The pages fluttered as Rusty’s hand dropped to his lap.
She looked at him. He had taken off his reading glasses. Nothing was tapping or clapping or jumping. He was staring out the window, silent, his gaze fixed on the distance.
She asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Headache.”
Her father never complained about real ailments. “Is it about the guy?” Rusty said nothing, so she asked, “Are you mad at me about the guy?”
“Of course not.”
Charlie felt anxious. For all of her bluster, she could not abide disappointing her father. “I’ll get his name tomorrow.”
“Not your job.” Rusty tucked his glasses into his shirt pocket. “Unless you plan to keep seeing him?”
Charlie sensed an odd weight behind his question. “Would it matter?”
Rusty didn’t answer. He was staring out the window again.
She said, “You need to start humming or making stupid jokes or I’m going to take you to the hospital so they can make sure nothing’s wrong with your heart.”
“It’s not my heart I’m worried about.” The statement came across as hokey, absent his usual flourishes. He asked, “What happened between you and Ben?”
Charlie’s foot almost slipped off the gas.
In nine months, Rusty had not asked her this question. She had waited five days to tell him that Ben had left. Charlie was standing in his office doorway. She had planned to relay to her father the fact of Ben leaving, nothing more, which was exactly what she’d done. But then Rusty had nodded curtly, like she was reminding him to get a haircut, and his ensuing silence had brought out a sort of verbal diarrhea that Charlie hadn’t experienced since the ninth grade. Her mouth would not stop moving. She’d told Rusty that she hoped Ben would be home by the weekend. That she hoped he would return her calls, her texts, her voicemails, the note she had left on the windshield of his car.
Finally, probably to shut her up, Rusty had quoted the first stanza from Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
“Dad,” Charlie said, but she couldn’t think of anything more to say. An oncoming car’s headlights flashed into her eyes. Charlotte looked in her rear-view mirror, watching the red tail-lights recede. She didn’t want to, but she told Rusty, “It wasn’t one thing. It was a lot of things.”
He said, “Maybe the question is, how are you going to fix it?”
She could see now that talking about this was a mistake. “Why do you assume I’m the only one who can fix it?”
“Because Ben would never cheat on you or do anything to purposefully hurt you, so it must be something that you did or are not doing.”
Charlie bit her lip too hard.
“This man you’re seeing—”
“There’s no seeing,” she snapped. “It happened once, and it was the first and only time, and I don’t appreciate—”
“Is it because of the miscarriage?”
Charlie’s breath caught in her chest. “That was three years ago.” And six. And thirteen. “Besides, Ben would never be that cruel.”
“That’s true, Ben would not be cruel.”
She wondered at his comment. Was he implying that Charlie would be?
Rusty sighed. He curled the stack of papers in his hand. His foot tapped the floorboard twice. He said, “You know, I’ve had a long, long time to think about this, and I think what I loved most about your mother was that she was a hard woman to love.”
Charlie felt the sting of the implied comparison.
“Her problem, her only problem, if you ask the man who worshipped her, was that she was too damn smart.” He tapped his foot along with the last three words to add emphasis. “Gamma knew everything, and she could tell you without having to give it a moment’s worth of thinking. Like the square root of three. Just off the top of her head, she’d say … well, hell, I don’t know the answer, but she’d say—”
“One point seven-three.”
“Right, right,” he said. “Or someone would ask, say, what’s the most common bird on earth?”
Charlie sighed. “The chicken.”
“The deadliest thing on earth?”
“Mosquito.”
“Australia’s number one export?”
“Uh … iron ore?” She furrowed her brow. “Dad, where is this going?”
“Let me ask you this: what were my contributions to that little exchange we just had?”
Charlie couldn’t follow. “Dad, I’m too tired for riddles.”
“A visual aid—” He played at the window button, rolling it down a fraction, then up a fraction, then down, then up.
She said, “Okay, your contributions are to annoy me and break my car.”
“Charlotte, let me give you the answer.”
“Okay.”
“No, darling. Listen to what I’m saying. Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”
She chewed her lip again.
“We return to our visual aid.” Rusty pressed the window button again, but held it this time. The glass slid all the way down. Then he pressed in the other direction and the window rolled back up. “Nice and easy. Back and forth. Like you’d volley a ball on the tennis court, except this way I don’t have to run around a tennis court to show you.”
Charlie heard him tap his foot along with the car blinker as she took a right onto the farmhouse driveway. “You really should’ve been a marriage counselor.”
“I tried, but for some reason, none of the women would get into the car with me.”
He nudged her with his elbow, until she reluctantly smiled.
He said, “I remember one time your mama said to me—she said, ‘Russell, I’ve got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.’”
Charlie felt a weird pang in her heart, because that sounded exactly like the kind of announcement Gamma would make. “Was she happy?”
“I think she was getting there.” He blew out a wheezy breath. “She was inscrutable. She was beautiful. She was—”
“Goat fucker?” The Subaru’s lights showed the broad side of the farmhouse. Someone had spray-painted GOAT FUCKER across the white clapboard in giant letters.
