The Far End of Happy

by Kathryn Craft

  And she could breathe again. There were times, while air-hammering the crumbling plaster to expose the stone walls in this basement office, when she and Jeff had worked just twelve feet apart but couldn’t see each other for all the airborne mess. She was just starting to discover what normal dusting was like.

  Organic Gardening PA magazine was now sending her assignments, resulting in steadier work.

  What solution did they need?

  Jeff took a deep breath. “I think we should open a farm stand.”

  “In our spare time?” Ronnie almost laughed out loud but was glad she hadn’t when she caught the look of boyish enthusiasm on her husband’s face. This Jeff—the one with the bright eyes and energized voice, whose dreams were precious to her—this was the man she’d married. She rolled her chair away from the computer. “I’m listening.”

  “It makes sense. Like all our interests are meant to converge. My food service experience and business degree with your knowledge of the organic food craze and connections in the farming community. Your eye for design, my construction know-how. I think we could do it.”

  “But selling tomatoes and peppers down on the road will not support us,” she said. “Or do you mean for the boys to do it, like the Amish?”

  “I’m thinking bigger—of building a real store.”

  “You’ve stayed at the hotel so long I thought you’d given up on starting a business.”

  Last year, when Jeff was upset about the sale of his hotel to a new chain but unwilling to tell her why, Ronnie had stopped in to see for herself—and was greeted by large flat-screen TVs blasting from every corner, as well as the flashing lights and intrusive sounds of amusements placed along the walls. The classy lounge over which Jeff had reigned for decades from his spot behind the bar had devolved into an arcade.

  Ronnie could hardly take seeing him in that environment. Ablaze with the inner fire that comes from following her passion, she resolved to talk to Jeff about a change in career.

  She was hardly qualified as an adviser. She was a thirty-three-year-old with a master’s degree who had never fulfilled her career potential and who had only recently figured out what she wanted to be when she grew up. But if she could discover enough purpose on her journal pages to reenergize her life, Jeff could too. So she arranged for a sleepover for the boys, fixed Jeff a nice dinner, then asked him the questions she’d asked of herself in her journal.

  Ronnie: “What gets you up in the morning?”

  Jeff: “My bladder.”

  Ronnie: “What are your goals in life?”

  Jeff: “I just want to get done what needs to be done. Mowing, renovating, things like that.”

  Ronnie: “Don’t you hope that when you die, you’ll have left the world a better place in some small way?”

  Jeff: “It probably isn’t good, but I’ve never thought about making any sort of contribution to society.”

  Ronnie: “I must not be phrasing this right. When your time on earth is through, what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?”

  Jeff had simply said, “You and the boys.”

  So if Jeff was finally starting to think along a more productive track, she could hardly dismiss him.

  Jeff walked around the desktop to her chair and swiveled it to face him. “You once said I should be doing work I love. And it finally hit me—there’s nothing I love more than you and this farm. Eventually we can quit our other jobs and work together the rest of our lives. If I invest in anything, I want it to be this land. We can let it provide for us.”

  “But I love my writing.”

  “Which is good, because we’ll have to work all our jobs until we start making money at the store. It will be tough for a while. But it would be fun to start another construction project together.”

  Fun? At least one of them thought so. Ronnie had already left that phase of their lives behind.

  Ronnie felt detached from Jeff’s proposal but couldn’t deny that she was the one who had instigated this line of thought. She was proud of him for thinking this through, and it was hard to deny the fire in his eyes, missing for so long.

  “But we can’t grow enough produce to stock a whole store with only six acres. Are you thinking we would purchase food wholesale and then resell it?”

  “It would be a mix, adding in more and more of our own goods as we can. I’m sure my mother wouldn’t mind if we pushed onto her land a bit. It’s not like she’s using it.”

  “But we’d need capital. Where would we get the money?” Ronnie’s fears about their debt flared again. “Or are you looking to your mother for that too?”

  “You think I need a handout. That I can’t do this.” He turned and went to the window. “I’d rather die than ask her.”

  “It’s not like you’ve come clean about the finances, Jeff. I don’t even know what kind of debt we’re in here. You tell me how we can do this.”

  Ronnie wanted Jeff to have this chance to live a happier life. Every night he came home with new horror stories from the hotel, and Ronnie hadn’t thought they could get worse than his decade-old story about the kitchen employee who reheated a prime rib for a late-starting wedding by running it through a soapless dishwasher. She didn’t know how much longer he could hold out there.

  Thinking aloud, Ronnie said, “We’ve worked hard on this house, so it’s probably worth a lot more than it was when you bought it. And you have so many bills to pay each month. Maybe we should apply for a home equity line of credit, pay off the credit cards, and use what’s left to build the store.”

  Jeff turned to her, the emotion he always kept at bay now rising like sunshine on his face. “That’s a great idea. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

  She joined him at the window. “So you’d want to build it right down the hill here, between the house and the road? The horses might not be too happy, with you eating up part of their pasture.”

  “They’ll get over it.” Jeff stood behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and laid his chin on her shoulder. “This is going to be good for us.”

