The Far End of Happy

by Kathryn Craft

  “Ronnie,” Corporal McNichol said, more quietly this time. “He’s here to help you.”

  He offered to help her up. Ronnie took his hand, but she didn’t have to lean. As she rose, Jeff’s cooling fingers slipped from around her neck, and his dead weight slumped to the floor. She didn’t want to leave him behind, yet rising was easier than it had been in quite some time.

  ronnie

  A sound pushed through Ronnie’s protective haze, like a wounded wolf that had lost the full force of its howl. Janet’s lips moved. Words formed.

  “How could you have done this, Ronnie? He worked so hard to fix up the farm. All he wanted was to make you happy, and you had to go and leave him. The house, the horses, the store, that beautiful property. He gave you everything.”

  Ronnie watched the words float past her, checking them. True enough.

  But he also gave up everything.

  Janet was old. Janet was a mother. Janet sought answers. Janet had to have someone to blame. But her scattershot ammunition couldn’t reach Ronnie. It bounced off some invisible shield and clattered to the floor.

  A mass of strangled sounds came from Janet’s throat. The EMT was tending her. She’s choking, Ronnie thought at first. She slowly put it together. My mother-in-law, barren of emotion since Jerry’s death, is crying.

  Ronnie turned to Corporal McNichol, still beside her. “I have to see my boys. Before they hear this some other way. Can you take me?”

  “Not just yet,” she said. “The coroner is waiting for you at the farm. There will be some paperwork to tie up first. The men have had a long day, and I’m sure they’re ready to go home.”

  Long.

  Ready.

  Home.

  “We can take your mother and mother-in-law over to be with the boys, if you want.”

  The corporal’s suggestion stilled the room.

  “No,” Ronnie said. Janet looked at Ronnie sharply, then to the door, where Karl Prout stood at the entrance of the room with Beverly. Mascara streaked her ruddy cheeks.

  “Mom,” Ronnie said.

  They looked at each other across a stretch of space, fresh tears streaming. Beverly moved toward her. “I know. Come here, Sunshine.” Ronnie fell into her mother’s arms, relishing the feel even as they cried.

  Fearing she would lose herself, though, Ronnie pulled back. She still had work to do. She turned to look directly at Corporal McNichol. “Under no circumstances do I want Janet and my mother seeing the boys before I do.”

  “What?” Beverly’s empty arms returned to her sides.

  “We love them too,” Janet said.

  “I don’t doubt it. But Andrew and Will need to believe in me right now, and you have both said some pretty ugly things to me today. You will not speak to them before I do.”

  Corporal McNichol put her arm around Ronnie’s shoulders. “I’ll take you back to the farm and leave an officer here with them.”

  “Like we’re under guard?” Janet said.

  “I’ll stay,” Karl Prout said, “and drive them wherever, whenever. These things make you feel so damn helpless. And you helped me, Janet, when my wife had the cancer.” Janet moved her hand to her abdomen. “Let me do something for you now.”

  “Ladies?” Corporal McNichol said.

  Beverly and Janet both nodded.

  Ronnie headed for the door.

  “Sunshine? Wait. Your keys.”

  Beverly picked up the heavy rings from where they were laying on the table. Ronnie took them—two fistfuls—and looked at them blankly.

  She’d been set free, with all the power she needed to go anywhere—and she had no clue where the hell that would be.

  6:00 p.m.

  ronnie

  In the deepening dusk, Ronnie pressed her forehead to the cool window of the corporal’s car. The area had cleared out considerably by the time Corporal McNichol took the road toward the farm. The roadblock had been dismantled and the media had moved on. Police vehicles no longer lined the road. Their car was free to turn up the driveway. All of the outside lights were on at the farm store, but Ronnie resisted their glow. She focused straight ahead.

  The coroner greeted her at the door to her house and introduced himself, offering his hand. For a moment, Ronnie wondered whether she wanted to touch him.

  “You must be the widow,” he said.

