Dear Wife

by Kimberly Belle

* * *

  Mistake number one: giving my mother a house key, though for the record, that was all Emma’s doing. But what was I going to do when I found out, ask for the key back? Ma would’ve had a fit, and I would’ve had to hear it every holiday and birthday for the rest of my life. I let her keep the key, but if I had any sense at all, I would have changed the locks.

  Mistake number two: leaving the house in such a state—though again, it couldn’t be helped. Police work is messy at times, and I’m a visual kind of guy. I like to spread my files across tables and floors, tape notes and pictures to the walls. I picture my mother walking through the kitchen and living room, piecing everything together and shaking her head, and I lean on my horn.

  “Move it!” I scream at the driver in front of me, flashing my lights, and he flips me off over his shoulder. I swerve onto the shoulder, slam the gas and fly past.

  Thirteen eternal minutes later, I screech into my driveway, coming to a hard stop behind my mother’s white Honda. The front door pops open, and she comes out slinging—her arms, her words, that expression she always used on me when I was a kid, the one that still to this day can give me phantom pains of an almost-constant childhood bellyache. Even now, all these years later, trying to please this woman is a full-time job. She’s fussing at me before I’ve even clambered out.

  “...looks like somebody tossed the place. Now I know you’ve been busy, but I didn’t raise my son to live in a pigsty. Did a tornado blow through town and no one thought to tell me?”

  I jog up the walkway, boots tearing up the concrete. “Ma, what are you doing here?”

  She gives me an insulted frown. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? I made another batch of chicken soup for Emma. That’s what people do when one of their loved ones is sick. They bring them chicken soup.”

  “That key was for emergencies only.”

  She points a finger over her shoulder. “Have you seen your house? This is an emergency. And I’ll have you know I rang the bell for at least fifteen minutes, just ask that nosy Ms. Delaney next door. I went around the side and saw Emma’s car in the garage. I thought something happened to her. I thought maybe she’d fainted, or fell down the stairs.” She pauses to take me in, shaking her head. “You look awful. When’s the last time you’ve eaten?”

  For Ma, every bad or busy day, every sickness or heartache or worry—it all boils down to food. What kind, and when you’d last had some, and if it was prepared with loving care and the correct amount of salt. I don’t dare tell her the truth—that for the past three days I’ve been living off the leftovers from Annabelle’s birthday dinner: standing over the counter, shoveling cold bites straight from the container, barely tasting any of it. But only when I remember to eat, which isn’t often.

  Then again, if she’s looked in my kitchen, which she most definitely has, she already knows. The dirty Tupperware is piled high, smelling up the sink.

  “I just came from Leon’s,” I lie, knowing the restaurant name will make her back off from this portion of the argument, at least. Leon’s is known for their fried catfish, fried shrimp, fried everything, the kind of fare that’ll keep you full for days. “Look, I appreciate you coming all the way over here, but—”

  “Marcus Robert Durand, you tell me what’s going on right this second.” She stabs a fist into her hip and scowls. “Where is Emma? I thought she was sick. Why isn’t she here?”

  Mistake number three: I should have had a story ready, a believable excuse I could pull from my sleeve without stumbling over my words. Both of us know Emma would have called to thank Ma for the chicken soup. She would have texted or sent a note. My mother coming over here now isn’t about seeing to the health of her favorite daughter-in-law, or bringing her some more soup. It’s about snagging the thank-you she should have gotten days ago.

  I sigh, nudging my mother inside. “She didn’t want you to know, okay? She didn’t want anyone to know.” I shut the door, leaning against the cool wood. Ma’s right. This place is a pigsty, and it smells like a barnyard. “If I tell you where she is, you can’t tell a soul. Not Camille, not Duke, not anybody.”

  Ma is already nodding, quick and manic like a bobblehead. “Of course, of course. My lips are sealed. You have my word.”

  I look my mother in the eye, and somehow manage to hold her gaze. “She’s at a retreat.”

