Something Has to Give

by Maren Smith

  Leaving her swaying on her feet in the tub, Quint left the bathroom. He returned a short few seconds later with a homemade quilt, which he slung over her shoulders before robbing her of her towel and then her still dripping panties.

  “Step,” he said, drawing them down to her ankles.

  She couldn’t do it without holding onto something. She chose the wall over his shoulders and stepped, one unsteady foot after the other. And then there they were, staring at one another, her swaddled like a baby in that quilt with her tears still wet on her red face and him, fully dressed and every bit as wet from hugging her throughout her fight with the shower. Worse, he was still angry. His eyes were bitter and hard with all the things he was trying not to say out loud. When he did finally speak, all he offered was a somber, “I’ll make some coffee.”

  “I don’t want your coffee,” she muttered, more hurt by that anger than she had been by the shower.

  Halfway out the door, Quint snapped around and came storming back to her. “Too damn bad, because you’re going to drink it anyway! Every damn drop!”

  “Why are you mad at me?” She thought she was all cried out, but she couldn’t even get through that one small sentence before her voice broke. The next thing she knew, she was sobbing all over again. “How is this my fault? How was I supposed to know there was a mountain lion out there?”

  “You think this is about the damn cat?”

  “Stop yelling at me!”

  “I’m not yelling!” he thundered, his voice like cannon fire in the tiny confines of the bathroom. They stared at one another—her eyes huge and watery, his snapping furiously. He threw up his hands, as if knowing he had to get distance between them, and then turned on his heel and stomped out. Except that a handful of steps later saw him marching right back into the bathroom again. “And you’re God damn right I’m mad,” he told her. “You haven’t got the sense God gave a cricket! What the hell were you thinking going out in that storm? You could have been lost! You could have gotten hurt! You could have been killed and you damn near froze to death!”

  “Pita—”

  “Don’t give me that crap! If you hadn’t been so determined to go off half-cocked, you’d have realized she was on the back porch!”

  “But I didn’t know that! I didn’t know it was going to drop six feet of snow on us either! This is supposed to be the desert! It’s not supposed to snow in the desert!”

  He stared at her, his eyes narrowing in disbelief. A ripple of tension shivered through him and his big hands fisted. His jaw squared, a tick of temper barely kept under control jumping as he grit his teeth. “Elsie, let’s go out onto the back porch. We can spit into Colorado together, we’re that close to the border. The best damn skiing on the face of the planet is here in Utah. Not only do we get snow here, this is only a flurry compared to what we could get. And I don’t give a damn if your mother is lost out there, if you ever leave this house again in conditions like that without me right God damn beside you, woman, you won’t sit for a year!”

  He really did leave the bathroom then, and this time he didn’t come back.

  Shivering (though not just from the cold anymore), Elsie sank down to sit on the edge of the tub. She hugged the quilt around her, her heart pounding hard at her ribs and her ears ringing from the fury of his scolding. Under the quilt, her bottom raced with an echo of the same prickling sensation that had been so painful when it had dominated her hands and feet. Only now it didn’t hurt so much as it just felt…ominous.

  She wanted to get angry at him—for threatening her in that Neanderthal vs. disobedient child way he seemed to think was so appropriate—and yet she couldn’t make herself form the emotion. Her eyes went watery all over again.

  What was wrong with her?

  Hugging the quilt around her knees, Elsie bent to rest her forehead on her arms and tried her best to cry without making any sound.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Quint made coffee, but Elsie didn’t drink any. She sat in the bathroom, huddled in his grandmother’s quilt, and didn’t come out for two hours. Now and then, he thought he heard sniffling, but he was too damn mad to want to go in and check on her. He could still feel that ugly sinking sensation that had gripped his stomach when he’d first realized she’d gone out into a full-on blizzard. It was something he’d never expected or wanted to feel for Elsie, but there it was, still camped out in his gut like the danger wasn’t yet done. Feelings like that weren’t something a man got over on the spur of a moment, and the quiver of it still lurking in there only served to make him that much madder.

  Wishing he could shake it off, Quint threw himself into angry work. He started with the damn goats. Not about to spend the winter with them shitting on his porch, he picked them up one at a time—starting with the ones that weren’t sporting swollen milk teats—and carried them through the snow to the goat shed. He made sure the door was shut so they couldn’t follow him right back through the snow to the house again. He also made sure no other predators could sneak in and have themselves a quick snack while his back was turned.

  He was on his third goat when Elsie came out onto the porch and, without a word or a look in his direction, performed her morning milking. Once all the goats had been carted out to his old tool shed—he still had no idea what she’d done with all his tools, dammit, and that made him madder still—Quint began looking for feed. He found that in the next shed over—along with his tools, which oddly did nothing to deflate his anger; he was on a good ol’ fashioned piss-off bender—and so fed both the chickens and the goats. He had to break the ice out of their water troughs and refilled both with warm water from the house. That was just laborious enough for him to spend the next few hours digging out the old heating elements from when his father was raising horses. He spent the next two hours rigging something that would keep both the goat and chicken houses lit and warm enough to keep the water from refreezing.

