by Dan Chaon
In the afternoon, after all the keys had been turned in, and while the maids were cleaning out the rooms, my sister stopped by for lunch. She was working at the courthouse, in the county attorney’s office, and she hadn’t been getting along with her coworkers—she didn’t want to spend her lunch period with them. They were all secretary types, dumb as dirt, she said. Besides, she suspected they had been gossiping about her and Mr. Trencher, her boss.
She’d brought a bucket of chicken from a local fast-food place, and we ate in the apartment in back of the office, in the old kitchen. The table we’d had when we were kids was still there, though the kitchen itself was cluttered with fresh towels and boxes of toilet paper and complimentary soap. “Don’t you find it a little creepy, eating back here,” Joan said as she spread out the plastic silverware and plates, and opened the Styrofoam containers of mashed potatoes and gravy. “I think of all the hours Mother spent in this kitchen, and now look at it. It would kill her to see.”
“I think it’s sort of comforting, actually,” I said. “Nostalgic.”
“You would,” she said. She peeled the crisp skin off her chicken and set it on my plate. “Trencher’s been moon-eyed all morning,” she said. “It’s really driving me crazy.”
“Tell him to cut it out,” I said. “Give him a karate chop.”
She grimaced. “Well,” she said. “It’s not like he’s chasing me around the desk or something. That’s the trouble. It’s this very subtle thing—little looks—and this weird tension in the air. So if I tell him to cut it out, he can act like I’m just paranoid. He’ll say I’m reading things into it.”
I nodded slowly, scoping my mind for good advice. I didn’t know what she expected me to say. I didn’t understand this Mr. Trencher, any more than I understood Rhonda, or Joan herself, whose unfaithful ex-husband used to call late at night, used to drive hundreds of miles to camp out on her door. Why did she seem to draw this type of man? I had never been a person who could follow that kind of love, with its hidden agendas and uncertainty, its mazes of fear and desire. I hadn’t been in love very many times. As far as I knew, my wife was the only woman who’d ever been in love with me. What did I know about any of it? “You could quit,” I suggested hesitantly.
“Why should I have to quit?” she said sharply. I shrugged. She was right—I hadn’t been thinking. “I didn’t do anything wrong. If anything, I should file harassment charges,” she said.
I nodded. “You could.” But then she just pursed her lips. It seemed a distant possibility; and as we looked at one another, I had the feeling that she wasn’t completely unhappy with the situation. We ate for a moment in silence.
I was trying to think of some other subject to bring up when the front desk buzzer rang. I scooted my chair back, and Joan stood up as I did.
“I’ve got to get going anyway,” Joan said. “I’ve got some errands to run.”
But when we walked out to the office, both of us stopped cold. Rhonda was standing at the desk, and when she saw Joan, her eyes narrowed. She glanced from Joan to me, holding herself stiffly, formally, like a messenger. She was wearing one of those coats that looked like it was made of red vinyl, the kind a rock singer might wear. But her face looked tired and drawn. She stared at me, and I felt myself blushing, for a moment imagining she had come to accuse me of spying on her.
“I wanted to leave this for Kent,” she said, and held out an envelope. She set it on the desk, on top of the guest register. “I heard he was working here.”
“He’s not here now,” I said, and she brushed her eyes over me, a quick once-over. She kept her face expressionless.
“I know,” she said. “Could you just see that Kent gets it?”
“Sure,” I said, and she turned, without looking at me again, and went out the door. I was almost as surprised by the abruptness of her exit as I had been to see her standing there. I guess I had imagined some little conversation between us, some slight acknowledgment. I watched her car pull through the motel’s cul-de-sac and back onto the street.
“Well, well,” Joan said. She breathed, a sigh that seemed somewhere between puzzled and gratified. “This should be interesting. I can hardly wait for Susan to hear about this.” She looked at me sidelong, and I watched her gently lift the envelope. For a moment, I thought she was going to open it, and it sent an odd, possessive jolt through me. I wanted to snatch it from her. But she just examined it, front and back: blank. Then she put it down. “I’ll drop by the house after work,” she said.
