by Dan Chaon
Then I pulled up the hood on my jacket and opened the car door, but I left the engine running. I thought, Why not be a good person? I thought, Why not go ring her bell and tell her welcome back? I imagined myself saying, “If there’s anything you need, give us a call,” though I knew Susan, my wife, wouldn’t want anything to do with her. Susan would probably hang up on her if she called.
I hesitated there on her stoop, thinking of this. I remembered Susan telling me, “If I see her, I have half a mind to kick her ass. Seriously.” The rain trickled from my hood, and I wiped the droplets from my glasses, leaving a blurry film before my eyes. Maybe this wasn’t even her place.
I opened the screen door and pressed my face close to the little diamond-shaped window in the inside door. I cupped my hand over my eyes and peered in. The window was fogged over; droplets of condensation ran down the steamy glass, leaving thin bars through which I could spot an old Naugahyde couch, a crumpled bag of potato chips lying on it. Then, just at the edge of my vision, I spotted an arm. I leaned closer, and the rest of her tilted into view: she was standing at the mouth of a dark hallway, with her back to me. I saw that she was shirtless, and as I watched, she pushed her jeans down to her ankles and stepped out of them. She was a small woman, yet her body was hard-looking, almost muscular; different from the shapes of women I was used to seeing around St. B. She stood there in her underwear and stockinged feet for a moment, looking down at something I couldn’t see. Then her shoulders tightened, and her arms contorted behind her back as she unhooked her bra. My own breath was fogging up the outside glass, and I passed my hand over it as she turned, startled. She crossed her arms over her bare breasts: she’d seen my face at the window, I thought, and my heart leapt. What was I doing? Peeping in—a person could get arrested for that. I let the screen door slam and backed away quickly, hurrying toward my idling car. How could I explain myself to Rhonda now, or worse, what would Susan say if she found out? My body felt luminous, visible.
I put the car in reverse, and my wheels spun in the wet gravel. I sped out of the row of houses, and as I turned the corner, I caught a glimpse of her as she stumbled to the door. I stepped on the gas, and as I roared away, I could see her standing on the doorstep in only a towel, her hands tented over her head to shield herself from the rain. I imagined I heard her shouting something after me.
Afterwards, when I thought of what I’d done, I felt trembly with embarrassment and confusion. What if she’d recognized the car? What if she’d seen me? I’d never really known Rhonda that well, not enough to think of her as a friend, anyway. I’d talked to her at family gatherings, and we’d seemed to hit it off. There was a kind of cynical edge in what she said, and I secretly relished her dry comments about our in-laws, the loose, almost bored posture as she sat, listening to them talk. I remembered the Thanksgiving afternoon when she sipped casually from a pint bottle of peach schnapps after dinner, reclining in the living room, watching sports while the rest of the women washed dishes. I was the one who sat next to her. But the vague camaraderie between us was not enough to justify my behavior. It might even give Rhonda the idea that I was after her, a married man eager to prey on a woman rumored to be “loose.”
It had been six months since Rhonda left my wife’s brother, Kent, and their two-year-old daughter. She’d run off with a drug dealer, so people said. Rhonda and Kent had been living in Virginia at the time. Kent had just been discharged from the navy, where he’d learned a trade—some kind of mechanics, I gathered—and he was looking for a job when she went off. My mother-in-law claimed the man she’d run off with was both a pimp and a cocaine addict, and had gotten Rhonda hooked on something. In any case, Kent came home to Nebraska with his little girl, and I gave him a job at the motel I run—the motel I inherited from my father. My mother-in-law cared for the child while he was at work.
Kent got a few letters from Rhonda, but he didn’t let anyone know what they said. And then, after several months, Rhonda appeared in St. Bonaventure. My mother-in-law imagined that the man had beaten her up and dumped her somewhere along their travels, a journey she’d followed through the postmarks on the letters—Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Baltimore. She talked of these cities as if they were distant constellations.
Ever since Rhonda returned, my mother-in-law had been imagining that Rhonda wanted Kent back. “He’d have to be out of his mind,” she murmured when Kent was out of the room.
