The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  The story broke right after Dana’s lunch at E.Claire’s, right after her encounter with the woman shown handcuffed at her arraignment with a bandage peeking out beneath her bangs. Jamie was home for a long weekend when it all rolled out on the eleven-o’clock news, and he’d reached for the remote to mute the newscast, to shield his mother as the particulars of her husband’s life unfolded in vivid color on Peter’s wide-screen TV.

  “It’s okay,” she told him, sighing. “I already know,” and she had known some of it, thanks to Moss. She knew the highlights if not the particulars—if not the whys, at least she knew the whos and whens and wheres of things.

  Jamie wasn’t surprised either as he gazed at the TV and texted his new girlfriend. Peter, who had told his own wife nothing, had at least had the decency to drive to Jamie’s dorm in Boston, where he’d warned his son of the unfortunate link to the highly publicized murder—Peter’s slight, he said, almost tangential involvement. What Jamie would soon see on the news and what would sadly and ineptly be unrolled for the general public was mostly hype, he’d told his son. The newshounds rarely got things right.

  Dana threw out every stick of furniture she’d found with Celia in their yard-sale days—a small desk, an antique phone stand, and three barstools. She promised herself she wouldn’t go to Celia’s funeral—a promise she broke in the end, but only when a TV camera panned in on the Episcopalian church downtown and after she’d let three of Moss’s phone calls go to voice mail. Only then did Dana change her mind, slipping into a black skirt, a lackluster beige blouse, and the high, black, strappy sandals that Celia would have loved. She headed for the church with the cool of early fall blowing through the open windows and Rachmaninoff blaring from the car radio. Ducking past the cameramen outside, she slid into a pew at the very back of the church, where she listened to a barrage of eulogies and tributes to a woman Dana realized she had never really known.

  Ronald was true to his word. He never moved back to Ashby Lane. The house is on the market now. The lawn is neatly mowed, if brown, and what flowers remain are trimmed and tidily deadheaded, the shutters newly painted a pale, insipid blue. She hasn’t seen Ronald since the funeral, when they walked together to their cars, his wife’s ashes in a lovely silver urn, his fingers trembling on the intricate design around its top. Sometimes Dana is troubled by a thought. A memory, she thinks, but she isn’t sure. Considering her state of mind when Celia died, the sangria blur the day became, nothing from that afternoon is certain. Still, sometimes she can almost feel the hood of Ronald’s car when, sliding into their driveway, she caught herself by throwing her hands against it. She can almost feel its warmth—tepid, really. The warmth of a hot engine cooled down over time.

  She opens the paint, spills the pale gold liquid into a roller pan. With her toes she slides a slice of newspaper under the white trim along the baseboard and rolls the new paint across the dingy, mushroom-colored wall.

  She steps back, examining the color. The rain pounds down outside, the windows fill with gray, and the sky is the color of dust. She rolls the paint in long zigs and zags, filling in the spaces between. Beside the window the wall is warm and bright in the lamplight. Dana paints and sings and knows, if only for that one hour, that one moment, she has found the balance that Dr. Ghea spoke of, the small, thin place between darkness and light.

  Someone knocks at the door, and Dana navigates her way around the displaced chairs and corner cupboards, through the dishes from her mother’s family, dusty and archaic, stacked on the dining-room table, the Spode and Haviland she’s almost never used. “Coming,” she calls out, and she stops to turn the music down.

  It isn’t Peter. It can’t be Peter—he would use his key. He’d slip in. He’d catch her there, shifting the sports page under her bare toes, her feet already speckled with gold paint. He’d stand there in the entryway, his arms crossed over his chest. “Dana!” he’d say. “You’re doing it again. All wrong. All wrong. As always.” Or he’d slink back to the bedroom to lie across their bed in the darkened alcove by the dresser. He would lie in wait. He’d scare her, lurking like a shadow in the murk of the rainy day. “Oh,” he’d say. “Didn’t mean to startle you, but it is still my house, after all. Where else would I be?”

  She takes a breath and tugs on the front door, and Jack Moss stands on the slick, rain-splattered porch, his sneakers at the edges of the doormat, his trench coat open and flapping in the wind. Raindrops roll down the visor of his Mets cap and fly into the air.

  “Moss?”

  “Hi.” He grins.

  “Come in.”

