The Good Wife

by Stewart O'Nan

  She’d wanted to take a shower and model her nightgown for him to make their first time special, like a second honeymoon, but that plan seems silly now. She pulls his shirt over his head, then raises her arms so he can do the same to her. He’s put on muscle from lifting weights and has a dark farmer’s tan, a white stripe at each bicep. Chest to chest, they clutch at each other. She grips his shoulders, and he lets her inch him back toward the bed and push him over so she can work at the button of his jeans. She’s tugging them down when she hears the doorknob rattle behind her, and stops.

  A knock.

  “Mom,” Casey calls.

  “Yeah, babe.”

  “I heard another noise.”

  “It was probably just us.”

  He tries the knob again.

  “What do you need, hon?”

  “I can’t sleep,” Casey says. “Can I come in with you?”

  Tommy sinks back, his arms limp above his head. Patty bends and lays a palm on his cheek, turns his face to her and kisses him.

  “Hey,” she whispers, “at least we weren’t on the couch.”

  She backs off the bed and tells Casey to go get his pillow, opens the dresser drawer and pulls on her regular nightshirt—one of Tommy’s old T-shirts, worn thin.

  The bed’s a double, barely big enough for the three of them. She’s squished in the middle, Tommy’s arm thrown over her. Even with just the sheet on it’s hot, and Casey’s wide awake.

  “Close your eyes,” she says.

  In the dark, the edges of the curtains glow. The room slowly fills with shadows.

  They wait for him to doze off, listening to the hum of an industrial blower somewhere, the climax of a TV soundtrack from their neighbors’, a lone plane crossing high above them and then fading to nothing. She lies still, aware of the silence, of Tommy’s hand warm on her stomach. Casey’s breathing turns ragged, long drawn sighs, and finally subsides, a soft inrushing whistle, his lips parted. Patty prays the phone won’t ring.

  The problem now is getting out of bed without waking him up. She gives him a few more minutes to go completely under before she taps Tommy’s arm and points to the door. They won’t be gone long. If he wakes up, she’ll say Daddy was sick and they had to go to the bathroom.

  They tiptoe the length of the hallway, following the walls. It seems wrong, using Casey’s bed, but it’s the only place. In the morning she’ll switch the sheets.

  They close the door because she wants the light on. She wants to see his body as she remembers it, to go over it inch by inch. He has bruises on both knees—“the bunk always gets you,” he says—but otherwise no scars, no new tattoos. She knows she’s changed after having Casey and working on the truck and waitressing; it’s been five years. If he sees the difference, he doesn’t mention anything. His hands seek out the same places, his kisses feel the same. She wants him now, and tells him so, but when she reaches for him, he’s not ready.

  She tries the spidery touch of her nails, the ridged friction of her fingertips—old standbys. And she understands. He could be nervous, after so long, or paranoid (because she is, imagining cameras everywhere). She coaxes him, nipping at his chest, scooting lower on the bed so she can get at him.

  From far off comes the hooting of a train approaching a grade crossing, the thrum of a diesel burrowing through the night.

  “Shit,” Tommy says, sitting up.

  She doesn’t quit until he stops her, gripping her shoulder, and she realizes the drumming has grown louder, the mournful double note of the horn that much closer.

  “It’s coming here,” Tommy explains, and she remembers the tracks along the wall.

  It gives them a way out, and they take it, finding their clothes, creeping through the kitchen again and getting back in bed with Casey before the freight roars by. He stirs but doesn’t wake up. It’s funny but Patty doesn’t dare laugh. Tommy lies on his back, staring at the ceiling.

  She taps him and points to the door.

  He just shakes his head.

  She gets up anyway, rolling over him, taking him by the hand, and he can’t protest without disturbing Casey.

  “Come on,” she says in the living room, “I’ll make you something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” he says, but a minute later he’s looking in the fridge. It’s almost midnight.

  She cuts them each a piece of cheesecake—firm now, perfect. They sit on the same side of the booth, hip to hip, eating. The cheesecake is too rich, gluing their mouths shut, keeping them from speaking. She runs them a glass of ice water, the cubes cracking.

