Don't Make Me Stop Now (12 page)

That week she succumbed to leaving her own machine on when she was at work in case B. R. called. She'd asked him to call if he had any questions, otherwise she'd see him Saturday morning, but she'd assumed he'd call to let her know he was coming anyway, and found herself a little disappointed at night when she came home to no blinks on the machine. It wasn't until late Friday night, sitting up at the kitchen table with a cooking magazine and a bottle of Zinfandel, that she realized she was anticipating his arrival as she would a date. But he wasn't a date, he was a thief. She wondered if he'd been watching the house for some time, if in his surveillance he had learned things about them that they didn't know, or care to acknowledge, themselves. Perhaps he was more than just a garden-variety thief; perhaps he was expert at reading the subtleties of the homes he violated, choosing to break and enter into only those homes that were already broken.

Oh, come on, she told herself as she corked the bottle and rinsed out her glass so she would not have to come upon the red dregs staining the glass in the morning, he's just some
brainwashed dry drunk who wants my forgiveness. Having someone ask her forgiveness seemed luxurious to her, no matter that it was the wrong party doing the asking.

Early the next morning — an hour before she planned to get up — she heard a car in the drive and looked out of her window to see him already out of the truck, crossing the yard to the garage. She took a twenty-minute shower, which did not succeed in washing away the bleariness. She'd been over-served, and she told herself it was a weekend, but still she felt guilty, as if he would take one look at her and know that she stayed up late with a bottle. She knew how reformed drinkers could turn sanctimonious about everyone else's drinking habits. Like divorced people she knew who became suddenly and implausibly knowledgeable about other people's marriages, as if they could sense from a tense word or brusque gesture everything that was hidden from view.

He was far too chipper, and she told him so.

He laughed. “Used to I'd be getting home about this time. Though most weekends I didn't bother going home at all. Now I have a meeting I go to every morning. Dawn Patrol. Start the day out strong.”

She offered coffee, but he declined, saying it would take several trips and he had other work to do that afternoon. She tried not to show her disappointment.

“Where am I taking it anyway?”

“I'll have to ride with you, I'm awful at directions.”

He put the box he'd grabbed down on the tailgate of the truck. “You sure?”

“You don't allow passengers in your truck?”

“I just thought, you know.”

“What?”

“Well, that you hired me to do it because you didn't want to do it yourself.”

“I'm not going to help you unload it. I'm just going to navigate.”

“Okay,” he said, but she could see from his expression that it was not okay, that he did not approve. She went in for more coffee and a doughnut from the carton she'd bought at the store the night before to share with him. Why do I need his approval? she thought, going teary at the kitchen sink. He's the one that needs something from me. Still, when the truck was almost loaded she poured him a glass of juice, took the doughnuts out to the back stoop, and was pleased when he sat down to eat.

“Is it hard for you, not drinking?”

He chewed for a while, swallowed. He did not look at her.

“You think about it all the time. You know that feeling you
get when you leave the house to go to work or on a trip and you realize you might have left the stove on, and you can't rest until you go back and check it out?”

She nodded, unable to speak. She knew that feeling well these days. She would manage a few seconds of distraction, or blissful freedom from thoughts of Christopher, and then her not-yet-believable circumstance would crop up to antagonize her. It had not gotten the least bit better so far, and it had already been three months.

She knew a little something about denying something you loved. But what was a bottle compared with a heart you cannot imagine living without? Who was he to go around claiming to be maimed, when it was only corn, barley, hops, and sugar he was battling, rather than heartbreak, misery, loneliness unto cooking shows?

“I used to imagine what my life would be like without booze,” he said, reaching for another doughnut. “I'd even have dreams, or visions, of what it would be. Clean white sheets on my bed. A good shave every morning.”

He caught her stealing a glance at his cheeks and blushed.

“I thought everything would be in control, you know. That everybody I hurt would take me right back, and when I'd come around they'd be glad to see me. I figured I would never again have to stick my hand between couch cushions in my
sister's den searching for dropped quarters. I thought maybe I'd be able to stay with a woman longer than a few months. Fresh start, clean slate, second chance.”

Laura tried hard to listen but found herself thinking of how she'd imagined her life without Christopher, of the deep loneliness and misery she'd envisioned, which had turned out to be true. So she was better off than this attic cleaner. At least there were no ravaged expectations. Her imagination had not swindled her.

“I take it things aren't perfect yet.”

He turned away from her. “Let's just say I'm a whole lot better off than I was.”

“Let's go,” she said. She went inside to put away the doughnuts and find her wallet. She did not think she was a whole lot better off than she was before, she did not want to be better off than she was before, she wanted her husband back and yet she knew that he wasn't coming back. And she knew also that the home B. R. Bradshaw violated was already violated, that she could not blame him or herself or even Christopher for the dissolution. It may have seemed like snow down south — she might have pretended to be caught unprepared, ill equipped to handle the cleanup — but the disturbance had been brewing for some time, and she'd done nothing to take shelter.

In the truck she gave directions to get them out of the city,
then lost herself in bitterness until she looked up to find him scrutinizing her.

“Which way now?” he asked.

They were stopped at a light at the edge of the clustering strip malls that ringed the city. She knew only vaguely where she was going. Several times some years ago, when they were remodeling their house, she'd gone to the landfill with Christopher, but he'd always driven and once they got out of town into the country, the side roads all looked alike to her. She didn't want to ask, but he would know soon enough where they were going.

“You know the way to the landfill don't you?”

He tapped the brakes and turned to her. “You're taking all this stuff to the dump?”

“I don't need it anymore. The dump is where you take stuff you don't need, right?”

“If it's something that no one else might need, sure. But there are other places to take perfectly good merchandise.”