It wasn’t that I approved of what Rhonda had done, of course. But I wasn’t sure that I blamed her, either. I wanted to know her side of the story.
When I got home, my sister, Joan, was there. She had come to cook us dinner. We had planned to go out dancing for my birthday that night, but by the afternoon we decided to postpone until some other time. The baby was colicky, and our two-year-old, Joshua, hadn’t taken well to his change in status. Recently, he’d begun to wake up in the middle of the night, too, calling for us jealously. So Joan said she was going to come over and fix us a steak.
My sister is six years older than I. My mother had two miscarriages in between us, and perhaps that had hardened Joan to the idea of siblings. In any case, we’d never been close as children; not, in fact, until after our parents had passed away and Joan had divorced. There wasn’t any real reason for her to stay in St. Bonaventure besides me, I guess.
Joan looked at me shrewdly when I came in. She often seemed to loom over people, though she wasn’t exactly tall—just, as she put it, big-boned. “Where were you?” she said. “I’ve been here for nearly an hour.”
“I was driving,” I told her, and she nodded. She was big on the notion of “private time.” Everyone in our family had been, in individual ways, a bit of a loner. Still, I couldn’t picture her following someone for no reason, or peeping into their home.
“Where’s Susan?” I said, and she looked back to the green pepper she was dissecting.
“She’s in the bedroom with the baby. The J-monster is in there, too.” She had recently started to be a little antagonistic toward Joshua, our oldest. I could tell she thought he was spoiled, but it still surprised me. She’d always seemed so delighted by him before. Not too long ago, she’d told me that she was glad she never had any children of her own. I hoped she wouldn’t keep calling Joshua the J-monster.
“Any major disasters while I was out?” I asked.
“Just the usual,” she said. “Tell Susan dinner will be ready soon.”
Susan was sitting on our bed, nursing Molly and reading a book to Joshua. He huddled into the crook of her arm, listening grimly. I sat down beside her, with Joshua between us, and I slipped my arm around her waist, encompassing all of them.
“ ‘They passed the restless ocean,’ ” Susan read, “ ‘combing out her hair.’ ” She winked at me. “What took you so long?” she said.
“Oh, I got lost,” I said. “It’s the perfect day for the end of my youth.” I put my hand to my brow melodramatically.
“Come on,” she said. “You’re not allowed to brood until you turn thirty.”
“I’m advanced,” I said, and Joshua pushed against us impatiently.
“Read,” he said. “Read.”
And so Susan continued, and I looked down at Molly. She was nursing intensely, her eyes closed, her brow furrowed. Susan hadn’t breast-fed Joshua, and it was still strange to see her breasts, with their new roundness, almost opaque so I could just barely see her veins beneath her skin. She had always been hearty and athletic looking, and the leftover softness of pregnancy made her seem almost exotic. We hadn’t made love since the baby was born, and I hadn’t pressed her, yet. But sometimes, when her nipple slipped out of the baby’s mouth, erect and red, I would feel a twinge of urgency. And then, almost involuntarily, I thought of Rhonda, the flash of the brown aureoles of her breasts before her pale arms covered them. I cleared my throat.
“Joan says supper’s almost ready,” I said, and Susan nodded.
At supper, Joan insisted on a chorus of “Happy Birthday” and
I sat there, listening to their low, female voices intertwining, echoing hollowly. Joshua watched with amazed horror. Afterwards, Joan went right into one of her heavy conversations. There were several recurring themes when Joan visited: her ex-husband and what happened to her marriage, her dislike for St. Bonaventure, lack of suitable male companionship, et cetera. Tonight, she told us that her boss, a married man, wanted to have an affair with her.
“The worst part of it,” she said, “is that we’re friends, sort of. At least, I have to work closely with him every day. It’s not like I can just say ‘screw you’ and forget about it. I can see what it is. His wife is this matronly, country-club type, and he’s got—what?—three or four kids. And I think it’s something that all married people go through at some point. Especially men.”
“Plus you’re pretty,” my wife said. “And vulnerable.”
“What do you mean, ‘especially men’?” I said.
