock all the doors?”
“Say it,” she said.
He sighed. The temperature had dropped when the sun went down, and it was cold outside. “I won’t go back for them,” he said. “I’ll leave them stranded and unhappy, without a tree, at Christmastime. Are you happy?”
“They’re crazy,” she said.
“Of course they are. Now let me in.”
She unlocked the door. He carried the tree through the kitchen, set it up in the corner of the living room, and turned it until the bare side faced the wall. It looked like a lopsided bush. Anne Marie clapped her hands in approval. He showed her how to fill the reservoir in the stand with water. Then he crumpled newspaper in the fireplace, built a hut of kindling, and set it alight.
Pam called the police station to renege on the hospitality, asking them to deliver the message to the people whose car was stolen. Everett strung the lights on the tree, and lifted Anne Marie to put the angel on top. There wasn’t really a single top to the tree, but he helped her pick one. Pam moved around the kitchen, making dinner.
A stranger watching would have thought it a perfectly ordinary December night, and it was true that they talked no more than they often did. Anne Marie gamely kept up an almost professional patter, like a hostess who knows her party has gone wrong and her guests are miserable. She hung the ornaments: the two mice sleeping in the nutshell, the fish, the baby Jesus in the crib. Everett sat in the big chair between the fireplace and the kitchen, feeling the soreness from chopping and hauling set in. He wasn’t twenty-five anymore. Anne Marie sang Christmas carols to herself: “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and “Good King Wenceslas.”
With a pot of soup on the stove, Pam made a juniper swag for the mantelpiece, her slimness in jeans set off by the firelight. She cut and arranged the boughs as she had every year they had been in the house, and as her mother had every year before that. She nestled three white candles among the branches, evenly spaced, and lit them. Everett watched her, thinking about the fact that she was Clyde’s type, wondering why he still wanted to go get the outlaws, and put himself in the way of temptation.
Pam turned from the mantel with the matchbook. There was sometimes a funny, ironic smile that came over her face when she caught him looking at her, a grown-up smile, at once confident and self-deprecating. But now she looked defiant and young. It was the look Anne Marie got at bedtime, when made to choose how to spend her dwindling time: this book or that book? Staying up by the fire or having ten minutes more with her dolls? Anne Marie always delayed and evaded, and chose the longest book, the most involved game.
Pam said, “Look, if you want to go get them, just go.”
“They’ll have gone by now,” he said, with a catch in his voice.
Pam threw the burnt match into the fire, and put the matchbook in the kitchen drawer. Then she picked up and dialed the phone, watching Everett, as if waiting for him to stop her.
“I called earlier about the couple with the stolen car,” she said, in her businesslike phone voice. “Are they still there?” She waited, looking out the dark glass door she had locked him out of.
“Hi, Bonnie,” she said into the phone. “It’s Pam—from the car. We picked you up. Hi.” Her laugh sounded social, but Everett could hear the nervousness in it. “No, I don’t think I introduced myself. Do you still want to help with the tree? Everett could run down and get you.”
She paused, listening.
“Put Clyde on,” she said, and she turned away from Everett. He watched the curve of his wife’s ass as she leaned on the kitchen counter, lifting her right foot and nervously tapping the toe on the floor. “Clyde,” she said. “Please come up for dinner. Anne Marie would love to show off the tree.” The pause again. “Really, we’d love it,” she said. Then, “Good. He’ll be right down.”
She hung up the phone, and turned to Everett. “Merry Christmas,” she said.
He was not sure how to behave. Anne Marie was still decorating the lower branches of the tree, singing, “We three kings of orient are.” There were plenty of branches left for Bonnie.
“So,” Pam said. She stirred the pot on the stove with a wooden spoon, tapped the spoon against the rim, and set it on the counter. “Do you want to go get them?”
Everett pushed himself out of the chair. “Want to come along, Anne Marie?” he asked.
His daughter looked up at him. “Are you going to get those people?”
“Yes,” he said. “To help with the tree.”
Anne Marie nodded, untangling the loop of string on a tiny ukulele. “I’ll stay here,” she said.
He kissed Pam goodbye on the top of her head. Was she attracted to Clyde? He wanted to take off her clothes right now and see. He was conscious of his own breathing, and he could tell she was unsteady.
“It’s Christmastime,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
He went out into the cold air. The Jimmy started up easy, and he headed in low gear down the hill toward town.