“The same place you took our CD player, right? And my grandmother's silver? But not my husband's checks, I guess.”

“Your husband left you, didn't he?”

“Just drive.”

“You're dumping his stuff to get back at him.”

“Look,” she said, “I don't need this from you. I hired you to haul this stuff away, not to counsel me.”

“You don't really want to do this, you know.”

“You don't really know what I want. What do you really want from me? You want my forgiveness? Is that all?”

“I don't expect you to forgive me. It's just a part of my recovery, making amends to the parties I've wronged. I don't have a lot of say over a whole lot in this life, like whether you forgive me or not.”

“So all you have to do is apologize, and then it's fresh start, clean slate, second chance?”

He pulled off the road then, into the parking lot of an antiques store. She tried to focus on the things the owner had put outside to entice customers, but the rickety office chairs and mediocre oil paintings depressed her, as they reminded her of the load in the back of the pickup, which would soon be dumped among the hills of ordinary daily waste. Christopher's cross-country skis and the leaky pup tent where they'd survived a freak April snowstorm in Linville Gorge, left for scavengers to find.

“What is it you want me to help you do?” he asked softly. “Because I know it's more than just clean your attic.”

She started to cry. She looked away from him, at an older man in a rocking chair on the porch of the store. He wore oversize black shades favored by people with cataracts, but she could tell by the way he cocked his head in their direction, his gaze frozen on the bed of the pickup, that he was interested in their load.

“Look, it's okay,” he said when she did not answer him.

“No, it's not okay,” she said. “I'm not ready to forgive anyone. I'm not capable of it, and I don't see why I should have to go around forgiving everyone their sins. It's not what I'd imagined for myself, this bitter old martyr I've become. I might as well open up a confession booth in the mall. Make some money out of it at least. I can quit my job and slurp Icee's behind the curtain and dispense forgiveness to the wretched all day long.”

“Maybe you need to forgive yourself.”

She turned to face him, felt the heat in her cheeks, turned away again. The antiques dealer was still studying the merchandise. “For what?” she said to the dealer, although she was talking to her attic cleaner.

“I couldn't really tell you what for. But it seems like to me you're being awful hard on yourself. Blaming yourself for things that aren't your fault.”

“That's the problem with you people,” she said. “You refuse to take responsibility for your actions. Don't blame yourself, blame someone else. Blame your genes, blame your parents, blame suburbia. If I blame myself it's because I'm brave enough to accept the blame.”

“Okay,” he said. Simply, softly: okay. She waited for him to continue, but he left it at okay, as if they had come to some agreement. As if it was okay by him if she accepted the blame.
They sat there. The engine ticked, and the cab of the truck began to heat up. She wanted to roll down the window, but she did not want to draw the attention of the antiques dealer.

“That guy over there's already got his calculator out,” said B. R.

“Yeah, I noticed. I don't have any antiques, though.”

“Just old stuff you want to get rid of? I bet he'd take it.”

She looked at him again, carefully this time. He was wearing a cap, and his hair was wild beneath it, and his eyes were kind even if she did not want to trust them.

“Where does he live?” he said. “I'll drop you off at home and take it over there.”

Why not? she thought. She could squint and pretend he was Christopher, come back to retrieve his things, or she could look him dead in the eye and forgive him, this housebreaker who, no matter what he'd taken from them, had at least forced her to clean her attic.

“I guess we can call it even now,” she told him, even though she knew, and suspected he knew as well, that both of them were a long way from finding any kind of balance. She felt the load shift in the bed behind her as he whipped the truck around in the parking lot, and when a box toppled onto the gravel and he braked to retrieve it, Laura angled the rear-view so that she might watch it shrink and told him to keep going.

J
ESUS HAD JUST LEFT
Chicago, bound for New Orleans, when the girl beneath James stopped moving. Lit by dancing candlelight, she cocked her head as if she heard something over the second cut of side 1 of ZZ Top's
Tres Hombres,
an album James would never have expected a girl to choose as sound track for a little late-night, bars-just-closed coupling. The walk from the bar to her garage apartment through the charged quiet of dark neighborhood streets, the way she laid him down on the tightly made bed while she went about lighting the half-dozen windowsill candles, the sound of the vinyl slipped from its sleeve and soon after of the arm falling, the needle scratching, the first bass-heavy notes of an album from James's youth: James thought maybe he might be in love.

He did not hear the phone ringing. He kept up with Jesus, who was working from one end to another and all points in between.
Aw, take me with you Jesus,
sang ZZ Top. James was
working his way down the Mississippi,
muddy water turned to wine,
when he finally noticed that Erin, beneath him, had stopped somewhere south of Chicago.

She had not gone rigid, as she might had there been someone in the room with them; she'd slackened a little, rocked gradually to a stop. Her eyes were wet. James heard the gurgling phone. It seemed to be buried under a towel. Boyfriend calling, he surmised. He knew squat-all about a boyfriend, but then he knew squat-all about Erin except that she'd just started waiting tables at the restaurant where he washed dishes and she was a music theory major and she was big-boned sexy, and over the fall and winter James had shed twenty-two pounds. At five ten, 137 pounds, he now favored flesh. He knew nothing about any boyfriend because he assumed it was her job to declare such a thing and it wasn't something he'd ever think to ask of a girl who'd invited him back to her garage apartment after twenty minutes of making out on the muddy lawn of He's Not Here, any more than he'd have thought to ask after any communicable diseases. Neither yesses were likely to make his night, which back then, late summer 1981, was about as far as his headlights shone in the dark.

“Do you need to get that?” He regretted these words as soon as they escaped, thought they sounded annoyed, clichéd, or both.

“I guess,” she said, but the phone rang three more times, muffled but persistent, before she made an effort to slide out from under him.