Don't Make Me Stop Now

by Michael Parker

  “You have no idea how much you’ve hurt me,” she said to herself as he lugged his mother’s hook rug to the pile.

  “What’s that?” said B. R.

  She hadn’t heard him come up.

  “What does B. R. stand for?” she asked.

  “Ben Randolph.”

  “Not Benjamin Randolph?”

  “Just Ben.”

  “Why not go by Ben?”

  “Just never have,” he said. He seemed shy now. She saw that he’d rather ask questions than answer them.

  “Would you like something to drink?” she asked.

  “That would be nice,” he said. “But I ought to get all this down first.” He pointed to the piles. The garage had no door and she knew she should not leave Christopher’s stuff out in the open, since they’d been broken into before, and even if nothing was stolen a storm could blow rain in and ruin everything. Yet she’d already started this attic cleaning. She’d hired herself an attic cleaner.

  When he finished she heard his knock at the back door. She offered him a beer.

  “No thanks.Never touch it.”

  “Never?” She didn’t know what she’d do without a drink at the end of the day. She knew she was drinking too much in the eyes of, say, her grandmother or her family doctor, but she never had a hangover and never drank before six and she felt she had full license to, if not drown her misery, bathe it a bit each night.

  “Oh, I used to.”

  She felt bad for pushing, but he didn’t seem at all bothered. In fact, it seemed he wanted to talk, despite his earlier reserve when she’d asked about his name.

  “I quit going on seven months ago. Six months, twenty three days in fact.”

  She got him a Coke from the refrigerator and tried to change the subject, for it seemed too much like her job, listening to the testimonies of the recently rehabbed. He was talking about his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and though she considered herself a compassionate person, she had an unwarranted and unfair distrust of self-help of any kind, especially those groups that seemed to her Sunday school dressed up in street clothes. She half-listened as he described his home group, how often he attended meetings, his sponsor who was helping him now with step 9.

  “What’s step 9?” She didn’t want to be rude. It was hard to enjoy the beer she’d poured into a fluted schooner, but she could not simply ignore him.

  “Step 9’s about making restitution to the ones you’ve hurt.”

  “And who are you making restitution to?” Before the words were across the table she realized how nosy she sounded. She had the childish urge to put her hand over her mouth. She thought so constantly and obsessively of Christopher now that communion with others, on any other topic, felt impossible.

  “You,” he said.

  She put down her beer. “No, really,” she said, and he interrupted her to say, “I’m serious, Miss . . .” and in the silence she realized he was waiting for her to say her name, which she did not want to say even though she would write him a check soon enough and he would know.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You had a break-in back a couple years ago.”

  As she felt the blood rush to her face, Laura put her hand around the glass of beer.

  “That was you?”

  He tried to look penitent, which made her even angrier.

  “Get out,” she said.

  He held up his hands. “I’m not here to . . .”

  “I don’t care what you’re here to do. You’re not here to clean my attic, that’s for sure.”

  “Really, if you’ll tell me your name so I won’t have to keep calling you ma’am.”

  “You stole my husband’s checks. You know my name.”

  “That was a long time ago. Maybe you kept your name when you married him. For all I know you’re not even married anymore.”

  She stood and reached for the phone. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Won’t you at least let me apologize? I just came here to make amends, I wasn’t planning on charging you for . . .”

  “Oh, so you’re going to make up the price of the stuff you took? Let’s see, some silver, a CD player, a VCR, a television, my husband’s checkbook. What about the less tangible things you took from us? The safety, the peace of mind, the happiness. You think you can pay that back also?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re crying, don’t cry.”

  She started dialing. He was gone by the time the 911 operator came on.

  “Just forget it,” she said, and hung up.

  She drank the rest of her beer in a swallow and poured another, took it into the living room. Drinking, she remembered the night of the break-in, the party they’d gone to, one of Christopher’s coworkers, an obligatory affair with all the canned laughter and dead silences and salted peanuts of office parties. She’d drunk too much jug wine. She barely remembered the ride home, tense and stiff, as if she’d carried the forced conviviality away on her clothes. In the car she criticized a woman Christopher worked with for no better reason than her cocktail chitchat was tedious. As if her own at these affairs was quotable. Christopher had started in on her then, her ambiguous statements interpreted, her judgments examined.

  They’d fought their way inside and carried on their fight in the kitchen and the creepiest part of that night was this: they did not realize someone had been there until the next morning. They’d gone to bed still angry, Christopher turning away from her to read, she too tipsy to read curling wine-groggy and anxious into a fitful night’s tossing. The next morning, when Christopher went down to make coffee, he’d noticed the spaces where their possessions had been, discovered the missing CD player, the silver pilfered from a bottom cabinet, a week or two later his checks missing from a file cabinet in his study. She did not care in the least about losing these things; what bothered her was how they could have settled down to their miserable sleep in a house violated, how they could have ignored it, not felt it, another presence in the sanctity they’d managed to preserve during the roughest of times. She realized later that despite the tension of that night, the way they’d both gone to sleep still angry, they — at least she — had pretended an invincibility no longer possible. She’d assumed it would all be fine in the morning. In memory the burglary seemed the beginning of the end.