  She frowns. “What kind of retreat?”

  “The kind that makes her better. Less...depressed.” My mother squints, folding her arms across her chest, closing herself off. She always knew when I was lying as a kid, and she knows it now. I kick things up a notch. “The thing is...it’s just... Em cries all the time, Ma. She... You know what? I don’t want to get into the ugly details. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because this story makes no sense. If your wife is depressed, the last thing you do is send her away. You definitely don’t send her off with a bunch of strangers. You keep her here, under your own roof, and you fix things. Above all else, you hold your family together.”

  For my mother, there’s no other option. Family is why her kids haven’t moved more than five miles away, why she summons us to her house every Sunday and on birthdays and holidays, why we haul our asses over there without complaint. Camille and Duke might not remember how Ma practically killed herself providing for three kids on a minimum-wage, single-mother salary, but I do. I remember her constant exhaustion, the way her worries—about money, about what people were saying about our jailbird father, about how the gossip would affect me and Camille and Duke—filled my stomach with something sour and itchy. I remember the sound of her tears when she thought I wasn’t listening, how they boiled inside me into a white-hot rage. When Dad died in prison, she lined us up along the grave site and ordered me to look sad, even though I detested the man, even though I’m pretty sure by then she detested him herself. “He’s your father,” Ma said, smacking me on the back of the head. Family.

  “I am holding us together,” I tell her now. “Or at least, I’m trying to. But I can’t do that when I’m standing here, arguing with you.”

  “Does this ‘retreat’—” she uses air quotes and pursed lips to let me know what she thinks of the word “—have anything to do with what happened at Easter?”

  I wince, wishing to all hell that she hadn’t brought it up. I don’t know how else to explain that it was nothing, the product of too many of us crammed into her tiny kitchen. I tossed Emma a pack of napkins, but all she saw was something coming at her head. She let out a scream so bloodcurdling, it froze everybody’s shoes to the linoleum.

  We all tried really hard to laugh it off, especially Emma, but I saw the way Ma looked at us after that. Like she was worried.

  Like she’s looking at me now.

  “Ma, I told you, that was nothing. Em just...thought she saw something that wasn’t there. That’s all.”

  She watches me carefully, her expression hard. “And what were all those papers on the kitchen table?”

  “Work. I’m in the middle of a missing-person investigation, remember? I’ve been working 24-7.”

  “What do hundreds of Emma’s emails have to do with the search for Sabine Hardison?”

  Her question tightens around my chest, pushing into my lungs and expanding, sucking up all the air. I need to get Ma out of here. I need her to leave. The last thing I need is for my mother to be butting into my case.

  “Maybe nothing, but maybe everything. Sabine showed us a house last year, and she sent Emma a list of people to work with. Inspectors, lenders, things like that. I need to find that list, and I need to talk to those people. They might know something about Sabine.”

  “Why don’t you ask Emma where the list is?”

  “Because I’m not allowed to talk to her. The doctors won’t let me. Not until she’s done with the whole program.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Ma doesn’t say anything for a really long time. Sh
e looks at me, and I look at her, and the longer this staredown drags on, the more my skin turns cold and clammy. Emma has a good life. She lives in a nice house, drives a nice car, goes to nice restaurants and parties, all things I provide for her. It’s more than my deadbeat father ever did for Ma and us kids, and yet there’s a hurricane whipping up in my gut at the look on Ma’s face. I turned thirty-six last month, and my mother can still do this to me.

  “I’ll take care of it, Ma. I swear to God. I’m taking care of it.”

  She presses her palms to either side of my face and shakes her head. “You go. Clean up this mess you made. I’ll clean up the one here.”

  BETH

  “Hey.”

  I jump at the man’s voice, and the papers slip from the stack between my fingers, hitting the table and scattering. First Martina, now Erwin Four. It’s like visiting hour in here, a revolving door of people coming and going. He stands in the same spot his father did less than an hour ago, looking like he just came from the mall, or maybe a visit with his tailor. The creases in his shirt are knife-sharp, his belt buckle so shiny I can see my own reflection.