  “Sorry,” he finally says, and starts to say something else.

  “Shhh.” She puts a finger to his lips and kisses him. “Just be with me.”

  That should be enough, and it is. It has to be. And then, when the phone rings and he has to leave again, she doesn’t even have that. Even here, she waits for him.

  GRATITUDE

  SHE’D NEVER TELL TOMMY, BUT BEING ON TRAILERS MAKES REGULAR visiting that much harder. There’s not enough time, and not being able to touch him the way she wants to is unsatisfying. The room is crowded and loud, with the machines and all the little kids. There’s nothing for Casey to do, and then on top of that they have the long drive back.

  Talking with the other wives, Patty finds out that at some places they get FRPs five or six times a year. Here, because of the demand, they’re scheduled once every four months.

  They do get better at it, after that first disaster. She doesn’t expect as much, so there’s less pressure on everyone. She understands that he’s as uncomfortable as she is, maybe even more paranoid, having to live with people watching him all the time. It’s not until their fourth visit that he’s able to make love to her, and even after that there are times when all she can do is hold him and tell him it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t. For forty-four hours, they’re a family.

  Like any family, they settle into a routine. Gin rummy, Fritos, TV Through these early years, the menu stays the same. One night of the two, they have lasagna, and always, tons of fresh fruit. In summer they barbecue steaks and make flavored ice cubes with Kool-Aid; in winter they tear up crusts for the birds. Christmas comes whenever they’re together, and their birthdays, their tenth anniversary. Sometimes they get lucky and they’re scheduled right on the day, but it really doesn’t matter.

  The count still interrupts them, but no longer has the power to devastate her, only the final eight o’clock call that says they’ve got an hour left, and by then she’s happy, filled with new memories. One time she has her period and it rains all weekend, and they have a great visit. The stove’s broken, the toilet backs up, Tommy’s got the flu, Casey falls off the monkey bars—that’s just life. Later, she knows, these little disasters will help them place the time they spent together, will become—like Eileen hooking their father’s ear with her very first cast—their most cherished memories.

  NEAR-SIGHTED

  IN FOURTH GRADE CASEY HITS A ROUGH PATCH. EVERYTHING UP through open house goes okay, but a couple of months in, his math teacher sends home an interim report warning Patty that he’s in danger of failing. There must be some mistake, but there are his grades, broken down into logical columns. She knows his homeworks and test scores are A’s because she’s seen them. She doesn’t understand why his class participation is a D and his quizzes are F’s, and, more important, why she hasn’t heard about it until now.

  When she asks Casey, he says Mrs. Muller doesn’t like him. He sits all the way in back and can’t see the board, and she won’t let him move up.

  “Did you tell her you can’t see?” Patty asks.

  His yes is defensive.

  When she asks how long he hasn’t been able to see the board, he shrugs.

  “He’s got your father’s eyes,” her mother suggests.

  Patty tests him by having him stand across the room from the TV showing the local news. Every photo over the anchorman’s shoulder has a caption. “What’s it say?” she
quizzes him.

  Casey cranes forward, squinting, then just shakes his head.

  The cost of it panics her. She’s working off the books for a friend of Eileen’s, painting interiors, so the trip to the eye doctor and then the glasses from Lenscrafters come out of her pocket. She tries not to ride Casey about how expensive they are, but when he leaves them in the plastic tray at the metal detector, before she can catch herself she reminds him sharply in front of the guards and the other women and then has to apologize in private.

  She doesn’t apologize for yelling at him that spring, when he loses them in the river while fishing with Cy and Eileen. By then she’s between jobs again, and instead of a day’s pay, she sees a chunk of their savings being swept downstream.

  It turns into a daily battle between them. Casey hates his glasses, hates the way they look, hates taking care of them. The pair he lost were scratched and smeared, and while she lectures him about his new pair (even more expensive), within a month they’re beat to shit.