Susan didn’t say much at first. Miraculously, both babies were asleep, and she was stretched out on the couch, watching music videos. I sat down, and she slid her feet onto my lap. “So you didn’t open this letter, I suppose,” she said at last.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” she said. I ran my thumb along the sole of her bare foot, reproachfully, and she shifted, stretching her leg muscles. “I’d like to know what that bitch is telling him.” She leaned her head back, looking at me thoughtfully.
“You could ask Kent,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “If my mom hasn’t gotten it out of him, then no one will.” She eyed me for a minute, and when my finger grazed the underside of her foot again, she moved her feet from my lap and tucked them beneath her. “He still loves her, I guess,” she said. “Thinks he loves her.”
“Could be,” I agreed. But I wasn’t sure what the difference was, between loving someone and thinking you do. It made me uncomfortable, puzzling over it, because it suggested layers of reality—what you thought was solid suddenly gave way, like a secret panel in a haunted house. “Maybe she thinks she loves him, too,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Susan said. She squinted, as if trying to see something far in the distance. “I’m sure that’s the line she’s feeding him, among others. ‘Kent I made a little mistake,’ ” she mimicked, in a soft breathy voice—nothing like Rhonda’s, I thought. Susan pouted her lips. “ ‘I’m so-o sorry,’ ” she purred.
“Well . . . ,” I said hesitantly. “Maybe she did make a mistake.” I shrugged, and she peered at me, the corners of her mouth moving vaguely, a Mona Lisa smile.
“That’s not a mistake,” she said at last. “A mistake is when your account is overdrawn a few bucks at the bank. It isn’t a mistake when you leave your husband and baby daughter to run off with some pimp.” Her expression shifted again, but I couldn’t guess what she was thinking. “If I were to do something like that, is that what you’d call it? A mistake?”
“I’d take you back,” I said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “You may think you would, but I know you. You wouldn’t.” I couldn’t help but flinch a little, pinned by that look. What did she see in me, or think she saw? She shook her head. “Besides,” she said. “I wouldn’t go back if you’d have me. I couldn’t respect you.” We stared at each other, and I couldn’t think of what to say next. The baby monitor crackled in the silence, humming with transistor noise. We waited. I saw her straighten, tensing like an animal seen briefly in a clearing before it bolts. “Oh, no,” she whispered, and Molly’s voice, that high, strange mechanical cry that infants have, began to unravel—soft at first, but gaining force.
When Joan showed up a while later, I was walking the baby, trying to quiet her. Susan and Joan sat down at the kitchen table, and I could hear Susan going on in the same vein. “I’ve told Kent what my opinion is,” she was saying. I didn’t concentrate on the rest. The baby kept wailing, her cries shuddering in my ears. The radio was turned up, playing static in hopes that the white noise might calm her, as it sometimes did. But it was having the opposite effect on me: the radio and the crying baby and the bitter voices of the women in the next room layered over me, like heavy, stale air. I looked into the kitchen. I was surprised by the shudder of disgust that passed through me. I stared at them from the threshold, and I couldn’t help but think how primitive they seemed, like pictures of Russian peasant women I’d seen in bo
oks, with their hard, judgmental mouths and their drab clothes. At that moment, they seemed to represent everything that was small and compromised and unlovely about my life. I thought about the time I’d gotten into Joan’s car and found the radio tuned to a Muzak station; I thought about the scuffed terry-cloth houseslippers my wife had taken to wearing, even in the middle of the day. They should want to run off with dangerous men, I thought, they should want to do crazy drugs and wander through strange cities after midnight. I rocked Molly insistently, shushing her without much gentleness in my voice.
“Has your mother heard about it?” Joan was saying. Susan was at the refrigerator, and I watched as she took out a single beer and poured it into two glasses. I thought sadly of those nights before we were married, walking her home after we’d been out drinking, Susan leaning against me, her lips pressed close to my ear. All that stuff, I thought, was behind us; now she couldn’t even manage to drink a whole beer by herself.
“I pray to God she doesn’t,” Susan said. She offered Joan the glass of beer, and I watched them both take little sips. “She’s on twenty-four-hour watch as it is.”
“I’m sure,” Joan said. She smiled—grotesquely, I thought—enjoying herself. “But don’t you think Rhonda’s going to eventually want to see the baby?”