  “You scared me.”

  “I noticed.” He comes into the room uninvited, dipping his chin at the piles on the table. “New-member bags, huh? Looks like fun.”

  I gather up the papers I dropped, shuffle them into a neat pile. “Are you looking for your father? Because he went to visit a sick parishioner.”

  “Mrs. McPherson, I know. Charlene told me.” He wanders over, looking over the stacks of papers and brochures on the table. He picks up one of the Bible booklets, flips through it with a thumb. “I hear somebody got into her drawers. Probably the most action she’s seen in decades.” He gives me a sly grin. “How much did they get away with?”

  “Two thousand dollars is the number I heard.”

  He whistles between his teeth. “That’s a pile of cash. Who do you think took it?”

  I push to a stand, digging through the box for a handful of tote bags and draping the straps over an arm. “I’m trying not to think about it too much, to be honest.” It’s a lie, of course. Like everybody else in this place, I’ve thought of little else.

  He tosses the pamphlet back on the stack with a shrug. “I just figured since you’re up here all day, you might see things others don’t. Like somebody sniffing around Charlene’s drawers.”

  Ha ha, snicker snicker. As much as I like and respect the Reverend, I’m not getting the same upstanding vibe from his son.

  “I didn’t see anybody sniffing around anywhere,” I say as casually as I can, “but I also wasn’t looking. I’ve been too busy working.”

  He nods like he doesn’t quite buy it. “What do you think about my father giving the thief time to return it? I mean, this isn’t preschool, and two thousand dollars is not nothing. If it were me they stole from, I’d have called the cops hours ago.”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I like to think I’d be as compassionate and forgiving as your father, but there are few people on this planet as softhearted as he is.”

  Erwin snorts, sinking into a chair and stretching out his legs. “Is that what you kids are calling it these days—softhearted?”

  “What, you don’t think so?” As soon as I pose the question, I wish I hadn’t. I don’t much care what Erwin Four thinks about his father or the money or anything else for that matter. I just want him to leave. The skin on the back of my neck is tingling, the hairs rising up one by one.

  “Home by ten. Straight As or else. Don’t just read but memorize the Bible, so you’re able to chastise sinners with apt verses at all times. Thus is the life of a preacher’s son.” He sighs, watching me fill the bags on my arm but not lifting a finger to help. “I never see him, not unless I come here. I can’t tell you the last time we’ve had a family dinner.”

  If Erwin Four wants me to feel sorry for him, he’s going to have to give me something better than some daddy issues. So his father didn’t spend enough time tossing baseballs with him in the front yard. My husband beat me, I want to scream in his face. He put a gun in my mouth and pressed his finger to the trigger, and he’s looking for me right now so he can finish the job. I think all these things, but I press my lips together and move down the table, dropping coffee mugs in the bags when what I’d really like to do is bean Erwin Four in the head with one.

  “Hey, I have a question for you,” he says, almost conversationally. “What did you do to get Oscar’s job?”

  My hands freeze midreach, and my head whips in his direction. “Excuse me?”

  “Like, do you stroke my dad’s ego? Tell him how kind and wise he is? Convince him to do you favors? Oddly enough that’s a confirmed technique to make a person like you, you know. The person who does the favor actually ends up liking the other person more. Weird, I know, but true.” He laughs in a way that is the opposite of funny. “Or maybe you’re the one doing him favors.”

  It’s not just his words but the way he’s looking at me—like I’m some sort of puzzle to be put together. Like I’m slightly dirty. A phone rings out in the hallway, but distant, at the far end. Martina’s warning floats through my mind: Erwin Four is a creep. Stay far, far away.

  “I hope you’re not implying what I think you are.”

  “I’m not implying anything. I’m trying to figure you out. What my dad sees that the rest of us can’t. And while we’re at it, if you have any tips on how to win some affection for me and my sister, I’m all ears.”