“Oh, shut up,” Joan told me. “Not you.” Joshua got up from the table, and I warned him that the baby was sleeping. He turned his back to me, bitterly, and sat down among his toys. “Anyway,” Joan said. “The truth is, in a lot of ways, I’m really attracted to him, and I would do it, I would. But look at me. I’ve been divorced now for almost as long as I was married, and I’ve passed the point in my life when I could allow that sort of thing to happen to me. I mean, here I am in this tiny town, with his wife and children living not so far away, and him involved in all these domestic things. I wouldn’t be able to call him if I wanted. We’d have to sneak around, quickies on abandoned roads, that sort of thing. I’m sure that’s just the kind of adventure he’d love. But me? I’d end up like what’s-her-name. Your brother’s wife. Rhonda. Wandering around St. Bonaventure like a spook.”
“Don’t do it,” my wife said. “You deserve better. You really do.”
“Yeah,” Joan said. “I know I do.” She cut her steak carefully, glancing down to where Joshua was driving a toy truck against her foot. She made a face. “So what’s with the whole Rhonda thing, anyway? Anything new?”
“Not that I know of,” Susan said. She looked over at me, and it sent a sudden prickle across the back of my neck. “It’s still in progress, as far as I know,” she said. She shot me another quick look, one that was meant to convey sympathy for Joan.
“Poor Joan,” Susan would say later, when we were up with the baby in the middle of the night. “I wish there was something we could do for her.” She went on to remark how sweet and smart and good-looking Joan was. “Why doesn’t someone wonderful come along for her?” she asked.
And I murmured, “I don’t know.” But the truth was, I thought, even if a wonderful man came along, he wouldn’t be good enough. At least Rhonda had made a choice. Joan acted like she could go through life, making excuses but never doing anything, as if there were an infinity of possibilities to choose from. Sooner or later she was going to find those possibilities were disappearing, one by one. But I wouldn’t tell Susan this, because generalities annoyed her. “What possibilities?” she’d ask. “Disappeared how?” And I wouldn’t be able to explain.
Saturdays are my only day off, and in the morning I was back to work at the motel. I tried to put all the thoughts of the previous day—of Rhonda, and my sister, and disappearing possibilities—out of my mind. To a certain extent, I guess I was feeling a little guilty. I kept imagining that she had recognized me, and I pictured her eventually getting back together with Kent, telling him. I tried to think of what I would say to Susan. I knew how she would interpret it: I secretly had the hots for Rhonda, she’d say. I was getting restless. That’s what she would think, no matter how carefully I explained myself.
Susan honestly hated Rhonda. “She’s beneath contempt,” she’d always say. “How could a mother leave her child like that, for any reason?” In a way, I suppose, I was surprised at the hard edge in her voice, just as I was surprised at how easily she’d settled into being a mother. She had once been pretty wild herself, and I thought she’d have more sympathy.
When we first met, Susan had seemed so dangerous to me: she hung around with older men, who gave her rides on their motorcycles and jacked-up cars, and she was a drinker. I guess it was what I needed at the time. My mother had just died, and my father had just had the first in the series of strokes that would eventually kill him. He once told me that the best thing he’d ever done was to be there for his parents when they were old—his brothers were never around—and that stuck with me. I’d come home from college to help with the motel, and Susan would come over late and talk me into turning on the NO VACANCY light before we’d filled. She’d get me to do things I would never have done without her. I still thought fondly of how we’d stayed up all night, how she and her tough girlfriends taught me how to bounce a quarter into a glass of beer, and of the time she’d tricked me into trying marijuana by feeding it to me in a cake. We used to drive a hundred miles just to check into small-town motels, pretending we were having an illicit affair. Once, an old woman had refused to give us a room because we didn’t have the same last name. “I don’t believe in it,” she told us darkly.
When I walked into the office of the motel, Kent was asleep, slumped in the swivel chair behind the desk. He worked the night shift, from ten until seven, and usually the motel was as full as it was going to get by the time he started. He didn’t have to deal much with customers, and I figured he would be good at taking care of the type of problems that sometimes arise late at night. He was a big man, with thick dark eyebrows and a kind of steely, mean-looking face. He was a nice enough person, actually, though I remember being afraid of him when we first met.