  “I’m not saying yes yet. We’ll see what the loan officer says. And I won’t give up my writing. I’ve made a lot of promises I intend to keep, and I like what I’m doing.” Maybe she could compromise and make calls from the farm store when it wasn’t busy. “And I don’t want to give up our week at the shore. It’s the only family heritage I have to share with the boys. So if we have to hire help to cover while we’re gone, then that goes in the budget.”

  “Aye-aye, captain.”

  Ronnie followed Jeff’s eyes down the hill and tried to imagine another barnlike structure where the horses grazed. With a deep breath, she fought the fleeting suffocation: the way the store would obscure the house from the road and further sequester their family life. She hoped the greater interaction with their community would counter it. “I’ll have to file for a business name.”

  “Already got that covered.” Jeff kissed her cheek. “New Hope Farms.”

  “Look. It’s starting to snow.” They watched together as tender snowflakes rested on the backs of the horses before melting.

  ronnie

  An early spring thaw convinced Jeff that four to six weeks was too long to wait for an answer from the bank. So they’d be ready to go when the home equity line came through, it wouldn’t hurt anything for him to level the site for the farm store, build the frame for the floor, and bring in a cement mixer to pour the slab. “We’ll need to open by Memorial Day at the latest so we don’t miss out on all the sales at the beginning of the growing season,” he said.

  “What would we sell?” Ronnie said. “We won’t even have any produce yet.”

  “We may have strawberries by then. And I’ve ordered a bunch of seed packets from Burpee. We could sell flats of plants and some starter vegetables.”

  Ronnie grew increasingly nervous. Twice she follo
wed up with the bank for an answer, but their loan officer said she was waiting for more information from the credit reporting agencies. It would take a little while longer. Meanwhile, Jeff racked up the credit cards and convinced her to help frame out the walls of the new building.

  Finally, at the beginning of April, Ronnie received the call she’d been awaiting. She rolled her office chair back and picked up the receiver. “Ronnie Farnham,” she said, her voice buoyed by the enthusiasm her work inspired. “May I help you?”

  It was the broker with whom they’d filed the home equity loan application. “I’m afraid your application was declined.”

  Ronnie was confused. “Why would it be declined? We’ve improved our house. It must be worth a lot more than what we paid for it.”

  “You may have improved it on the inside, but appraisals are done from the outside.” Ronnie cringed, recalling how happy Jeff had once been at their deceptively low assessment, the affordable taxes. “But besides that, do you have any idea what your credit report looks like?”

  “Not exactly, but I know we can still get credit.” Her fears of impending financial doom had been alleviated last fall when their old car died. Ronnie had sat beside Jeff at the dealership when he applied for a loan to buy a new Nissan Altima. Ronnie had fidgeted, unsure of what they’d find; when approval came through, Jeff seemed to swell with the power of this new credit. If they were in deep debt, they wouldn’t have extended them even more credit, would they?

  “Listen to this,” the woman said.

  She began a laundry list of creditors and amounts owed. Instinctively Ronnie flipped on her digital voice recorder. “…Sears, $8,432…” How could they owe Sears that much money? All she knew was that Jeff had bought a used garden tractor for $400 and that she charged about a hundred dollars of clothes for the boys on that card each fall. “…Sunoco, $12,129…” Wasn’t Sunoco a gas card? How could it have that much on it? “…Texaco, $5,078…” She didn’t know they still had a Texaco card. There weren’t any Texaco stations around here! “…Diner’s Club, $6,854…” and on and on.

  After Ronnie hung up, she sat there for a moment, stunned. She felt as betrayed as if the broker were Jeff’s mistress, calling to detail all the times he had cheated on her.

  Looking back, the sheer number of catalogs that came to their house should have tipped her off to the credit card purchases accumulating. Jeff had never let her recycle the catalogs without him looking first, “to see what I need,” he would say, a running gag early in their marriage. Ronnie would laugh and say, “If you needed it, I would think you would know that before you saw it in a catalog.” She’d lovingly dubbed him “Captain Consumer.”

  It was no longer funny.

  Jeff walked into her office wearing his black and white work outfit, his kiss good-bye delayed when he registered the look on her face. “What’s the matter?”

  “I just got a call about our home equity loan. We’ve been turned down.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Sit down,” Ronnie said, rewinding the recorder. “I have something you need to hear.”

  He looked at his watch. “I don’t have time for this. I have to get to work.”

  “Not this time, Jeff.” He had left her alone during both her miscarriages because he had to work. “You are not the freaking president of the United States! Be late for once. You are going to sit here and live through this like I had to.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “You will not put me off one moment longer.”

  “We’ll talk when I get home.” He pulled his car keys from his pocket and walked away.

  “You know damn well I’ll be asleep when you get home.”

  “Then we’ll talk in the morning,” he said, already on the stairs.

  Sure. The morning—when he’d be impossible to rouse.