  The day after she ran B. R. Bradshaw off, Laura had an alarm system installed. It took the better part of the week, as she opted for the type that activated each window, the most expensive system available. She called her lawyer to see if there was some way Christopher might share the cost of this extravagance, as it was his defection that made the purchase necessary.

  “I’m good, Laura, but I’m not that good.”

  “It’s his fault,” she said.

  “Maybe you should have checked with me before you had it installed.”

  “I still need it whether he pays or not,” she said. She thought of telling her lawyer the story of B. R. Bradshaw, but so far she had told no one, which was strange — she remembered half-hoping he might hit on her that first day so that she might use his advance to garner sympathy from her pity-depleted friends. But it did not feel right, sharing this secret with anyone else. And it seemed more powerful if kept a secret, even from Christopher, though the thought had occurred to her that if he knew he might even come home. Perhaps this incident would remind him of the vow he took. She’d never thought to take it seriously herself when they were content, but now it seemed a monumental promise. Love, honor, protect. If the greatest of these was love, she’d settle for the least of these, the last.

  Twice during the next week she set off the alarm accidentally and had to apologize to the sullen dispatcher at the police department. The junk from the attic remained in the garage, a reminder of many things — the return of the burglar to the scene of the crime, Christopher’s leaving, a cleaner attic, the coming of spring. She liked looking at it out the kitchen window at dusk, a bourbon warming her stomach, fueling her i
ndignation at the way things were.

  On Saturday evening she heard a noise at the back porch. Immediately afterward the alarm went off, and she grabbed the phone and ran to the kitchen to find Christopher at the door, his keys in hand, his face screwed into a wince at the bleating of the alarm. She tried not to smile as she held up her hand to signal for him to wait, called the police department to explain that it was an accident, switched the alarm off, and stepped out on the back porch.

  “Jesus, Laura.”

  Laura shrugged. She looked behind him to the shiny Volkswagen Jetta in the drive. Christopher wore gym clothes, and was sweating. Before he left the most exercise he managed was a walk around the block.

  “New image, new car?”

  “It’s Sydney’s. Mine’s in the shop. Speaking of new toys.”

  “You forget we were broken into. I live here by myself. I need to feel safe.”

  She regretted saying this, as it suggested to him that she’d felt safe when he was around, but he seemed too flustered at setting off the alarm to pay much attention.

  “I came to get some things out of the attic.”

  “You might have called.”

  “I did, remember? You told me to fuck off and hung up on me.”

  “I had it cleaned,” she said, and when he looked confused she added, “The attic.”

  “What do you mean you had it cleaned?”

  She didn’t answer, for she thought she had given it away, her secret, her attic cleaner.

  “I mean I cleaned out the attic.”

  “You got rid of my things?”

  She crossed her arms and nodded at the garage.

  “Oh great,” he said. “You get an alarm for your stuff and you leave mine out for the taking.”

  “You want it, take it. I don’t think anything’s missing.”

  “I’ll have to rent a truck.”

  “I know a guy who has a truck. He’ll deliver it. He’s pretty cheap.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, do you? I don’t send Sydney over here to pick up my mail.”

  She couldn’t decide whether to laugh or slap him. It amused her, Christopher assuming the housebreaker was her Sydney, and it infuriated her that he thought her capable of replacing him in a few weeks’ time with some guy who owned a truck.

  “Some of us find it hard to go from one lover to the next without even stopping to take a shower.”

  Christopher said, “Well, who is he then?”

  She thought she heard a bit of jealousy in his voice. Maybe I should have played along, she thought, but what’s the point of stooping? Besides, she wouldn’t exactly win when Ben Randolph showed up in his janitor pants. Christopher would only feel sorry for her. She wouldn’t mind pity from her friends, but she was strong enough suddenly not to need it from him.

  “He’s just some workman. I hired him to do some yard-work.”

  Christopher looked around the yard.

  “He hasn’t started yet,” she said.

  He sighed and turned to look at the garage. “Okay,” he said. “When?”

  “Next Saturday.”

  “You’re going to leave it out here for a whole week?”

  “Take what you can. Unless Sydney’s particular about her car.”

  “Why do you insist on making this harder?”

  “Because you do?” she said, and she left him there on the porch. From the kitchen window she watched him haul a few boxes to the trunk of the Volkswagen before giving up and driving off. Before he’d even backed out of the drive she was on the phone to B. R. She felt oddly elated calling him, as if it could not wait another second, and was disappointed when the monotonal British lady came on to ask her to leave a message.

  That week she succumbed to leaving her own machine on when she was at work in case B. R. called. She’d asked him to call if he had any questions, otherwise she’d see him Saturday morning, but she’d assumed he’d call to let her know he was coming anyway, and found herself a little disappointed at night when she came home to no blinks on the machine. It wasn’t until late Friday night, sitting up at the kitchen table with a cooking magazine and a bottle of Zinfandel, that she realized she was anticipating his arrival as she would a date. But he wasn’t a date, he was a thief. She wondered if he’d been watching the house for some time, if in his surveillance he had learned things about them that they didn’t know, or care to acknowledge, themselves. Perhaps he was more than just a garden-variety thief; perhaps he was expert at reading the subtleties of the homes he violated, choosing to break and enter into only those homes that were already broken.