Of course, my father wouldn’t have liked to see him there, unshaved, a full ashtray on the desk, his heavy head tucked against his shoulder. My parents had always run the place themselves. We’d lived in the little three-bedroom apartment connected to the office, and my mother or father had registered every guest. There was a buzzer at the front that brought them, no matter what the hour, out of bed.
I’d hired out. The little apartment behind the office had been converted into storage. Still, I was there six days a week, ten hours a day. I hadn’t abandoned the place.
I rang the bell, and Kent stirred a little, his brow furrowing. “Fuck,” he murmured. Then he opened his eyes, glowering up at whoever had disturbed him.
I frowned. “Rise and shine,” I said. “Shift’s over.”
“Oh,” he said, and his look softened. “Robert. Hey, happy birthday, man.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You know . . . you really have to be careful about your language around the guests.”
“Yeah,” he said, and looked down. “I know it. Sorry about that.” He glanced around sheepishly, as if there might be someone else in the room, and his look reminded me that he’d had a rough time of it lately. I didn’t want to be another problem in his life.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “Any major disasters last night?”
“Nada,” he said. “All quiet. Did you and Sue go out?”
I shrugged. “In a few weeks, maybe. Joan came over and fixed us a nice dinner.” I shrugged again, as if I had to make excuses, to apologize. “It was all right,” I said.
Kent nodded, and his voice dropped a little, the way men’s voices do when they exchange something that passes for personal. I’d never been exactly sure what it meant. “Yeah, well, I know how it is, man.” He smiled, pursing his lips. “I guess maybe I’m lucky to be a bachelor again.”
“Yes, well,” I said. I wished that I could ask him what was going on between him and Rhonda. He surely must have known she was in town. Had he seen her? Talked to her? “So how are things going with you?” I said. “You’re getting along okay?”
“Oh, fine.” Now it was Kent’s turn to shrug. “Brittany’s running Mom ragged. You know how Mom can get to complaining. But she loves it, you can tell.” He sighed and stood up. His hair was flattened on one side, stiff as paper. I watched as he tried to neaten the
clutter on the desk, piling the scattered papers together. “I guess you heard that Rhonda’s back in town,” he said at last.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Fucking everybody’s heard.” He stared into my eyes, and I tried to keep my face noncommittal, but I could feel my expression wavering, the muscles moving beneath the skin. Finally he looked away and picked up his ashtray, dumping it into the wastebasket. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
The motel, the Bonaventure Motor Lodge, was not the most profitable business around. The town was in a valley, and couldn’t be seen by cars passing on the interstate. All they could see were the mesas and treeless hills, the empty pastureland that surrounded us, and despite the cheerful signs that promised food, gas, and lodging, most drivers just kept on going. Still, there were always a few forced to straggle in come nightfall, enough to keep us in business.
I liked to watch them in the mornings as they loaded up their vehicles and went on their various ways. This time of year, there weren’t too many vacationers. They were mostly, I imagined, off on more desperate pursuits: nomadic men and women; fugitives; lovers; addled old folks; young families on their way to new jobs; working men fleeing their dying cities; or parts of families, single mothers and fathers, escaping some domestic situation. There was something heroic about these people, I thought. I would walk down the row, glancing at the license plates, peeking in the windows of the cars. You could tell a lot about people from what they left in the backseat of their cars: toys, books, empty beer cans, little barking dogs with their toenails painted bright red. Once I saw a semiautomatic, tossed casually on a blanket in the back; another time, a limbless mannequin gazed blankly at me when I peered into a hatchback. For a minute, I thought it was a body. Sometimes, when I was sure no one was looking, I would trace my name or my initials in the dusty film on the back of a car. Sometimes, I would be out there when a guest would come out the door, and I’d talk to them for a bit—ask them if they slept comfortably, inquire casually as to where they were headed. Mostly, people didn’t have much to say. To them, I was just another provincial busy-body, another obstacle in their path.