“Not if Mom can help it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, and they both looked up. Molly had quieted a bit, and maybe they hadn’t noticed me listening. “They can’t keep her from seeing her own child,” I said, and the pulse of annoyance I felt toward them crept into my voice. “I mean, legally, doesn’t she have visitation rights or something?”
They both eyed me. Susan made a wry face, and the way she tilted her head made me realize she needed a haircut. Her hair constantly looked like it needed to be combed, and the word unbecoming came suddenly into my mind. “She’d need a damn good lawyer,” Susan said. “And if you think she’s going to get past Mom without a fight, you don’t know my mother.” She let her gaze linger over me for a moment, and I frowned. “He’s been Rhonda’s biggest fan lately,” she told Joan.
“Oh, I know,” Joan said. “You should have seen them making goo-goo eyes at each other at the motel.” It was supposed to be a joke, but I felt my face getting warm. I wasn’t in the mood for Joan’s humor. “Little do we know,” Joan said. “He’s actually Rhonda’s secret sex slave.”
“Shut up, Joan,” I said. “That’s all you think about, isn’t it? Why don’t you just sleep with Trencher and get it over with.” I hesitated, a little taken aback by my own meanness, but before Joan could say anything, Molly started to shriek again, and the sound made my shoulders go rigid, made my whole body hum with irritation. “Jesus Christ!” I snapped at Susan. “Can you please take this thing off my hands—it wants to nurse.” I thrust the baby toward her, and the cries stopped abruptly; Molly’s tiny eyes widened in terror or accusation. Then her mouth contorted, and she screamed again.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you crazy?” Glaring, she took the baby and cradled her gently, sheltering her from me.
“How do you expect me to get her to sleep with you two in here harping away like a couple of old biddies?” I said. Susan lifted her blouse roughly, and the baby affixed herself desperately to the breast, as if she’d been held against her will and starved by some torturer. “Oh, it makes me sick,” I said. “My whole life is nothing but work and screaming kids and listening to you two gossip and complain. I’m so bored and tired of this same old thing that I could just jump out a window.”
“Why don’t you, then?” Susan said. “You’re the one that complains all the time! All you do is sit around like a lump and brood. And now you can’t even stand to take a few minutes to comfort your own sick baby. If you’re so bored, why don’t you leave? Maybe you could hook up with your precious Rhonda. I’m sure she’d show you a great time.”
“Maybe I will,” I said.
“Good,” Susan said. She narrowed her eyes at me, then lifted her glass and drained the beer defiantly. “There’s the door.”
I hesitated for a moment, opening my mouth with no words—no quick retorts or parting shots. I just stared at them, shaking my head. “I’m leaving,” I said. Then I turned and walked out, slamming the door.
It was a cool night, full of those heavy, earthy-smelling spring shadows, and by the time I was in the car my heart was shriveling. It wasn’t an anger I’d be able to hang on to for very long, and I knew that in a few hours I’d be turning various apologies over in my mind. At least, I thought, I’d go out to a bar; then I’d walk down to the motel and spend the night there.
I drove slowly down our street, through the tunnel of newly budding trees, the rows of my neighbors’ houses with their basketball hoops above the garage doors or their toy-scattered lawns, curling down into the valley, toward Euclid. It was about nine o’clock; the movie had let out, and the high-school kids were cruising, just as I had done at their age, idling restlessly at the three stoplights, roaring from one end of town to the other and back, honking as they passed their friends. I thought of the worn path a zoo animal makes around the circumference of its cage. They’d get out of St. Bonaventure soon; they’d graduate and never come back. That’s what they were thinking.
I pulled onto Euclid, maybe the only grown-up on the street, merging with them, pacing the twelve blocks or so between eastern and western city limits. A car full of heavily made-up teenage girls slowed, and they stretched to peer at me. I could see their mouths laughing and chattering as they passed. We had been trying to stop the kids from using the motel lot as a place to make U-turns, but I watched them come to the end of the street and spin through the cul-de-sac at the Motor Lodge, riding the big speed bumps we’d put in as if they were some carnival ride. I could see from a distance the NO VACANCY light was on. But when I drove through, making my own U-turn, I counted only six cars in the lot. The office was dark, and the thought of Kent in there, fast asleep, brought back a wave of that old irritation.