“Funny thing about that,” Rusty said. “Now, the goat, that’s been there a week or two. The fucker just showed up today.” He slapped his knee. “Damn efficient of ’em, don’t you think? I mean, the goat’s already there. No need to pull out the Shakespeare.”
“You need to call the police.”
“Hell, honey, the police probably did it.”
Charlie pulled the car close to the kitchen door. The floodlights came on. They were so bright that she could see the individual weeds in the overgrown yard.
She didn’t want to, but she offered: “I should go with you to make sure there’s no one inside.”
“Nope.” He threw open the door and jumped out. “Be sure to bring your umbrella tomorrow. I am extremely certain about the rain.”
She watched his jaunty walk to the house. He stood on the porch where all those years ago Charlie and Sam had left their socks and sneakers. Rusty unlocked the two locks and threw open the door. Instead of going inside, he turned to salute her, well aware that he was standing between the GOAT and the FUCKER.
He shouted, “‘What’s done cannot be undone! And now, to bed, to bed, to—’”
Charlie threw the car into reverse.
There was no need to pull out the Shakespeare.
6
Charlie sat in the garage, hands wrapped around the steering wheel.
She hated everything about going into her empty house.
Their empty house.
She hated hanging her keys on the hook by the door because Ben’s hook was always empty. She hated sitting on the couch because Ben wasn’t on the other side with his spidery toes hooked onto the coffee table. She couldn’t even s
it at the kitchen counter because Ben’s empty barstool made her too sad. Most nights, she ended up eating a bowl of cereal over the sink while she stared into the darkness outside the window.
This was no way for a woman to feel about her husband after almost two decades of marriage, but absent her actual husband, Charlie had been rocked by a kind of lovesickness that she hadn’t experienced since high school.
She hadn’t washed Ben’s pillowcase. His favorite beer still took up door space in the refrigerator. She had left his dirty socks by the bed because she knew if she picked them up, he would not be back to leave another pair.
During the first year of their marriage, one of their biggest arguments had been over Ben’s habit of taking off his socks every night and dropping them on the floor of the bedroom. Charlie had started kicking them under the bed when he wasn’t looking, and one day Ben had realized that he didn’t have any socks left and Charlie had laughed and he had yelled at her and she had yelled back at him and because they were both twenty-five, they had ended up fucking each other on the floor. Magically, the fury she’d once felt every time she saw the socks had been dialed back to a mild irritation, like the tail end of a yeast infection.
The first month without Ben, when it had finally dawned on Charlie that his leaving wasn’t a blip, that he might not ever come back, she had sat on the floor by the socks and sobbed like a baby.
That had been the last and only time she had allowed herself to give in to her sorrow. After that long night of tears, Charlie had forced herself to stop sleeping late and to brush her teeth at least twice a day and bathe regularly and to do all those other things that showed the world that she was a functioning human being. She knew this from before: the moment she let her guard down, the world would spiral into a distant but familiar abyss.
Her first four years of college had been a headlong plunge into a bacchanalia she had only glimpsed in high school. With Lenore not there to slap some sense into her, Charlie had let loose. Too much alcohol. Too many boys. A blurring of the lines that only mattered the next morning when she didn’t recognize the boy in her bed, or whose bed she was in, and couldn’t recall if she had said yes or no or blacked out from the copious amounts of beer she had poured down her throat.
By some miracle, she had managed to clean up her act long enough to ace the LSAT. Duke was the only law school she applied to. Charlie had wanted to start over. New university. New city. The gamble had worked out after a long stretch of nothing working out. She had met Ben in Intro to Writing or Elements of the Law. On their third date, they had both agreed they were going to get married eventually, so they might as well go ahead and get married now.
A loud scraping noise pulled her out of her thoughts. Their neighbor was dragging his garbage can to the curb. Ben used to be in charge of that chore. Since he left, Charlie had accumulated so little garbage that most weeks she left a single bag at the end of the driveway.
She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. The bruises underneath her eyes were solidly black now, like a football player’s. She felt achy. Her nose throbbed. She wanted soup and crackers and some hot tea, but there was no one to make it for her.
She shook her head. “You are so fucking sad,” she told herself, hoping the verbal humiliation would snap her out of it.
It did not.
Charlie dragged herself out of the car before she was tempted to close the garage door and turn on the engine.
She ignored the empty space where Ben’s truck was not parked. The storage shelves that held neatly labeled boxes and sporting goods that he hadn’t yet claimed. She found a bag of cat food in the metal cabinet Ben had put together last summer.
They used to secretly laugh at other people whose garages were so filled with clutter that they couldn’t park inside. Tidiness was one of the things they were both really good at. They cleaned the house together every Saturday. Charlie washed clothes. Ben folded. Charlie did the kitchen. Ben vacuumed the rugs and dusted the furniture. They read the same books at the same time so that they could talk about them. They binge-watched Netflix and Hulu together. They snuggled on the couch and talked about their work days and their families and what they were going to do over the weekend.