  By the time he wandered back up to the house to warm up his hands and get something hot inside him, Elsie was dressed, the milking bucket was empty and washed, there was a fresh tub of cheese curds dripping in a bowl of cheesecloth in the fridge and two more wax-dipped rounds of cheese hanging from the rafters in the cellar. There was also a simple lunch of soup and sandwiches warming in a covered pan on the stove.

  At first, Elsie kept her head ducked and her face turned away when Quint came in, stomping the snow off his boots and brushing thick flakes out of his hair. But when he walked past the table set for two and into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, she eventually dragged herself around to face him. There was no anger, no more tears. She didn’t seem to hold him to blame at all, which mollified him a little, but neither one of them were smiling. For his part, Quint wasn’t mad anymore. That had been replaced by a great, roiling turmoil of absolute frustration.

  “Are you hungry?” she softly asked.

  The air between, and all around them, felt densely packed with a veritable mountain of things he didn’t know if he could, or should try to say.

  “Yes.” When he sat down at the table, she brought him a grilled ham and cheese with a steaming mug of cream of mushroom soup to wash it down. It was hot and filling, and both of them sat across the table from one another—him eating in silence while she picked her sandwich apart with her fingers—until he was finished. The mountain between them felt impassable now. Not knowing how to bridge it, Quint drank the last drops of his soup and went back outside.

  It was still snowing, but not as hard as before. Fetching a shovel from the new tool shed, he threw his back into clearing a path from the goat and chicken houses to the nearest porch. The sun was going down and his arms and back were killing him before he was finished. By then, he was so tired he could barely put the shovel away and then walk back to the house. He put himself directly into a hot shower, where he stayed until heat had once more suffused all his digits. A hot cup of coffee and a huge bowl of savory potato and corn chowder were waiting for him on the table when he emerge
d.

  Quint took a quiet seat at the table. He could get used to this. Were he living alone, right now he would have been too tired to do anything more than a peanut butter sandwich. As it was, it took roughly three mouthfuls of that hearty stew before his hunger kicked in. He wolfed down two bowls—his, hers (which she pushed towards him, having not touched more than a bite or two herself)—plus every drop left in the pot on the stove. He’d give her this much: she certainly knew how to cook.

  Neither one of them said a word to one another, and the mountain just got bigger. Elsie didn’t seem to know how to bridge it any more than he did.

  After she was done with the dishes, she hovered in the doorway for a while, watching him watch television (there was almost as much snow on the screen as there was outside) before quietly heading upstairs to bed.

  Quint bedded down on the couch, which had to be a good foot too small for him. This was going to be a miserable experience, but just the thought of trying to wrestle another night of sleep out of that bed upstairs, with her sleeping too damn close, and her smell in his nose, and the memory of how soft she’d felt fresh in his mind, and all this mounting frustration building under his skin—it was just too much to bear. He punched his pillow twice, but comfort was elusive. He couldn’t sleep. With the lights all off and the house dark, he lay on his side with his legs as stretched out as that too-cramped sofa would allow, and tried not to think about how even his blood was burning so hot now that it was all he could do not to go upstairs and slip under the covers right up next to her. A couple petting strokes, maybe a soft kiss or two to her shoulder and nape…maybe she’d warm to him.

  Maybe that would get them over the mountain.

  Or maybe it would build a whole new one.

  Brand new levels of frustration balled his fists. He slugged his pillow, but comfort remained elusive. Sighing, he forced himself to close his eyes, praying for sleep to just hurry up and take him. He was tired of hearing the unanswerable siren’s song of temptation that was Elsie, sleeping in the room just over his head…so near and yet so untouchable.

  It wasn’t until the moment when she spoke that he realized Elsie had come back downstairs.

  “Aren’t you coming up to bed?” She sounded very small and close to tears.

  A better man would have found the words to reassure her. It’s not you, honey, it’s me; that sort of thing. Except that it was her, and they both knew it. So what good would it do either of them to lie?

  “No.” The back of the couch ran parallel to the wall that connected with the stairs. Lying on his side with his feet nearest to her, he kept his eyes shut and his arms tightly folded across his chest.

  Elsie was quiet for so long he thought she’d gone back upstairs. “Please come up to bed,” she said thickly. He could definitely hear the tears in her voice and beneath that small request, as loudly as if she’d spoken it instead, he heard her begging him, Please stop being mad at me.

  He wished he could. He clenched his hands tighter. As evenly as he could, through gritted teeth, Quint told her, “Elsie, the next time I get into bed with you, neither one of us will be getting any sleep. Not for a long, long time.”

  She didn’t move. He couldn’t even hear her breathing, not until she whispered, “Okay.”

  Quint opened his eyes.

  Without waiting for him, Elsie disappeared back upstairs, leaving him to lie in stunned silence for almost two full minutes before he suddenly realized the mountains were gone. One minute, unscalable; the next minute, poof.

