The Far End of Happy

by Kathryn Craft

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “The store office.”

  They started down the driveway, but the sudden dark and a light fog distorted her senses. Nothing looked right. For the first time, it occurred to Ronnie that the “something” he wanted to show her might be a gun.

  “I’m not going any farther,” she said. If Jeff insisted on going to the store office, he was going alone.

  Her footsteps crunched on the gravel as Ronnie ran back to the relative safety of the living room. The room for living. Her mind frantic, seeking options. They lived in a dark, secluded area. The pasture light that used to come on at dusk had been added to a fix-it list that was now impossibly long. The boys were up two flights of stairs. She couldn’t possibly get them out of the house before Jeff got back. She couldn’t think. Was he really violent?

  The door latch clicked; Ronnie’s heart jumped as Jeff entered the room. He reached into his pocket. She pressed her back against the wall, breath ragged. Oh god, what if he has a gun? When he withdrew his hand, he passed her what at first looked like a marshmallow. Two sheets of paper that had been folded over and over like the origami fortune-tellers she used to make as a child that told you who you were, what you liked, and who you loved. The edges were rounded, compressed, and worn—as if they had, indeed, been through the wash. He said, “Read it.”

  Her knees would hold her no longer. She collapsed into a chair. The paper had grown brittle in the dryer. Tension mounted as she picked at it with shaking hands, carefully peeling back its layers. He stared at her as she read, making it harder to concentrate. The letter said he loved her, that she was the best thing in his life, and to please give his love to the boys. He said he hated his mother. He asked to be buried beside his father…

  Ronnie went to the kitchen and got the dusty phone book down from the top shelf.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “You need to talk to somebody. There’s a suicide hotline—”

  “I’m not talking to any hotline.”

  “They have people trained to help you.” Lines and lines of numbers—how was she supposed to focus, to find the one she needed?

  “I’m not going to talk to some stranger,” he said.

  “Then call Paco.” Paco was the manager at the restaurant where Ronnie used to work, the only person Ronnie had ever thought of as Jeff’s buddy. A drinking buddy, when both men were single, and until they’d had kids. He’d stood up for Jeff at their wedding.

  “I haven’t talked to him in years.”

  “I go years between talking to some of my old friends too, but we always reconnect,” Ronnie said, continuing to flip through the phone book for that hotline. “He’d want you to call.”

  “I’m not talking to him.”

  “Jeff, you’re hurting.” Emotion welled in her throat. Somehow, in strengthening her resolve to leave her husband, she’d found a new reserve of compassion for him. “You need to talk to someone. I know you want it to be me, but it can’t be.”

  Ronnie found the listing. She picked up the wall phone to dial. Jeff tore the receiver from her, then ripped the phone from the wall.

  A hole gaped from the sheetrock they had so lovingly hung. Ronnie sank to the floor beneath it. Jeff crossed to the opposite side of the kitchen and did the same. Their backs against the oak cupboards they’d installed when Andrew was a baby.

  They stared at each other for several minutes, Ronnie held hostage by choices she’d made when Jeff had seemed a different man. It had already been a long day, and as she sat there, the rush from its surprise ending began to wane.

  “We’re at a stalemate,” she finally said. “Guess I’ll have to watch you all night because I will not have the boys tripping over your dead body on their way to the bus stop tomorrow.”

  Ronnie sat with him for another fifteen minutes or so, not talking. At least he’s not drinking. Yet as the minutes dragged on, she saw the futility in this approach. She’d never be able to stay awake all night. How long could she guard Jeff? For the rest of their lives?

  “Never mind.” Ronnie stood. “I’m going to bed.”

  Ronnie washed her face and brushed her teeth but didn’t undress. Who was she kidding? No matter how exhausted she was, she’d never be able to relax into sleep with the threat of violence in the air. Her mind raced. She needed to get Jeff help, but how? She reached for the bedroom phone, but it wasn’t in its cradle. After looking all over the second floor, she found it where she had no doubt left it—on the sitting room bed. She tried to turn it on. Dead. Her cell phone was plugged in to charge at the store, where she left it every night. Why bother bringing it inside this fortress, where thick stone walls obscured a signal?