  “He’s nine years old,” Tommy says in a letter. “I’d worry about him if he took good care of them.”

  They write more now, trying to pinch pennies. Patty takes maybe the most boring job of her life, cashiering at a big discount liquor store in Vestal. It’s steady, and she only has to work nights twice a week, but it’s depressing, between the older regulars cashing their pension checks and the college kids stocking up for the weekend. Patty remembers how she and Tommy used to party, all the risks they used to take. She hasn’t gotten stoned in years, and that lifestyle seems childish now. He was drunk that night, and while that’s no excuse, she’s sure it had something to do with what happened. It makes the job harder. When she sells a couple gallons of grain alcohol to a bunch of students or a five-dollar bottle of scotch to an old-timer, she can see all the possible consequences, none of them good. She wonders if she’s getting old.

  Early one morning while she’s driving to work, flying along in the left-hand lane of the Southern Tier, the truck suddenly loses power, slows down, sputtering like she’s run out of gas. The needle’s past halfway. She’s awake enough to signal right and coast onto the loose shoulder. By then it’s completely dead, it just clicks once when she turns the key.

  She props the hood open to take a look. Everything seems to be in place, the battery cables are solid, the belts and hoses are all connected. The Apalachin exit is just around the bend; she leaves the hood up and starts walking. She’s nearly to the ramp when a state trooper pulls in behind her, his tires crunching.

  “Nice timing,” she says before turning around.

  She accepts a ride to the truck plaza, where there’s a pay phone. She thanks the guy, making it clear that it’s okay to leave, but he curls around the pumps and idles near the far entrance of the lot like he’s keeping an eye on her.

  She calls the liquor store to say she’ll be late. The truck she has towed to a garage in Apalachin she finds in the Yellow Pages, with instructions to call her before they do anything. Cy and Eileen are already at work, so she asks her mother to come pick her up, then drives her mother home and takes her old LeSabre to work. All day she broods on how much the truck’s going to cost. It’s got 140,000 miles on it, but most of that’s highway, driving back and forth to Auburn. Shelving margarita mix, she takes a minute to figure out how many times she’s made the drive—something like five hundred. But the truck’s never given her problems before, and it’s a part of her and Tommy.

  At the end of the day she calls the garage, but they haven’t had a chance to look at it. When she gets home, she asks Eileen what she thinks. It sounds like something electrical, Eileen guesses; it could be as simple as a cracked distributor cap or it could be more involved, like a bad alternator, she’ll just have to wait and see.

  What Patty wants isn’t a diagnosis as much as some guidance. She’s not going to talk to Tommy until she sees him this weekend. Does Eileen know a local garage that will do an honest job, like the Hilltop? Maybe Cy could talk to Trace.

  “You didn’t know?” Eileen says. “Trace is in Syracuse. He got a sponsor up there.”

  “That’s great,” Patty says, yet she feels stung, like finding out an old boyfriend from high school is getting married.

  Eileen goes on, oblivious. Towing the truck on a flatbed from Apalachin would be expensive. It’s better to find out what’s wrong with it before she does anything.

  The next day when she calls the garage the mechanic says she’s going to need a whole new wiring harness. They’ll have to special-order the part because the truck’s so old. He does the math out loud for her. With labor, they’re looking somewhere around five hundred.

  He waits for her decision. In the old days she would have told him she needed to check with her husband. She’s tempted to do it now, just to buy herself some time. Instead, a simple logic kicks in. She was willing to spend three hundred, three-fifty tops, so this is just a hundred and fifty extra. Would she trade the truck for a hundred and fifty dollars?

  “Go ahead,” she says.

  As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she knows she’s made a mistake.

  The feeling that she screwed up stays with her until she tells Tommy everything. She’s relieved when he agrees with her that the truck’s got a lot of life left in it. He doesn’t seem surprised that the problem was the wiring harness.

  “How much?” he asks, because she’s pussyfooted up to it.

  “Five hundred.”

  “That’s not bad,” he says with a shrug.

