“Follow me in your car,” he said.
He headed back toward the center of this town about which he knew almost nothing except for his forays to this motel. He knew the department store on Main Street and the Victorian-looking bed-and-breakfast that always had a VACANCY sign out front, yet always looked welcoming wearing its fresh color of pale blue like a shy child who had kindness within. He did not know where a branch of his bank might be, but he drove as though it would appear, only glancing once in the rearview mirror to see her following him; she was biting on her lip, a gesture so familiar to him he knew not to look in the mirror again. He drove with the fully set sun off to his right, and he noted once more that he felt okay. Passing an old church he thought that if she had not been following, he might have pulled over just to look at it from the road.
He had sometimes felt a need to pray. This need was as abhorrent to him as was the sight of his wife. He had been brought up in a Methodist church that had done nothing for him at all, except that he associated the experience with carsickness. He had attended some services at the Congregational church with Marilyn because she wanted to, but that experience of duty had attenuated as soon as the children reached early adolescence; he could not stand it, he told her, and she did not argue with him, they simply stopped going. And no one in the church pursued them. Except for the baptism of his grandchildren, and the funeral of Patty Nicely’s husband, Charlie had not been in a church for years.
But these days, sometimes, he just wanted to go into a church and pray. He wanted to fall on his knees, and what would he pray for? Forgiveness. There was nothing else to pray for, not if you were Charlie Macauley. Charles Macauley did not have the luxury, the foolery, to pray for health for his children or the ability to better love his wife—no no no no no—Charlie Macauley could only pray, beg on his knees, Dear God, forgive me if you can stand to.
But how sickening. It made him sick.
Off to the right, past one more traffic light, he saw the sign for a branch of his bank. Pulling in to the parking lot he saw that the bank was still open and experienced a sense of strange accomplishment. He watched as she pulled in behind him; he signaled with one hand that she should stay where she was, and she nodded once. In about ten minutes he carried out two envelopes of cash—they had the bulky softness of flesh—and handed them to her through her partly open driver’s side window. She opened the window more, as though she were about to thank him, but he shook his head to stop her. “If I hear from you again, I’ll track you down and kill you myself,” he said calmly. “Whether your name is Tracy or Lacy or Shitty or Pretty. Get it? Because you will need more.”
She started her car and drove away.
—
Now the shaking began, first his hands, then his arms, and then his thighs. He had stolen from Marilyn, and wasn’t that different? It seemed to him that that was different from anything else he had done. He was no longer earning money, nor was she. It really shook him up—he had stolen money from his wife. He sat in his car until he felt he could drive.
Only the faintest afterglow was in the sky now; it was a dangerous time, because it was essentially dark, not even dusk anymore; quickly, quietly, night had descended. And yet it was not nighttime. There were hours before one could sleep; his pills at best gave him five hours of sleep.
—
The bed-and-breakfast was a larger house than it appeared to be from the street. He parked in the lot behind it and walked back around—the air was crisp against his face like the witch hazel aftershave he’d used many years ago—and he went up the front steps, which slightly creaked, and that sound slightly pleased him. His instinct told him that this was a good place to be when the real blow arrived; he could be safe here, it could allow a man like him. In fact, the woman who answered the door was as old as he was, perhaps older, a tiny prim woman with good skin. Immediately he thought: She’ll be afraid of me. But she did not seem to be. She looked him in the eye, asked if a room without a television would be all right. If he wanted to watch television, he could watch it here in the living room, the other guests seemed to have already turned in.
At first he told her no, he did not need a television, but when he saw his room, he understood that he could not sit in there and wait, and so he came back into the hall and she said, “Of course,” and gave him the remote, and said, “Do you mind if I join you once I’m done in the kitchen?” He said he wouldn’t mind. “I don’t care what we watch,” she added. In a distant way he understood that she had her own echoes of pain—at their age, he supposed, who did not? Then he supposed that many did not. It occurred to him often that many did not have echoes of pain from the silent noises he carried in his head.
He sat on the couch and heard her in the kitchen. He crossed his arms, and watched a British comedy because British comedies were ridiculous, so removed from anything real—safe, those British comedies: the accents, the clackety teacups. And so he waited. It would come: the wave upon wave of raw pain after a blow like this, oh yes, it would come.
Quietly, the proprietress slipped into the room. From the edge of his eye he saw that she took the big chair in the corner. “Oh, perfect,” she murmured, he assumed meaning the choice of show.
He wanted to ask her: If you made your name up and chose it to be Tracy, what do you think your real name would be?
And so it was coming closer, yes siree bob. He knew what it was, he had been there before, and then it would be over. And yet: It was taking longer than he thought it would.
You never get used to pain, no matter what anyone says about it. But now, for the first time, it occurred to him—could it really be the first time this had occurred to him?—that there was something far more frightening: people who no longer felt pain at all. He had seen it in other men—the blankness behind the eyes, the lack that then defined them.
So Charlie, a tiny bit, sat up straighter, and he stared pretty hard at that television set. He waited, hope like a crocus bulb inside him now. He waited and he hoped, he practically prayed. O sweet Jesus, let it come. Dear God, please, could you? Could you please let it come?
Mississippi Mary
“Tell your father I miss him,” Mary said, dabbing at her eyes with the tissue her daughter handed her. “Can you tell him that, please? Tell him I’m sorry.”
Her daughter looked up at the ceiling—such high ceilings in these Italian apartments—and turned to look briefly toward the window through which the ocean could be seen, then looked back at her mother. Angelina could not stop thinking how old her mother seemed, and small. And weirdly brown. She said, “Mom. Please stop this. Please stop it, Mom. It took my whole year’s savings to fly over here, and I find you in this awful—I’m sorry, but it is—this squalid two-room flat with this guy, your husband, oh God. And he’s almost my age, and we’ve just ignored that fact, what else could we do but ignore that fact? And now you’re eighty years old, Mom.”
“Seventy-eight.” Mary had stopped weeping. “And he’s not your age at all. He’s sixty-two. Come on, honey.”
Angelina said, “Okay, so you’re seventy-eight. But you’ve had a stroke and a heart attack.”
“Oh now please. That was years ago.”
“And now you’re telling me to tell Dad you miss him.”
“I do miss him, honey. I imagine there must be days he misses me too.” Mary’s elbow rested on the arm of the chair; her hand waved the tissue listlessly.