  Oh, come on, she told herself as she corked the bottle and rinsed out her glass so she would not have to come upon the red dregs staining the glass in the morning, he’s just some brainwashed dry drunk who wants my forgiveness. Having someone ask her forgiveness seemed luxurious to her, no matter that it was the wrong party doing the asking.

  Early the next morning — an hour before she planned to get up — she heard a car in the drive and looked out of her window to see him already out of the truck, crossing the yard to the garage. She took a twenty-minute shower, which did not succeed in washing away the bleariness. She’d been over-served, and she told herself it was a weekend, but still she felt guilty, as if he would take one look at her and know that she stayed up late with a bottle. She knew how reformed drinkers could turn sanctimonious about everyone else’s drinking habits. Like divorced people she knew who became suddenly and implausibly knowledgeable about other people’s marriages, as if they could sense from a tense word or brusque gesture everything that was hidden from view.

  He was far too chipper, and she told him so.

  He laughed. “Used to I’d be getting home about this time. Though most weekends I didn’t bother going home at all. Now I have a meeting I go to every morning. Dawn Patrol. Start the day out strong.”

  She offered coffee, but he declined, saying it would take several trips and he had other work to do that afternoon. She tried not to show her disappointment.

  “Where am I taking it anyway?”

  “I’ll have to ride with you, I’m awful at directions.”

  He put the box he’d grabbed down on the tailgate of the truck. “You sure?”

  “You don’t allow passengers in your truck?”

  “I just thought, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Well, that you hired me to do it because you didn’t want to do it yourself.”

  “I’m not going to help you unload it. I’m just going to navigate.”

  “Okay,” he said, but she could see from his expression that it was not okay, that he did not approve. She went in for more coffee and a doughnut from the carton she’d bought at the store the night before to share with him. Why do I need his approval? she thought, going teary at the kitchen sink. He’s the one that needs something from me. Still, when the truck was almost loaded she poured him a glass of juice, took the doughnuts out to the back stoop, and was pleased when he sat down to eat.

  “Is it hard for you, not drinking?”

  He chewed for a while, swallowed. He did not look at her.

  “You think about it all the time. You know that feeling you get when you leave the house to go to work or on a trip and you realize you might have left the stove on, and you can’t rest until you go back and check it out?”

  She nodded, unable to speak. She knew that feeling well these days. She would manage a few seconds of distraction, or blissful freedom from thoughts of Christopher, and then her not-yet-believable circumstance would crop up to antagonize her. It had not gotten the least bit better so far, and it had already been three months.

  She knew a little something about denying something you loved. But what was a bottle compared with a heart you cannot imagine living without? Who was he to go around claiming to be maimed, when it was only corn, barley, hops, and sugar he was battling, rather than
heartbreak, misery, loneliness unto cooking shows?

  “I used to imagine what my life would be like without booze,” he said, reaching for another doughnut. “I’d even have dreams, or visions, of what it would be. Clean white sheets on my bed. A good shave every morning.”

  He caught her stealing a glance at his cheeks and blushed.

  “I thought everything would be in control, you know. That everybody I hurt would take me right back, and when I’d come around they’d be glad to see me. I figured I would never again have to stick my hand between couch cushions in my sister’s den searching for dropped quarters. I thought maybe I’d be able to stay with a woman longer than a few months. Fresh start, clean slate, second chance.”

  Laura tried hard to listen but found herself thinking of how she’d imagined her life without Christopher, of the deep loneliness and misery she’d envisioned, which had turned out to be true. So she was better off than this attic cleaner. At least there were no ravaged expectations. Her imagination had not swindled her.

  “I take it things aren’t perfect yet.”

  He turned away from her. “Let’s just say I’m a whole lot better off than I was.”

  “Let’s go,” she said. She went inside to put away the doughnuts and find her wallet. She did not think she was a whole lot better off than she was before, she did not want to be better off than she was before, she wanted her husband back and yet she knew that he wasn’t coming back. And she knew also that the home B. R. Bradshaw violated was already violated, that she could not blame him or herself or even Christopher for the dissolution. It may have seemed like snow down south — she might have pretended to be caught unprepared, ill equipped to handle the cleanup — but the disturbance had been brewing for some time, and she’d done nothing to take shelter.

  In the truck she gave directions to get them out of the city, then lost herself in bitterness until she looked up to find him scrutinizing her.

  “Which way now?” he asked.

  They were stopped at a light at the edge of the clustering strip malls that ringed the city. She knew only vaguely where she was going. Several times some years ago, when they were remodeling their house, she’d gone to the landfill with Christopher, but he’d always driven and once they got out of town into the country, the side roads all looked alike to her. She didn’t want to ask, but he would know soon enough where they were going.