  His steps crossed the floor above her, and she heard the kitchen door open and close. Once again, Ronnie was left with a jumble of feelings she needed a partner to untangle. She checked the time on her computer—a half hour until the bus dropped off the boys. Desperate to engage in meaningful communication, she headed up to the guest room and pulled her journals out from underneath her bed.

  She didn’t bother uncapping her pen.

  This time, she read.

  ronnie

  When Corporal McNichol returned, all three women rose. “It’s clear that the ways we’ve been trying to communicate with Jeff aren’t working. We want to try something new.”

  Communicate with Jeff. A concept doomed to failure. How many times over the past few years had Ronnie pleaded with him to talk with her—about the finances, covering the boys’ schedules, or even going for a horseback ride together—to no avail? As if he’d already been walling himself off, brick by brick.

  “What have you been trying?” Beverly said.

  “We’ve been calling to him through a bullhorn. And in case he disconnected the phone, we also slid a portable phone into the store and asked him to come out and pick it up. He did not. We’re running out of ideas.”

  Janet sat back down. Hard. Corporal McNichol turned to Ronnie. “I know it looks bad. But this could still turn around. Do you want to try speaking to him?”

  “You mean call him?”

  “No. As I said, he’s not answering the phone. An officer would take you back to the store so you could appeal to Jeff over the bullhorn.”

  She was about to say that she’d already said everything she needed to say to Jeff, more than once. That she had no influence over him. That she didn’t see the point.

  But there was a point: Jeff still loved her. If she stayed with him, she might hold the power to save his life.

  Go to the farm. Talk to Jeff. After all they had meant to each other—after all they’d accomplished, as a team—she owed him this much.

  Or did she? Working shoulder to shoulder toward a distant dream, they were genial partners, but within the confines of reality and face-to-face, they hadn’t had an effective exchange in—well, she couldn’t recall how long.

  She heard Anita saying she’d done all she could.

  She remembered the psychiatrist saying she now had to take care of herself and her children.

  And the alcohol counselor saying no one expected her continued support.

  If only she could have one of them counsel her now. Ronnie felt she had come to the greatest test of her life and she’d have to make this decision alone.

  There were only cons to consider. If Jeff died today, what kind of hell would they face? But if he lived, what kind of problems would he still cause? The operation’s focus suddenly shifted, it seemed, and all guns were aimed at her.

  She felt Jeff clinging to her now, his fingers laced around her neck, his full weight dragging on her as once again she was charged with a decision affecting them all. If she tried to pull him up with one last heave, at this late stage, how far might he drag her down instead?

  Our words hang in the air all around him, but they can’t sink in, the psychiatrist had said.

  She’d already tried so many times to get Jeff care from professionals who knew much more than she did. AA. Inpatient rehab. Outpatient rehab. Individual counseling. She’d tried to talk to him, from her heart, about her own journey. She’d toed him up to the healing waters and looked right in, but in their reflection, only Ronnie saw the possibilities. She’d kicked him into the deep end with involuntary commitment, but even that didn’t work. You cannot force a man to drink something life-sustaining if he thirsts for something different. Can’t force him to stay afloat if he won’t swim.

  How much clearer could he be? Jeff had no desire to heal.

  God, Jeff. Where the hell are you?

  The air in the room felt too heavy to bear.

  “I won’t lie to him,” she finally said. “Not today, not with so much at stake, and certain
ly not over a bullhorn with the media and all the world watching. I won’t do it to him and I…” The words, so foreign to her, caught in her throat. “I won’t do it to myself. I can’t live for him anymore. I’m done.”

  Janet and Beverly turned away.

  Corporal McNichol handed her a tissue. “Is there anyone else with influence? Karl Prout is saying they’re good friends. He wants to try.”

  When Ronnie saw Jeff this morning, it seemed he’d been drinking all night. Ronnie tried to imagine what it would be like to be that drunk, that sleep-deprived. Already feeling like the relationships in his life had lost all meaning. And then some well-intentioned guy like Karl Prout comes forward to reach out. Ronnie could feel the pain deep in her own belly. For the first time, she could imagine Jeff actually pulling the trigger.

  “You’re the expert,” Ronnie said. “But I’m telling you, Jeff forces himself to be nice to the guy. He thinks Karl is an idiot.” Ronnie felt a twinge in her abdomen and bent forward to relieve it.

  “Are you okay?” Corporal McNichol said.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Ronnie felt light-headed as she walked to the far end of the hall. Insubstantial, as if the gravity that had been tugging on her so fiercely in recent weeks might release her and let her float away. In the bathroom stall, she found her underwear damp and red. A good ten days before her period was due.

  Jeff was able to hold an entire community at bay, but life kept making its demands of her. When she returned to the hall, she pulled her mother out into the stairwell and asked her to go back to Perlmutter’s and get her some supplies.

  When Ronnie headed back to the table where she’d been sitting, she saw Corporal McNichol speaking quietly to Jeff’s mother in the corner by the bar.

  Ronnie strode over to them, thinking she may have missed some news—and heard Corporal McNichol ask Janet to speak to her son over the bullhorn.