  The widow. As bound to Jeff in death as she had been in life. “I’m Ronnie,” she corrected.

  The man had made himself at home. His paperwork was spread recklessly across her stove top. He showed her the death certificate. The facts were at the top. Name: Farnham, Jeffrey Hoyer. Age: 47.

  His birthday was eleven days away.

  At the bottom: Cause of death: self-inflicted gunshot wound.

  Ronnie noted the time of death. She’d been ordering a cheeseburger while her husband was pronounced dead.

  The coroner handed her a pen and showed her where to sign. “Because we’ve been on-site all day, it’s a pretty clear cause of death. There won’t be further investigation.”

  “Can we get an autopsy?” Ronnie needed answers that Jeff had never offered. Maybe his body could speak for him. Maybe his liver could tell her how advanced the alcoholism had been. Did he have cirrhosis? He had lost so much weight. How close to death had he already been? So many things weren’t known. Any facts would be a help.

  “I’m sorry, an autopsy won’t be possible. He used a shotgun. The wound was massive, allowing a lot of interaction with the Mace, and he bled out pretty thoroughly before we could get in there. We opened the place up but couldn’t stay in there long enough to do anything. The Mace was eating through our masks. We won’t even get an accurate blood alcohol reading.”

  The coroner collected his paperwork. “We’ll be taking the shotgun into evidence but will return it when we’re through. I like to warn people of that. It can be disconcerting to see a cruiser pull up and watch an officer get out of his vehicle holding a weapon.”

  Ronnie nodded.

  The coroner extended his hand. His work was done.

  Ronnie went down to her office to get the boys’ overnight bag. They couldn’t stay here tonight with so much trauma in the air. Whether Beverly wanted them or not, she would take the boys to her mother’s for a couple of days. The boys could sleep together in her spare bedroom and Ronnie would seek what rest she could find on the couch.

  She found Max curled on the recliner, blockaded into her office by a ten-ream box of paper with a laundry basket on top. As soon as he saw her, he leaped into her arms, knocking over the laundry. Ronnie let his wriggles invigorate her, let his dry kisses cover her face. “I’m so sorry,” she kept saying. Heard Jeff’s voice: He’s your dog. “I’m so, so sorry. I’ll get you some water, boy.” She filled a shallow bucket at the utility sink, put it on the laundry room floor, and went back into the office to get the duffel bag they’d abandoned earlier that day.

  Sitting on top were the boys’ blankets. Ronnie picked them up and held them to her lips, hoping these objects carried enough of her love to see Andrew and Will through this.

  She could accept Jeff’s death as her lot. She had to; she’d chosen him. But no child should have to live through his father’s self-destruction.

  Her gaze moved through the window toward the store’s unnatural light. The back door of the farm store office stood propped open, an emergency exit with a panic bar they never used.

  She saw him, chest down on the concrete floor. His face turned away from her. That full head of brown hair. The jean jacket with the tan corduroy collar. One hand cast to the side as if resting on their mattress.

  Jeff.

  Headlights cut through growing dusk as another vehicle pulled up the drive. Ronnie tore her eyes away and headed back up to the kitchen. Out in the driveway, Amber and a young man got out of a pickup truck. When Ron
nie went to greet them, Max didn’t even lift a leg. As soon as he hit the grass, he squatted and peed.

  “God, Ronnie.” Amber put her arms around Ronnie and didn’t let go. “It’s already been on TV. I just had to come over. How does anybody handle such a thing? Jeff was such a great guy.”

  The girl started to cry on Ronnie’s shoulder. Ronnie patted her back absently, wondering how she’d already been thrust into the position of offering solace.

  “Jeff committed suicide,” Ronnie said. This wasn’t news. But she had to put the words on her tongue so that one day she could set their bitter taste aside.

  Amber pulled away and looked at Ronnie queerly. Wiping her nose across the back of her hand, she said, “You remember my boyfriend, Brad. He’s good around horses. I thought we could help.”

