Pete yanked a snack pack of Doritos off the impulse display rack and dropped it next to the Camels, then counted out change and clattered it on the counter instead of handing it over, which usually pissed Tom off. But he let it go. The guy was miserable, you could tell just by looking at him, and Tom both hated and felt sorry for him because he reminded him of his father. There was just a loser type, and this guy was it. “They ever going to come back?” he asked Pete, jerking his head in the direction of the condo construction along the reservoir. Lakeview Arms. Really it should have been “Pondview,” but “Lakeview” sounded better. They were described as luxury units, but everything had stalled a month or two after the meltdown, and the project had been on hold for a year.
“Is who going to come back?” Pothead Pete looked at the deli slicer as he ripped open the Doritos with his teeth.
Duh, Tom wanted to say, but didn’t. “The condos.”
“Fuck if I know.” Pete was busy rummaging in his pockets.
“But you worked there, right?” Tom tossed him a book of matches.
Pete caught it without thanking him and said, “Before I got shit-canned I did.” He wanted to light up right there in the store, Tom could tell, but instead he cupped the cigarette and asked, “Hey, you hiring?”
Tom started to shake his head, then caught himself. What skin would it be off him to throw a few shifts to this guy, especially with the holidays coming? He still felt kind of guilty about the way he’d tossed him out of the crash site that night, and it would give him a chance to be home more, try to figure out how to repair things with Alison. Ignoring the dismay he felt at remembering that his marriage needed repair, he gave Pete—Cliff—an application and a pen, told him that if everything checked out, he could start on Sunday morning. Cliff seemed to stifle a groan, but he muttered Thanks before slouching to the door and saying he’d bring the application back the next time he came in.
The shack empty of customers, Tom called Alison. “I can’t talk,” she said, by way of answering. “I’m late already.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you later?”
A pause, during which he dared to hope she had changed her mind. Then she said, “I just really feel like going alone this time. I know it’s stupid, but I keep thinking that if we do things differently, the results will be different. You know?”
He did know; he was tempted to believe in this superstition himself. “Okay. But will you call me as soon as you find out?”
“No. I’ll tell you in person, whatever it is.”
“It’ll be good news, I promise.”
“We don’t know that,” she said. “Don’t get your hopes up.” It sounded more like an order than a wish for his well-being.
“See you around four thirty, then. I can’t wait.”
She said, “Don’t go yet,” and he kept the phone to his ear, gratified to think that she needed another moment of his moral support. Instead she told him, “My parents are coming for dinner.”
Trying to keep his voice neutral, he asked, “Tonight? Why?”
“I thought it would be nice, if we have something to celebrate.”
“But like you said, we might not.” The bell over the shack’s door rang, announcing the entrance of three high school girls. Because his father had trained him to expect teenagers to try to lift something, Tom kept his eye on them as they shuffled toward the candy aisle. “Either way, wouldn’t it be better if it was just us? I mean—either way?”
“I gotta go,” Alison said, putting the phone down. The girls brought their selections up to the counter—Jolly Ranchers, Sky Bars, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. One, with a streak of pink in her bangs, stood back as the other two paid.
Tom refrained from asking if they had Mrs. Carbone for English. They looked about the right age. “This your breakfast?” he said instead. “Nice.”
He actually meant it, as in I wish I could eat a candy bar for breakfast, but the girls took his comment as sarcasm. “Whatever,” the pink-haired one said, as she grabbed the bag from him and strode out leading the other two. He caught what she said under her breath to make the other girls giggle: Perv.
He was angry, but only for a moment. Then he saw how funny, in fact, it was. Tom Carbone, once Chilton Regional High’s pass-yards record holder and homecoming king, reduced to working a crappy job running his father’s old crappy convenience store.
And was funny the right word? Probably not, but he was damned if he knew what was. He’d never been a student, one to pay attention in English or any other class. That had been Alison’s thing—one of the things he’d ruined.
For the thousandth time he remembered that he didn’t deserve her. But watching the high school girls climb laughing into a Volvo worth three of his trucks, he resolved again to do whatever it took to become a husband who did. He’d turn things around somehow; he just wasn’t sure how yet.
His father-in-law’s Buick was already sitting behind Alison’s car on their side of the duplex when Tom pulled up, not even four thirty. He breathed out a curse and parked on the street. On the seat beside him was a bag containing two cartons of ice cream, to give Alison a choice. He’d driven too fast on the way home from the Stewart’s store, wanting to hear whatever the news was and not wanting the ice cream to melt.
He knew she’d appreciate his thoughts behind bringing the ice cream: either they would celebrate and pretend she was already pregnant enough to have cravings, or they would eat their way through the disappointment—again—via Philly Vanilla and Heavenly Hash. These were the only two situations in which she allowed sugar in the house. Otherwise, there was nothing except what was contained in fruit and whatever the manufacturers put in Diet Coke, which Alison bought by the case. She called it her “secret vice,” which made no sense to Tom because she was not secretive about it at all; one whole fridge door was filled with cans so she could be sure there was always a cold one waiting.