She blushed when she recalled how smug they had been about their fantastic marriage. There were so many things that they agreed on: which way the toilet-paper roll should go, the number of cats a person should keep, the appropriate number of years to mourn if a spouse was lost at sea. When their friends would argue loudly in public, or make cutting remarks about each other at a dinner party, Charlie would always look at Ben, or Ben would look at Charlie, and they would smile because their relationship was so fucking solid.
She had belittled him.
That’s what Ben’s leaving was about.
Charlie’s shift from supportive spouse to raging harpy had not been gradual. Seemingly overnight, she was no longer capable of compromise. She was no longer able to let things go. Everything Ben did irritated her. This wasn’t like the socks. There was no chance of fucking their way past it. Charlie was aware of her nagging behavior, but she couldn’t stop it. Didn’t want to stop it. She felt the most angry when she mordantly feigned interest in things that had genuinely interested her before: the politics at Ben’s job, or the personality quirks of their various pets, or that weird bump one of Ben’s coworkers had on the back of his neck.
She had gone to a doctor. There was nothing wrong with her hormones. Her thyroid was fine. The problem was not medical. Charlie was just a bitchy, domineering wife.
Ben’s sisters had been ecstatic. She could remember them blinking their eyes that first time Charlie had laid into Ben at Thanksgiving like they had just come out of the wilderness.
Now she’s one of us.
Invariably, one or two of them had started calling her almost every day, and Charlie had vented like a steam engine. The slouching. The loping walk. The chewing on the tip of his tongue. The humming when he brushed his teeth. Why did he bring home skim milk instead of two percent? Why did he leave the trash bag by the back door instead of taking it to the garbage can when he knew that the raccoons would get it?
Then she had started telling the sisters about personal things. That time Ben had tried to contact his long-absent father. Why he had stopped talking to Peggy for six months when she went to college. What had happened with that girl they all liked—but not better than Charlie—whom he insisted he’d broken up with but they all suspected had broken his heart.
She argued with him in public. She cut him down at dinner parties.
This wasn’t just belittling. After almost two full years of constant abrasion, Charlie had worn Ben down to a nub. The resentment in his eyes, the persistent requests that she let something—anything—go, fell on deaf ears. The two times that he had managed to drag her into couples therapy, Charlie had been so nasty to him that the therapist had suggested that she see them separately.
It was a wonder Ben had the strength left to pack his bags and walk out the door.
“Fu-u-uck,” Charlie drew out the word. She had spilled cat food all over the back deck. Ben had been right about the appropriate number of cats. Charlie had started feeding strays, and the strays had multiplied and now there were squirrels and chipmunks and, to her horror, a possum the size of a small dog that shuffled onto the back deck every night, staring at her through the glass door, his beady red eyes flashing in the light from the television.
Charlie used her hands to scrape up the food. She cursed Ben for having the dog this week because Barkzilla, their greedy Jack Russell terrier, would’ve hoovered all of the kibble in seconds. Since she had skipped her chores this morning, there was more to do tonight. She added food and water to the appropriate bowls, used the pitchfork to shift the hay they’d laid down for bedding. She topped off the bird feeders. She washed down the deck. She used the outside broom to knock down some spiderwebs. She did everything she could to keep from going inside until, finally, it was to
o dark and too cold not to.
Ben’s empty key hook greeted her by the door. The empty barstool. The empty couch. The emptiness followed her upstairs into the bedroom, into the shower. Ben’s hair was not stuck to the soap, his toothbrush wasn’t by the sink, his razor wasn’t on her side of the counter.
Charlie’s toxic level of patheticness was so pronounced that by the time she slouched downstairs in her pajamas, even pouring a bowl of cereal felt like too much work.
She fell onto the couch. She didn’t want to read. She didn’t want to stare at the ceiling and moan. She did what she had avoided doing all day and turned on the television.
The channel was already tuned to CNN. A pretty blonde teenager was standing in front of the Pikeville Middle School. She held a candle in her hand because there was some kind of vigil going on. The banner underneath her face identified her as CANDICE BELMONT, NORTH GEORGIA.
The girl said, “Mrs. Alexander talked about her daughter all the time in class. Called her ‘the Baby’ because she was so sweet, like a little baby. You could really tell that she loved her.”
Charlie muted the sound. The media were milking the tragedy the same way she was milking her self-pity over Ben. As someone who had been on the inside of violence, who had lived with its aftermath, she felt sick whenever she saw these kinds of stories covered. The sharp graphics. The haunting music. The montages of grieving people. The stations were desperate to keep viewers watching, and the easiest way they’d found to achieve that goal was to report everything they heard and sort out the truth later.
The camera cut away from the blonde at the vigil to the handsome field reporter, his shirtsleeves rolled up three-quarters, the candlelight glowing softly in the background. Charlie studied his pantomimed grief as he tossed the story back to the studio. The news anchor behind the desk had the same solemn expression on his face as he continued reporting what was not the news. Charlie read the chyron crawling at the bottom of the screen, a quote from the Alexander family: UNCLE: KELLY RENE WILSON “A COLD-BLOODED MURDERER.”