  And then two weeks later, as she’s bumping over the railroad crossing north of town, the head gasket blows and the engine spews a geyser of coolant that films the windshield and stops traffic in both directions. She hears what the guy driving the wrecker says, and the guy at the garage, and Eileen and Cy and her mother, even Tommy (who’s not mad at her, just bummed), all of them giving her the same advice, and while she finally does let go of the truck, cleaning out the cab before it’s hauled off to the junkyard, there’s some small part of her that insists it can still be fixed.

  LACERATIONS

  IT’S APRIL WHEN HER MOTHER FIELDS THE CALL FROM THE CHAPLAIN and immediately calls Patty at work. Tommy’s in the hospital. He’s going to be okay, they said; they just wanted to notify her.

  “What happened?” Patty asks from the manager’s booth overlooking the rows of booze.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “What hospital’s he at?”

  “I guess the one there.”

  Patty tries the counselor but it just rings. There’s no point going home, but she does anyway, dialing until her ears are sore. She’s taking a break when the phone rings.

  It’s a collect call—Tommy, from the infirmary.

  “I figured they’d screw it up,” he says. “It’s nothing, I just had a little accident in the kitchen. A couple stitches is all. They’re not even going to keep me overnight.”

  Now that she knows he’s all right, Patty can break down.

  “Whoa, whoa,” he says. “It’s just a couple of little cuts.”

  “Where are they?” she asks, thinking of his hands.

  “On my lower back.”

  “How do you cut your back?”

  “I wasn’t watching where I was going and I kind of backed into the edge of this table. It was just one of those dumb mistakes. Don’t worry, they’re taking care of me here.”

  “How many times did you back into it?”

  “Hey,” Tommy says. “It’s all taken care of. Like I said, it was a mistake.”

  Sometimes on trailers when he’s asleep she’ll run a finger over the three short scars, but when she asks him to explain he just says that’s over and they end up fighting. “You don’t want to know,” he says, and while it’s true, in some way she already does.

  SPACE INVADERS

  THAT SUMMER MARKS TEN YEARS HE’S BEEN IN AUBURN. THOUGH they don’t celebrate the occasion, it’s hard not to look back (to look forward, the stretch ahead ev
en longer). Tommy’s gotten better at managing his time the last couple of years, setting goals instead of just living for their next FRP He’s earned certificates in construction carpentry and cabinetmaking, machine shop and small-engine repair, and has a regular work assignment stamping license plates. It’s boring, and he only makes thirty cents an hour, barely enough to cover his cigarettes at the commissary. Patty knows he’s ashamed of having to rely on her money orders, so anything that lets him pay his own way is a help.

  In the same way, Patty feels she’s taking advantage of her mother. She and Casey have been in her house for too long. At this point she doesn’t see how they’ll ever leave. The down payment for the used Horizon she drives ate up what little savings she had. She doesn’t even like the car—it was all she could afford—and now on the first of every month she has an extra bill she can’t let slide. Her mother says she understands if Patty can’t give her anything for rent, but Patty thinks she needs to at least help with the food and the utilities.

  Some months she can’t. She’s been bouncing between jobs. At Kentucky Fried Chicken, her shift supervisor’s a high school kid, and she lasts only three weeks. She waitresses for the catering service out of the Treadway Inn, but summer’s a slow time. They only do functions one or two nights a week, and it’s straight hourly, no tips, and the heavy trays are hard on her back.

  She’s careful with her money, but Casey’s growing. When they hit the back-to-school sales, she finds he’s gained two sizes. He’s going to be bigger than Tommy, except he’s not athletic. Like any kid, he loves TV and playing video games, and as Christmas approaches, he lobbies hard for an Atari system like his friend Travis’s. She tells him they can’t afford it, but he thinks she’s just joking with him, that after they open all the presents she’ll surprise him with one last box. Her mother offers to lend her the money or to buy it herself, and Patty has to tell her not to. A week before Christmas she sits down with Casey to explain the situation and finds herself apologizing, but angrily, as if it’s someone’s fault besides hers.