Alison met him at the door. Seeing the red in her eyes, he drew her against him and said, “Okay.” He’d been expecting this, and not. He felt more angry than sad, which surprised him. “It’s okay. Next time.”
Mutely, she nodded against his chest, then pulled away as her parents entered the kitchen from the living room, where they must have all been sitting when he drove in. How long had they been there, and how long had they known? No matter how many times he tried to convince Alison that he should hear such news first, she always said she didn’t see why it mattered, they were all family, her parents deserved to know whether they were finally going to have a grandchild or not.
Helen put an arm around her daughter. Doug shook Tom’s hand and said, “Sorry, guy.” But his blue eyes held the usual accusation Tom saw there.
He never liked looking into those eyes, even though they were so much like Alison’s. So blue, so light, they startled people. Drew comments. On Alison they were pretty, the first thing people noticed, the thing she was most proud of about her looks even though of course she’d had nothing to do with it.
Doug Armstrong’s eyes were a different story. On him, Tom thought, the blue was a sinister disguise, designed to tell people Trust me, I’m harmless. Not dominant; Tom remembered that from biology in tenth grade. He couldn’t remember the word for what blue was, beaten out by the darker what—pigments? All he knew was that if he and Alison had a kid, it would have brown eyes. All the Carbones did. It was in the genes, like athletic ability or an ear for music. Or being a drunk—but Tom shut down that notion as soon as it entered his mind.
“Tom, so sorry.” His mother-in-law made the greeting sound like a condolence, coming toward him with outstretched arms. However cold Doug’s eyes made him feel, Helen’s false warmth was worse. Though she’d gotten sober ten years ago, when he and Alison were sophomores, it was clear she white-knuckled it all the way; she’d always seemed fragile to Tom, freeze-dried, as if missing the one element—alcohol—that would restore her to her normal state. Against his will, he let himself be
taken into a hug. “I told Alison already, this is just a setback, not a defeat. You’ll keep trying, it’ll take. You’re both young and healthy. You’ve just had some bad luck so far.”
Bad luck was not what the doctor called it—he said it had to do with that first fall, and how the doctor in charge of the miscarriage, back then, had handled things. Tom came away from that appointment convinced he and Alison would never have children of their own, a conviction the second miscarriage, a year later, seemed to confirm. He understood you weren’t supposed to think of it that way—that you could adopt a child and it would still be your “own”—but he knew what he meant by it, and he knew everyone else did, too. For better or worse, he and Alison still wanted a kid with a mix of their two bloods running through its veins. A kid that looked like them. He or she might inherit Helen’s craggy voice, or Alison’s shortness, or Tom’s father’s apparent wish to destroy himself. But it didn’t matter. That was what they wanted. Tom hoped for a girl for the first one; Alison, a boy. At least, that’s how they’d started out thinking about it. Now they just wanted a baby that would make it to the second trimester.
“I got some stuff,” Alison told them all now, gesturing toward the kitchen table, where she had set out tubs of prepared food from the supermarket. “If it had been better news, I would have cooked something. But—you know.” She rubbed a hand across her forehead. Helen said Poor baby and began putting the food back in the fridge.
“Nobody’s hungry, anyway. Right?” she said. Tom knew he couldn’t say that in fact he was hungry, not having eaten anything since the two full-size Snickers bars he’d pulled off the candy shelf as soon as the pink-haired girl and her friends left the store laughing at him.
He told Alison he’d put the food away, and sent her and her parents into the living room. He took a spoon and ladled potato salad, egg salad, and coleslaw into his mouth without using a plate or napkin. When he sensed he was staying away from the others too long, he put the tubs back in the fridge, checked his teeth in the powder-room mirror, and went in to gauge the mood in the living room.
They were all sitting around looking at the space in front of them; no one spoke.
“Everything’s going to change around here,” Tom said, feeling that in this moment, in his own house, he had to assert something or lose what little power he had. He was referring to all of it: Alison and a successful pregnancy; their being able to move from this crappy duplex into a house of their own; his finding the money somewhere to upgrade the shack, adding the diner counter his father had always dreamed of installing; the state of his and Alison’s union. Doug and Helen nodded, raising their glasses (beer for him, seltzer with lemon for her). “I got ice cream,” Tom said, remembering the cartons only then, but Alison shook her head and told them all she was going to bed; it hadn’t been the best day.
Trust
A few days after her encounter with Rachel Feinbloom at the pizza shop, Susanne came home from dropping Joy off for her shift at the nursing home and found Gil going through a sheaf of bank papers at the kitchen table.
“Suse,” he said. He was staring at a statement as if it contained words in a language he could not comprehend. “You didn’t put money in for me, did you? Into the business account?”
She laughed with a degree of bitterness she had not quite realized she felt. “I’m serious,” he told her. “Seventeen hundred dollars. I didn’t do that. It wasn’t you?”
“Of course it wasn’t,” she told him. “One, I don’t have any extra money, remember?” A dig referring to the folly he had shown by investing the trust Susanne’s parents had left her, along with his own savings, in a venture he’d been told was a sure thing but that turned out to be a hoax from which they couldn’t recover what he’d put in.