  She steps back from the door in the tiny entry with the Japanese umbrella stand, the dark red flowered rug, and he stands dripping in the doorway. Water plops in circles and rolls along the floor.

  “Here,” she says. “Let me take your coat.”

  “Sorry.” He hands it to her. He glances at the wet floor, the spots of rain across the flowered rug.

  “It’s fine.” She gestures toward the dining room, the painted wall, the scattered bits of newsprint. “What do you think?”

  “I like it,” he says. “It’s cheery.” He steps to the edge of the living room.

  “Sit,” she says. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “No,” he says. “No. I’m just here for a minute.”

  “Listen.” She smiles, sits beside him on the sofa. “If you’ve come to arrest me, Moss, this is a really bad time.”

  “Oh, yeah? How come?”

  “The painting, obviously. I’m afraid you’ll have to come back later.”

  “When?” He seems almost serious. He laughs then, like he’s caught himself. “There’s never a really good time for arrests.”

  “Some times are better than others. On the way to E.Claire’s might not be a bad one.”

  “Or in the dentist’s office. Seriously.” He makes a move to stand, slides forward on the sofa.

  “Seriously.”

  “There’s this job at the forensics lab.”

  “Huh.”

  “Would you be interested?”

  “I don’t know.” She cups her chin in her hand. “Should I be?”

  He shrugs. “I could take you over there. Show you around.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”

  “Next week? Tuesday, say?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Maybe lunch afterward?”

  “Hmmm.” She taps her fingers against her knees. “That depends.”

  “Yeah? On what?”

  “Where? E.Claire’s?”

  “Where else?”

  “Anywhere in the world else. Anywhere in the universe else!”

  “No kidding?”

  “Nope. I’m out of Xanax.”

  “I’ll see what I can come up with,” Jack says. He gets to his feet. “Want some help?”

  “What? Painting?”

  ”Yeah. I could tape off the trim before you—”

  “Naw,” she says, “but thanks anyway. I’ve got this system.”

  “Right. My ex used to . . . both of them used to . . .” He stops, takes a breath, sticks on his cap. “How are you doing these days?”

  Dana looks down at her hands. She looks at Spot, darting back and forth behind the door. “I’m okay,” she says. “I take it one day at a time. This is a good day.”

  He nods. “You deserve a whole long string of good days.”

  They walk together to the door, their bodies touching briefly in the narrow entryway and moving apart. “Next time you can say hey to Spot,” she says.

  “Nice cat.”

  “Not really, but he grows on you.”

  “Yeah.” He waves toward the frantic kitten as it leaps onto the back of a rattan chair. “At least he isn’t boring,” Jack says, and he pushes against the screen door.

  “We don’t really do boring around here.” Dana laughs. The rain has slowed to a steady drizzle, and she knows it’s ushering in more cold. She stands in the doorway, her arms across he
r chest, as Jack hurries to the Crown Vic in the driveway. She waves as he backs out, as he tips his rain-soaked cap, as a little rivulet of water pours into his lap, as he yells, “Damn!” and pulls the rest of the way out to the street.

  She breathes in the fresh air. The day is colder already. She leans her head back, staring at the gray-fog sky, the dazzling autumn trees. The wind blows through, making a long, sweet sound in the air, catching in the spaces between things, garages and skinny side yards and fallen, rolling garbage cans. It pulls her hair back off her forehead, slapping her bandanna from side to side. She breathes again and closes her eyes, and the wind is in every pore, on every inch of skin, but it does not consume her. When it passes, she still stands whole on her front porch, her hands reaching out behind her for the door, her feet dappled in gold.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PHOTO BY B. CRAWFORD, EDITED BY LINDA BRAZEAU

  SUSAN CRAWFORD is a four-time winner of the Atlanta Writers Club award for her short fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in the literary magazines Loves Lost and Found, Long Story Short, and a short piece in The Sun. Susan works for the Department of Technical and Adult Education in Atlanta. This is her first novel.

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  ALSO BY SUSAN CRAWFORD

  The Pocket Wife

  CREDITS

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH MARY SCHUCK

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY TREVILLION IMAGES

  COPYRIGHT

  “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda, translated by Donald D. Walsh, from The Captain’s Verses, copyright © 1972 by Pablo Neruda and Donald D. Walsh. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  THE POCKET WIFE. Copyright © 2015 by Susan Crawford. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-236285-8

  EPub Edition March 2015 ISBN: 9780062362872

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