  If only she could keep Jeff from drinking. Keep him talking. Distract him some way until she thought up a plan. Wondering what he was doing now, she slipped off her shoes and tiptoed down the stairs—but before she reached the kitchen, she heard the freezer drawer slide open and ice clunk against the side of a plastic mug. Then the front door. Jeff must have taken his drink to the porch so he could smoke.

  She had to act fast. Holding her breath as she passed the kitchen window, just feet away from where Jeff probably sat, she descended again.

  From her basement office, she called her therapist. Anita also worked at the Women in Crisis Center in Reading; she’d know what to do. Ronnie quickly apologized for the late hour—it was just past eleven thirty—and explained what was happening. Anita told her to hang up and call 911 and say that Jeff had threatened suicide and that she’d seen a note with his burial wishes detailed. “The note is important. Don’t forget,” she said.

  Ronnie had been up since five a.m. With this flow and ebb of late-night adrenaline added on to weeks of turmoil, her vision was starting to blur with exhaustion. She anticipated the relief as she handed Jeff over to authorities better equipped to deal with the situation.

  “Call now, Ronnie, and don’t leave him alone until someone arrives.”

  What would she do if Jeff pulled a gun, fight him for it? She called the police and gave the prompted report. To head back up the stairs, she had to summon meager scraps of courage and pretend the rest. She hated to admit that she was afraid of the man who had been her lover for more than a decade. She recalled her brother Teddy’s words when she’d told him she was divorcing Jeff: “My god, Ronnie, we’ve known that family our whole lives. You’d think you’d know him by now.”

  You’d think.

  Ronnie forced a casual air as she walked onto the porch in her stocking feet and flopped onto the squashed cushions of the rusting glider beside Jeff’s chair. The way his eyes lit up for a moment, as they always had when she walked into a room, ignited a small explosion in her heart.

  “I thought you were going to bed.” His words were slurring. How could that be? She’d only left him alone a short while.

  “How am I supposed to sleep after what you said tonight?”

  They sat for a half hour or so while Jeff added his cigarette smoke to a fog already determined to choke them off from the rest of the world. Beneath Ronnie, the glider creaked a distress signal into the night. Each stared off in a different direction. She still couldn’t look at him. He’d see right through her. Ronnie’s inadequate acting skills were the reason she never went along when the IRS audited Jeff; she’d trigger a bullshit meter a full block away. Let him try to defend his own shoddy tip reporting.

  The lulling rhythm of the glider, the relinquishment of demands to silence, the booze—she wasn’t sure why, but soon Jeff relaxed into his chair. On the table beside him, ice cubes melted at the bottom of the mug. Jeff used to make his Manhattans in squat “rocks” glasses, as any commercial bartender would. But for the past few years, he’d been making them in plastic beer mugs “so he wouldn’t have to get up as often.” Ronnie did the math. Chances were he was drinking nine to twelve shot
s of liquor on his nights off.

  For once, she was glad he was impaired. Ronnie no longer feared any sudden movements. As she looked out into the night, an occasional wing caught the porch light as bats swooped down for bugs.

  After a while, she sneaked a sideways glance; he’d let his glasses slide down on his nose. Why didn’t he push them up?

  Creak. Creak. Each crepitation ticked off another second until help arrived.

  Finally, the first pop of gravel beneath tires in the driveway. Jeff leaned forward; he’d heard it too. Soon headlights advanced around the corner of the porch.

  “Who on earth—?”

  Ronnie felt blame’s spotlight seeking her out.

  Another moment and the full length of the state police cruiser came into view. An evening that began with the removal of wedding rings had resulted in the arrival of police. Ronnie felt, for a moment, that it was her offense that was actionable.