Folly was a generous word for it. A betrayal is what it was, they both knew, and Susanne had allowed herself to consider it justification for the betrayal she’d committed herself against him, with Martin, though Gil didn’t know about that yet.
“And two,” she went on, “even if I did have it, I would have just given it to you.” She moved toward the table and held her hand out for the statement. He showed her. “You should check with the bank,” she said. “Check with Mark Feinbloom. He seems pretty interested in our financial affairs.”
When Gil asked what she meant, she remembered she’d decided not to tell him about Rachel’s solicitous inquiry—I hope everything’s okay—when they’d run into each other at Adriano’s. “I just mean he could probably trace that deposit,” she said. “If you wanted to know.”
What was it that had made her add that last line? It went without saying, so why did she propose that there might be an “if”?
When Gil didn’t respond, she knew he was considering the same question. If it was a bank mistake, wasn’t it up to the bank to fix? If neither of them had deposited the money, it had to be a mistake, and inquiring about it would only result in that amount being subtracted from an account already too low.
“I’m not the kind of guy who doesn’t ask about stuff like this,” he murmured, as if reminding himself. Susanne remained silent. “But it’s not that much money. It’s not that big a deal. We’ll see.” He tossed the bank statement to the other end of the table and rubbed his hand over the top of his head, where the hair had begun thinning in earnest during the past year.
Last May, just before he’d confessed to her about the money, he’d looked so pale and sick that she feared he was going to say he had a terminal disease. So when she understood what it was he was telling her instead, it took a few moments to sink in because she experienced those moments of relief first, before actually hearing him say that he’d taken the bulk of her inheritance out of their joint account, fully assured that he would be restoring the original investment within a few months along with the first of many returns. Had she yelled? She didn’t think so. More likely, she couldn’t find her voice. “I can’t believe you did that,” she kept saying, when it came back to her. “Do you realize what you did?”
Now, watching him wear away his hair, she felt the same sick feeling he must have felt that day before asking her to sit down. She’d known she was going to tell Gil about Martin; she just hadn’t decided when, and she didn’t think it would be so soon after she’d broken things off with him after resuming the affair (despite her intentions) when classes began again in September. Did she choose this moment to keep herself from being tempted again—to reinforce, in her own mind, the fact that it was over? Or was it because Gil looked so forlorn already, trying to make sense of his accounts, that she figured his spirits didn’t have that much farther to fall?
She was wrong. After she told him (and what words had she used? She couldn’t quite remember, even a few minutes after she’d said them. “I had an affair”? “I slept with someone”? She’d come up with different options in her vision for this scene but forgot them all when it came time), he just sat there looking at her with an unchanged expression, as if he were still waiting to hear what she had to say.
Was it possible she had only imagined telling him? “Did you hear me?” she asked.
He shot out a bullet of a guffaw. “What kind of question is that? I’m sitting right here. You just told me you slept with somebody. How could I not hear you?”
She sat back, feeling chastened. When he didn’t continue, she thought for a moment that the anxiety in the silence between them might smother her. “Don’t you want to know who it was?”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it? It was somebody besides me. That’s all that counts.” Then, both of them understanding that he was just biting the bullet to get through what was inevitable, he sighed and said, “Okay, go ahead.”
She told him Martin. He’d been bracing himself, but at hearing the name he furrowed his brow and said, “Who?”
She reminded him: Gil had met him only once, during the barbecue they’d hosted on Labor Day. Susanne had never talked much about him before that, first because she was afraid th
at telling the truth about Martin’s talent—how exceptional he was—would threaten Gil somehow (though later she recognized this as only a wish of her own she felt ashamed of; she’d always wanted her husband to aspire to more, though he was perfectly content fixing things and restoring them to function. He was a craftsman, he’d always said, not an artist. There was a difference. If you need to be with an artist, he told her, shortly before he proposed, we should break up now, because it’s not me, and at the time she told him Don’t be silly, it doesn’t matter, you do work you’re proud of and that’s what counts) and later, after sleeping with Martin, of course she did not bring up his name.
When he understood who she was talking about, Gil frowned further. “But he’s—”
“I know.”
“I mean—”
“That doesn’t really matter, though, does it? I mean, what difference does it make that he’s black?”
“Black? That’s not what I was going to say.”
“What, then?” Of course he’d been going to say black. But she let it slide because she was in no position not to.
Gil sat back in his chair. “I was going to say he’s a grad student, right? I mean, how old is he?”
She shrugged, not because she wasn’t sure, but to buy time. “Late twenties. I don’t know, exactly.” Both lies; he was twenty-four, which he’d confessed to her the second time they were in bed together.
“Jeez, Suse.” Gil took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. She’d always found endearing about him the fact that when he cursed, he did it so mildly—not out of prudishness but because he considered lavish swearing a lack of personal control. Between the massaging he’d done of his hair and face since they’d started talking, it looked almost as if he’d erased an entire dimension of his features, using the force of his shock and dismay to flatten himself. “That makes him closer to Joy’s age than ours.”
How Will I Know You? Page 10