  Brad looked at the driveway and rearranged a few rocks with his toes.

  Drawn by what secrets the farm store held, Ronnie drifted beyond the shadow of the house, Amber and Brad in tow. The harsh glare of the store’s floodlights hit Ronnie’s face.

  “Aw, no, Ronnie.” Amber pulled Brad around in front of Ronnie to create a barrier. “You don’t want to see that.”

  “I have to,” Ronnie said, stepping around them. “To witness.” Amber and Brad averted their eyes and allowed Ronnie and Jeff one final horrific moment.

  Two men carried Jeff’s limp, backlit form from the store and laid it on a body bag. After arranging his limbs, one of the officers zipped the bag, stopping momentarily at his head to tuck in a few strands of hair.

  “Will’s class is hatching chicks,” she whispered.

  The horses whinnied at the new activity and galloped up the hill. Ronnie let Amber lead her back up the drive.

  “The animals haven’t been fed all day,” Ronnie said. The horses already stood at the fence near the barn, blowing through their nostrils, with little Horsey Patch bringing up the rear.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Amber said.

  Ronnie stopped and looked at her. “I’ve always had to worry about that.”

  “I mean that’s why we’re here.” Amber had cared for their horses when the family was at the shore. She knew the horses’ names and which stalls to put them in; she would know to find directions taped inside the lid of the feed bin. “We’ll take care of everything.”

  “And we mean everything.” The conviction in Brad’s voice surprised her. “Don’t ever feel you have to come back here again.”

  Such kindness.

  But she knew she would come back.

  Life on this farm had asked more of her than she could ever give, but it was the only home the boys had known. She felt sure of only one thing: in this time of turmoil, she would not wrench them from it. This was no time for losing one another among packing crates and yard sales and house shopping. They’d have no more energy for staging their home than they’d have for staging their faces while settling into new classrooms and neighborhoods. This was a time to confront what had happened, together. To allow their friends to help. To soothe themselves with the rhythms of chores and the comfort of their animals and the familiar roll of the landscape, as Jeff had taught her. To anchor themselves within the same passions and challenges that reflected their choices the day before the suicide. It felt more important than ever that they be fully themselves. She would not allow additional change to interrupt the reality of their loss.

  If Jeff had wanted to end their lives, he could have done so, the police had assured her. The only way to convince the boys that he hadn’t was to carry on with life as they knew it. Jeff had always thought this farm would be a great place to raise kids, and it would be again someday. She would not give Jeff the power to change that in absentia.

  Red and blue lights suddenly flashed from the farm store driveway. The cruiser peeled out and, shortly thereafter, its siren wailed. Life—disruptive and frightening and glorious—went on. Theirs was not the only drama, nor was it any longer an emergency.

  The rest of the cars pulled away together, taking Jeff and the remaining daylight with them. A chill settled in. It would be a clear night; Ronnie watched the first stars emerge. Corporal McNichol joined Ronnie on the porch. “You ready to go?”

  “I have a couple more things I need to do. I’ll drive myself.”

  “It would be better if someone else drove.”

  “We’ll take care of her,” Amber said. “We’ll go put the horses in.”

  “The halters are—”

  “We know, Ronnie,” Amber said. “We’ve got this.”

  Ronnie turned to Corporal McNichol.

  “You’ll want to get a hazmat team out here to clean up. Here’s someone we trust to do a good job.” Corporal McNichol handed her a business card. “The produce will all have to be tossed, and probably everything with a paper label. And anything made of wood. It absorbs the Mace.”

  Ronnie nodded absently. After a certain level of loss, little else registered. She shook the hand Corporal McNichol offered. “Thank you for trying,” Ronnie whispered.