  She finally hazarded a look in Jeff’s direction. His eyes were like weapons trained over the top of his glasses. Words sloshed around in his mouth before he spit them toward Ronnie: “I will never forgive you for this.”

  ronnie

  Two policemen got out of the car, Ronnie keenly aware of the peaceable scene they’d happened upon: a man and woman enjoying a spot of night air before bed. Ronnie stood and acknowledged that she had placed the call. She could feel the heat of Jeff’s presence behind her. One officer asked to speak with her in the house; the other said to Jeff, “I hear you’re not doing too well tonight, Mr. Farnham.”

  Inside, Ronnie’s officer explained that separating them was standard procedure in domestic situations. Ronnie told him what had happened that evening and showed him the suicide note.

  The officer said they’d take it into evidence. He passed the note through the door to his colleague. The other officer asked, “Is this your handwriting, Mr. Farnham?” She heard Jeff say yes. The officers conferred for a bit, their voices muffled behind the door, before the one assigned to Ronnie returned.

  Jeff did not repeat the threat of suicide in front of the other officer, he said, so unless Ronnie was willing to get involved, their hands were tied.

  “What do you mean, ‘get involved’?”

  “Your husband does not want our help, but that suicide note will allow you to commit him to the psychiatric ward against his will for up to five days. To do that, you’ll have to come down to the hospital and sign papers.”

  “Okay. I’ll head over first thing in the morning.”

  “It’ll have to be now if you want help from us tonight. Otherwise, we’ll have to leave your husband here—”

  “No.” That much was unthinkable. “But I have two children asleep upstairs.”

  He shrugged. Not his problem.

  Ronnie’s mind raced. It was past midnight; she wouldn’t be able to get anyone to come over now to stay with the boys.

  The officer shifted his weight. Jeff watched her through the door.

  “I’ll go wake them.”

  The officers called an ambulance from the squad car and gave Ronnie directions to the hospital. She shivered; the night had cooled, the fog had thickened, and she had never put on a sweater. Within a few minutes, she saw flashing lights refracting through millions of water droplets hanging in the air down by the road.

  “We’ll walk him down so the driver doesn’t have to turn around up here,” an officer said.

  Ronnie then took in an image so incongruous she could only stare: Jeff, in handcuffs. He didn’t look at her as they led him away.

  In the attic Ronnie dressed the boys, explaining that their dad was sick. The ambulance had taken him to the hospital, and they had to go make sure he’d be okay.

  The boys quickly fell back asleep in the car. Ronnie’s thoughts flitted back to when Andrew was in first grade and had learned that some of the kids in his class were in a club called Banana Splits, which Ronnie knew to be a support group for kids from broken families. When at the end of the school year they got to have a banana split party with all the fixings, Andrew was jealous. He was a big lover of ice cream. One night, at a rare family dinner in which both Ronnie and Jeff were present, he said, “I think that next year I’d like to join Banana Splits.”

  Jeff had laughed along with Ronnie, who believed that those circumstances would never arise within their loving family. Ronnie had told Andrew, “You wouldn’t want to pay the cost of membership.”

  The fog wasn’t as prevalent closer to Reading, and Ronnie found the hospital. It was going on two a.m. and the emergency room was empty. The boys sprawled out on plastic seats in the waiting room, CNN droning on the television above them. She’d hoped they’d fall asleep, but they couldn’t get comfortable. They wanted to know what was wrong with their dad. It only occurred to Ronnie then that despite Jeff’s consumption of filterless cigarettes and alcohol, the boys had never seen him sick. Maybe the farm store vegetables helped, although he ate that way for frugality more than health, so he could eat in maturation what he paid for in seed.

  Time dragged while Jeff was assessed. The boys whined and wanted to know when they could go home. Ronnie told them the doctors were trying to figure that out.

  At long last, the social worker called her into a small office.