As I parked the car, I clenched my fists, imagining Kent huddled up in the back, eyes closed tight, breathing through his nose. I thought of the money he’d lost me; not much, probably, but it added up, it meshed with all the other worries on my mind. I was never going to get anywhere, I thought.
It was silent when I opened the door. My keys chimed against one another, dangling in the lock. “Kent?” I said sternly. I flipped on the lights, and the fluorescent bulbs slowly flickered to life. Kent’s dirty ashtray was on the desk, and papers were scattered everywhere. I glanced outside, thinking maybe some emergency had taken him away, but my mother-in-law’s pickup, the one she let Kent drive, was still out there in the space marked MANAGER.
“Kent,” I called again, less certainly, and I stepped cautiously toward the dark, bare rooms. For a moment I thought I could hear music coming from back there—vague, distant sounds, like marimba tones, bamboo wind chimes brushing one another. I used to check out this book at the library from time to time, Omens and Superstitions of the World, and I remember reading that if you imagine you hear music, then you are in the presence of benevolent spirits. It’s an American Indian belief. But the music didn’t sound benevolent: it seemed sad; something has been lost, I thought, and it made me shiver. The sound seemed to drift off into the distance, just barely at the edge of my hearing. Then it was gone.
“Kent,” I whispered. I stood there, not really wanting to move into the shadows, imagining terrible things: Kent lying on the floor back there with a gun still gripped in his fist, or his body swinging slowly over a tipped chair. “Hello? Is someone there?” I called. And then I noticed, lying there on the desk, the cash box—just sitting out, for all to see. I picked it up quickly and opened it. Of course it was empty, except for a few credit card vouchers and a page of motel stationery, with Kent’s handwriting on it. “Dear Robert,” I read, beneath the motel letterhead.
I know what I am doing is wrong. But part of it can count toward this week’s wages I
guess. I hope you will consider the rest a loan. I will pay you back as soon as I can. I am going to get back with Rhon. We will get Brittany after Mom is asleep. And go somewhere, I’m not sure. Please tell Mom that I will send for our stuff when we are settled. And tell her and Susan I am sorry and love to them. But this is the only way it seems because nothing can work under so much pressure and everyone’s mind made up, etc. I swear I’ll pay back every cent to you.
It was signed “Kent Barnhart.”
I didn’t know how much they’d taken; there might have been almost five hundred dollars there. I’d planned to go to the bank and deposit it in the morning. But I knew this much: I couldn’t really afford to lose it. I stood there at the window, the sound of my pulse beating in my ears. I stared out at the parking lot—six lousy cars. But someone would have to be there to check them out in the morning. Then, as I gazed out at the line of doorways, the familiar shape of the building and the walk, I recognized the car at the end of the row. It was Rhonda’s old white Buick.
I knew they must have been in there at that very moment, in the room just in front of her car—B19, the one with the king-size bed. My muscles tightened, and for a moment, I pressed my hands to the window, as if I were locked inside. I wasn’t, of course; I could march down there myself and open the door with my master key, throw it wide open and demand my money back. That’s what Susan would do, I thought. And if it were Joan, she’d have already been on the phone with the cops. But I was just sitting there, listening to the ticks and hums of the empty office, waiting. Coward, I thought.
I pulled my keys out of the lock and went out, moving like a burglar across my own property, hanging close to the wall. I tried to goad myself, picturing them making love on a nest of my money, picturing them mocking me. My insides felt wavery, like something seen through thick, imperfect glass, and I pinched the key tightly between my fingers. By the time I got to the door, that wavering feeling seemed to be spreading, extending beyond my body like an aura. I saw myself fit the key into the lock, sliding the metal teeth silently into the slot, and I felt my hand turning the knob. But I didn’t push the door open. I hesitated there, the knob cool and smooth against my skin, and I drew my face closer to the door. I could hear voices. I inched the door open, just a crack. They were whispering, and though I held my breath, I couldn’t make out the words—only gentle, sad voices, and when I pushed the door open a bit further I could see them, reflected in the dresser mirror, sitting there on the bed, their heads almost touching, holding hands. I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at their reflection, but they didn’t look up. I felt as if something large and dark were hovering over me, opening its wings. After a time I edged back. I let the door pull quietly closed. Then I went back to my car and drove away.