  “I’m sorry things didn’t turn out differently.” The corporal opened her car door, then paused. “You’ll want answers, and there aren’t any. But the questions get easier to sit with, in time.”

  ronnie

  A few minutes later, Ronnie had gathered everything they’d need for a few days and put it in her mother’s Blazer. Max, determined not to be left behind, had jumped onto the back gate, then sat in the front passenger seat during her trips back and forth to pack. Ronnie went back in and called the firehouse to say she’d soon be on her way to see her sons, reminding the man who answered that her mother and mother-in-law were not to see them without her.

  Yet Ronnie couldn’t get her feet to move back toward the car. She kept envisioning the way Jeff had acted each time she’d interrupted him the day before, flipping the pages on a yellow legal tablet so she wouldn’t see what he’d written.

  She had to get into the store office.

  Seeing that the lights were still on in the barn, she went back to the kitchen, pulled a flashlight from the junk drawer, and left Max barking in the car as she headed down to New Hope Farms.

  Twenty feet from the office door, the spicy stench of Mace hit her. The police had left the store wide open to air out. She took a deep breath, pulled her sweater up over her nose and mouth, and flicked on the light as she ran in toward the desk. One of her feet slid, and she struggled to catch her balance. She looked back. Through what appeared to be an innocuous, yard-wide circle of sawdust, she saw a dark red streak where her shoe had slid. She had just missed stepping on Jeff’s eyeglasses. Reflexively, she sucked in a gasp of air through the sweater.

  At the desk, she flipped up the front of her sweater to use as a satchel, stuffing in several neat piles of paper she found on top. Beside them was an open, almost empty half-gallon bottle with G on the label. With her throat burning, she ran back out to the grassy patch behind the store. She had been in the store a total of five, maybe six seconds, inhaling only the smallest amount of air, but she dropped everything to the ground and bent over and coughed and coughed until she retched. She could only imagine the hell Jeff must have gone through in the half hour between the first and second rounds of Mace.

  Jeff’s sickening voice came back to her, now explained by that jar of gin. If her experience was any indication, the Mace must have incinerated his lungs. When her airway finally calmed enough that she could breathe without gagging, she collected the items strewn on the grass and used the flashlight to examine them.

  The police hadn’t mentioned a suicide note, but she had to know if there was one. This whole day had been so unbelievable, she needed any possible clue that might help explain it.

  She found the payment book for the Altima, the payment book for the mortgage, his checkbook. Addressed to “R” was an itemized list of all the credit cards he had already paid off a
nd which ones would still arrive, noting that enough of his mother’s money remained in the checking account to cover them.

  She counted the number of credit cards. Not two, not twelve—thirty-two active credit cards. At the bottom of his accounting, he wrote, “Use the rest of the money as necessary. Everything I have here is yours and the boys’, do as you wish.” Beneath that, in a large dramatic sweep, he wrote the initial J. And beneath that, a postscript:

  All taxes are paid

  Dish programming is paid for one year

  All ins. is paid

  I think I thought this out, but who knows

  More mixed signals. The note was at once thoughtful and selfish.

  But this accounting made one thing clear: Jeff’s suicide was no act of passion. This list had been dated yesterday.

  Drops of blood streaked one of the envelopes. It bore her name. Raw lungs sucked in the night air as she unfolded the yellow, legal-size pages that revealed words written with his hand.

  Dear Ronnie,

  Without you I have no life. Even Mother’s money has no meaning to me without you. Can’t even think what I would do with it.

  I can see why you want out. I am not capable of bringing anything of my own to you. I have nothing positive to offer to anyone. Why else would someone spend 20 years tending the same bar. A real person would have done something more for himself and his family.

  Thank God my mother had the resources and thought ahead or Andrew and Will would have no college funds. I certainly haven’t done anything.

  I am truly sorry that it had to come to this. This is probably the best and kindest thing I can do for you and our boys. Before I drag them down to my level.

  I do love Will and Andrew more than you or they will ever know. Thanks for wanting them so much. When I think of how much fun, loving, learning, playing, teaching, sharing, comforting I’ve missed with the boys it really makes me sick and disgusted with myself. Thank goodness you were their mother or they would be a basket case.