  “Well, hell,” he said, marveling. Kicking out of his blankets, he headed up after her. There was already a tight burn of tension pulling low in his belly. It extended quickly down into his groin, bringing a flare of giddiness and anticipation to life. Right up until he reached the top of the stairs. His bedroom door was wide open and there, sitting on the edge of the mattress, was Elsie. She held his grandmother’s wooden-backed hairbrush in her hands while nervously smoothing her nightshirt midway down her thighs.

  “You found it,” he said, somewhat surprised. After his escape from the bathroom window and subsequent mad-dash run through the yard, he wasn’t sure exactly where he’d dropped it.

  “It was in the basement under the bottom step.” For the first time, she looked at him long enough to grant him the biggest fake smile he’d ever seen. “I saw it when I was hanging the cheese.”

  Quint slid his hands into his pants pockets, wondering why she was holding it now. Her hair already looked brushed, although from the condition of the bristles, it didn’t look as if she’d used his grandmother’s brush to do it. In fact, as far as he knew, that hairbrush had never once been used to brush hair. Any time his mother had picked it up, the end result had usually been his burning need not to sit down for a while. Oh yes, he had known the bite of that brush, as his father had surely known it before him and perhaps even his grandmother before that. Maydeen had known it only once in all the years they had been married, and that had been for throwing a fit at the mall over how much she could and could not spend in any one shopping trip. While it might have saved his wallet, obviously it hadn’t done their marriage a lot of good.

  He wondered if Elsie knew how close she had come to having it used on her the other day.

  “Will you come sit down beside me?” she softly asked, once more with eyes turned to her lap.

  Quint came into the room. They were the only two people in the house, but he closed the door anyway. Somehow, that deepened the level of intimacy between them, but sitting down beside her brought that to a whole new level.

  He sat down on the bed beside her, ducking his head a little, trying to see her face.

  “Will you do something for me?” She glanced at him then, a quick sideways peek that never went farther than his knee.

  “What?”

  When she stood up, he had the instant premonition that she was about to put herself bottom-up across his lap and in that strangely surreal moment, he was hit by both the electrifying eroticism such an offering would bring and by the absurdity. Elsie had fought him so violently the two times he had spanked her before, there was no way she’d ever just lay herself across his knee and meekly submit to having her bottom slapped.

  And she didn’t this time, either. But what she did do was almost as surreal. She sat in his lap and it felt like the most natural thing in the world, when she tucked her head down on his shoulder, to wrap his arm around her. He thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t do that either. She began to talk instead and it was so soft that, were he not already straining to hear her, he would have missed one word in five.

  “We were only married a few weeks when the recession finally hit our town and I lost my job. A couple days later I came home to find he’d annulled our marriage, taken all our money and all our things and just…gone. All I had was the money in my wallet, the beat-up old car I’d been driving and the clothes I’d been wearing. That’s it. That’s all. I didn’t know what to do…so I left. I put all the money I had in the gas tank and I drove until it was gone. I sat there about half a day before I pushed it off the road into a chasm between two big rocks.”

  His eyebrows arched, but otherwise he didn’t move. “Why?”

  She didn’t move much either, just a lift of one shoulder. “I don’t know. It looked real peaceful down at the bottom of that hole. I couldn’t see the car anymore. It was all covered over with dust and rocks. For a moment, I remember wanting to be down there with it.”

  He actually drew back a little at that. He didn’t take his arm from around her, but he did try to get a better look at her face. “Why?” he asked again, trying not to sound as appalled as he felt.

  “Because if no one found us, we’d never have to go back.” Her eyes fell closed for just a moment before she opened them again, shaking her head as she looked at him, silently beseeching understanding. “I can’t tell you how much I did not want to have to go back. Haven’t you ever felt that way, like things could never get any w
orse?”

  Yeah, he had. He hadn’t pushed a car into a rocky chasm or moved into someone else’s house, but he had enlisted for another year in a violent war zone where he dodged bombs, bullets and insurgents on a weekly, if not daily basis. Of the two of them, quite frankly, she had dealt with it better than he had.

  “So I just started walking. It took me two days, but when I found your driveway I just…walked down it. I sat on your porch all day long waiting for someone to come home, but when no one did and it got dark, I don’t know why but I tried the door. It wasn’t even locked.”

  The way she was speaking, so flat and emotionless, it was a little unnerving. Quint stroked her back, not sure if he ought to stop her, reassure her, or just let her talk it all out.

  “All night long, I sat on your couch and waited, expecting any minute for car lights to come down the driveway, but they never did. Eventually, I dozed off and when I woke up in the morning, I found out the lights and water still worked. There was dust everywhere and a few cans of food in the pantry, so I cleaned up a little and ate some peas. I kept all the cans, neatly lined up on the table so I could make a full accounting when someone came back. I knew the house was empty but I think it took three days before it really sank in that all that dust meant no one was going to come home. So I stayed. And eight months later, you did.”

  She stared at her knees for a time, turning the hairbrush over and over in her hands.

  “You’re right,” she finally admitted, once more her voice falling to very soft tones. “This isn’t my house and I don’t belong here. You don’t have to evict me. Let me stay until the snow melts, and then I’ll go.”