  How about stop acting like a spoiled brat? Maybe don’t be an asshole? I get that the pressure on a preacher’s kid must be enormous, but Erwin Four should be able to see the bigger picture—that he has a father who cares enough to hold him to a higher moral standard than others in his flock. That should count for something.

  “You and your sister are hardly unloved,” I say. “Your father talks about you all the time. You’re even his computer password.” The Reverend asked me not to mention it, but I’m pretty sure if he heard this conversation, he’d say something similar.

  “ErwinGrace2, I know. What, you don’t think IT has access to the computer passwords around here?”

  I don’t answer. If Erwin Four runs the IT, if he knows how to log on to his father’s computer, he’ll know how to pluck Sabine’s story from the history files. I study him for clues, but then again, maybe him cornering me here is the biggest clue of all. The first pinpricks of understanding burn like hot ice on my skin.

  He raises both hands, lets them fall back to his lap. “Do you believe what my dad preaches, that marriage is a holy covenant between three people—a man, a woman and God?”

  I almost laugh. Almost. Not just because this conversation is ridiculous, but also because if God had been anywhere near my marriage, He wouldn’t have just stood by and watched you slap and punch and kick me. He would have shielded me. He would have taken one for the team.

  “Another thing I’ve never really given much thought,” I say carefully.

  “Well, I have, and let me tell you, it’s yet another reason for me to never tie the knot. That is a threesome I am not the least bit interested in.”

  He stands, and at that moment, right there and then, is when I feel it. Something stark and obvious. Something not right. I put some space between us, scooping items from the table into the bags, hurrying farther down the line.

  “What about sin? What are your feelings on that?”

  “Why are you asking me? I’m hardly an expert on anything Biblical.”

  “Because you’re not one of Dad’s mindless sheep. You’re not going to parrot his words back at me. I get enough of that at home. I’d like to hear an honest answer from someone like me, someone who’s bitten into more than a few apples.” His gaze wanders south. Alarm zips up my spine.

  I turn away, tugging on my T-shirt. “I’ve made mistakes. Hasn’t everybody?”

  “Yes, but according to my dad, sin is preordained. The Bible tells us not to sin at the same time it tells us we’re
destined to lie and cheat and steal. If you ask me, that’s the whole problem with Christianity. It takes away an individual’s free will. It renders us powerless.”

  Leave, a voice screams in my head. Don’t stay here alone with this man.

  I eye the distance between Erwin Four and the door, the way he’s standing there like a roadblock.

  “I don’t think it’s about taking power away,” I say slowly, buying myself some time. I drop the bags in the box and edge around to the opposite side of the table. “But to give it back. Choose God and go to heaven. Isn’t that the point?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.” He steps to the right, and I ease to the left.

  “I’m pretty sure I did.”

  Get out, get out, get out.

  In three lightning steps, Erwin Four is in front of me, smelling of aftershave and astringent and—beer? Or maybe that’s my memory, playing tricks on me.

  “No. I’m pretty sure you didn’t. The question still stands. How do you feel about original sin? Good?” He runs a finger down my forearm, his touch so light I have to actually look down to make sure it was real. “Or bad?”

  I don’t move because I can’t. A wave of disgust, so intense I’m paralyzed, sticks my sneakers to the floor. The air between us shimmers, and I’m transported to another time, another place. A dusty field at last year’s annual barbecue.

  I remember everything about that day. How the afternoon air was muggy and hot, the official start of what would be a sweltering summer. How the beer was flowing faster than the river behind the bandstand, and how you chugged it from a red Solo cup. How when I made a joke, saying you might want to switch to water, you laughed and ran your finger down my forearm, soft and light as a feather, like Erwin Four did just now.

  But only because people were watching.

  Your laugh was for them, but the words you whispered in my ear were for me. You leaned in, stinking of beer and fury. “If you ever, and I mean ever embarrass me like that again, I will kill you and dump your body somewhere no one will ever find it.”