He wanted to decide, as he drove, what they were doing. He wanted to separate his impulse to be a good Samaritan from the kiss on the corner of his mouth. Bonnie did not, he was fairly sure, just want to hang angels on a tree. Clyde’s asking her to move in with his mistress had put her in a giddy, reckless mood, and Everett was the beneficiary. He wasn’t going to think about Clyde’s low, sincere apology to Pam. Or about Pam turning away on the phone to ask Clyde to come to the house. Although he found he wanted very much to think about that.
He thought instead about Anne Marie, and how the evening might work out for her. The lesson about not abandoning people was a good one. The silent, submerged unhappiness of the evening couldn’t be good for a kid, and now it was gone, dissolved by Pam’s call into the buzz of unsettled excitement.
The streets were dark and empty, the houses warm with light. He wanted to keep thinking, but he was at the station before he had sorted things out, and Bonnie was waiting on the curb. She climbed into the front seat and kicked the snow off her boots.
“Hi,” she said, and she clutched her hands in her lap. She shuddered once, from nervousness or cold. “Clyde’ll be here in a second,” she said. “He’s signing something about the car.”
“Okay,” he said.
She looked at Everett and seemed about to say something, and then she was in his arms. He gathered her up as well as he could, given her thick coat and the awkward position, and kissed her sweet face. Her cheeks were cold but her lips were warm, and she was trembling. The peacoat was unbuttoned, and he reached inside to feel the curve of her breast through her sweater.
A second later they pulled apart—the time required to sign papers measured somewhere in both their minds—and Bonnie smoothed her hair. The lighted glass door of the station opened, and Clyde walked with his long stride toward them and got in the back seat.
> Everett thought there must be a smell in the car from the kiss, an electricity. But the husband said nothing, and Everett drove the outlaws back to his house. They talked about the stolen car, and the cold, and the tree. All the while, Everett felt both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything he wanted, all at once.
Maile Meloy is the author of the story collection Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter. Meloy’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and other publications. She has been shortlisted for the UK’s Orange Prize, and has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a -Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Los Angeles.
ALSO BY MAILIE MELOY
A Family Daughter
Liars and Saints
Half in Love
Praise for Mailie Meloy
‘Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for
the things she doesn’t do, what really sets Meloy apart
is her restraint. She is impressively concise, disciplined
in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach
to character, neither blinded by love for her creations,
nor abusive toward them . . . She’s such a talented and
unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan
club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.’
Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times Book Review
‘[Meloy] cracks at our nagging desires to have it all . . .
in eleven tightly written, remarkably fluid narratives.’
Elle
‘Don’t let the easy accessibility of Maile Meloy’s
writing fool you; she’s capable of witchcraft.’
Time
‘The quite unastonished precision with which Maile
Meloy depicts the extent to which everything now
goes haywire in so-called ordinary American life is an
impressive achievement, literary and otherwise.’
Philip Roth
‘Meloy is able to give convincing voice to a huge range
of characters . . . she harnesses skilfully the power of
untold secrets that underlie the story.’
Guardian
Praise for A Family Daughter
‘Wonderful . . . Meloy’s enthralling storytelling alternates
between dramatic narrative swoops and tiny moments
of emotional acuity.’
Marie Claire
‘A deliciously duplicitous book.’
Sunday Telegraph
Praise for Half in Love
‘Maile Meloy writes with both fearlessness and true
compassion, two talents that are rarely combined.
In every story she creates a complex portrait of
such disparate lives that by the end of the book
I feel like I’ve seen half the world.’
Ann Patchett
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in the United States in 2009 by
Riverhead Books, part of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
This digital edition first published in 2010
by Canongate Books
Copyright © Mailie Meloy, 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The following stories have been previously published,
in slightly different form: “Travis, B.” (The New Yorker),
“Red from Green” (The New Yorker), “Lovely Rita” (Playboy),
“Two-Step” (Zoetrope: All-Story), “The Girlfriend” (Prospect, UK),
“Liliana” (The Paris Review), “Agustín” (Ploughshares),
“O'Tannenbaum” (Granta).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following:
“Coming Right Up,” from The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons by
A. R. Ammons. Copyright © 1990 by A. R. Ammons. Used by permission
of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 900 0
Book design by Amanda Dewey
www.meetatthegate.com
Table of Contents
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Travis, B.
Red From Green
Lovely Rita
Spy vs. Spy
Two-Step
The Girlfriend
Liliana
Nine
Agustín
The Children
O Tannenbaum
About the Author
Also by Mailie Meloy
Reviews
Copyright
Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
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