  “Your husband’s feeling pretty good right now.” Feeling good? Was Jeff putting on some kind of act? And was the act for Ronnie’s benefit or theirs? “His blood alcohol is 0.20. We can’t do a psych evaluation until that comes down.”

  This wasn’t drinking to numb—this was drinking toward coma. How on earth could he have consumed so much?

  “I understand he threatened suicide and that you want to commit him, so I’ve drawn up the paperwork.”

  The social worker slid the papers toward her. Handed her a pen. Ronnie’s stomach quivered.

  She tried to hold her voice steady when she asked what would happen to him if she committed him.

  “Tomorrow they’ll want to reassess him. Until then, we’ll make him comfortable so he can sleep it off.”

  Ronnie remembered the words Jeff had hissed at her: I will never forgive you for this. Saw again the disgust on his face as he was led away in handcuffs. The signature line on the commitment paper undulated. The consequences of this decision seemed too massive to pin down.

  Then she thought of Andrew and Will, out in the lobby, held hostage by CNN in bucket chairs when they needed to be sleeping in their beds.

  The line solidified, bold and clear.

  Ronnie took a deep breath and signed.

  ronnie

  A police officer strode into the fire hall and handed Corporal McNichol a piece of paper. She took some time to look it over.

  “What is it?” Ronnie said.

  “A list of reporters wanting an interview. Two requests for Janet, and a whole lot more for you.”

  “Like who?”

  “The Morning Call in Allentown, the Reading Eagle, the Potts Forge Times, Channel 69, Maura Riley from Action News, and it goes on. Maybe a half dozen more television news reporters.”

  Corporal McNichol handed Ronnie the paper. “You’re free to do what you want, but I worry about the effect that more choppers and vehicles might have on Jeff.”

  There was a time when Ronnie thought her name would be on such a list. She’d planned to be a journalist, not an interview subject. They’d likely ask, “How do you feel?” In answer, the blank space in her morning journal came to mind. She only knew that extricating herself from Jeff had suddenly become a more complex and wretched story than she could comprehend. And despite a safe physical remove, she was still trapped within it.

  It was hard to believe any of them belonged here. How had this happened, when slipping into Jeff’s life had been so sweet and easy?

  • • •

  The first morning she awoke at the farm, a few mon
ths after she and Jeff had started dating, Ronnie was thinking it was a good thing she’d entered under the cover of darkness or the loud clash between the green sheets, purple blanket, and vivid yellow-and-blue-flowered wallpaper peeling beside her would not have allowed rest. She picked up her clothes from the unfinished floor planks, tiptoed past the kerosene heater in the hallway, and headed for the bathroom.

  Protected by the bliss of physical intimacy, she breezed over the orange shag carpeting pieced together on the bathroom floor and got in the shower. Once cold water slapped her awake—it took a few moments of fiddling to realize the hot and cold taps were reversed—she couldn’t help but notice the walls’ plastic gray tiles and mildewed paint.

  When she left the bathroom, Jeff was dressed. “So, this is your house,” she said. “Guess I was a little too distracted to see it last night.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her passionately. “And I aim to distract you again.” He gave her an impish grin. “Come on. I need to show you something.”

  After crossing the rough subfloor of an empty room, he led her up a charming staircase with pine treads worn from centuries of use. Up ahead, however, she expected bats and squirrels. Before he reached the top, he pointed to the floorboards, now level with their eyes. “When my mother gave me the keys so I could take a look at the place, for some odd reason this floor was completely covered with tar. Even so, I was able to see what you see right now.”

  Ronnie ran her finger over the exposed edges. “Some of these boards must be eighteen, twenty inches wide.”

  “I’d never seen flooring like this before. Not outside of preserved historic homes anyway. It made me curious about this house’s potential. So I bought it and got to work.” He took her hand. “This was the result.”

  He led her the rest of the way up the stairs and into a handsomely renovated, painted, and completely empty attic.