The priest chuckled. "The words of a man who has truly had his fingers burned, son." He sighed. "I'm fascinated by your story, but I wonder if we could move it along a bit faster? My company will wait while I do the Lord's work, but not forever. And I believe we're having chicken salad, heavy on the mayo. A favorite of mine."
"There's not much more," Monette said. "If you've played, you've got the gist of it. You can buy the scratch tickets at all the same places you can buy the Powerball and Megabucks tickets, but you can also buy them at a lot of other places, including turnpike rest stops. You don't even need to do business with a clerk; you can get them from a machine. The machines are always green, the color of money. By the time Barb came clean-"
"By the time she confessed," the priest said, with what might have been a touch of actual slyness.
"Yes, by the time she confessed, they'd pretty much settled on the twenty-dollar scratch-offs. Barb said she never bought any when she was on her own, but when she was with Cowboy Bob, they'd buy a lot. Hoping for that big score, you know. Once she said they bought a hundred of those puppies in a single night. That's two thousand dollars' worth. They got back eighty. They each had their own little plastic ticket scratcher. They look like snow scrapers for elves and have MAINE STATE LOTTERY written on the handle. They're green, like the vending machines that sell the tickets. She showed me hers-it was under the guest room bed. You couldn't make out anything except TERY on it. Could have been MYSTERY instead of LOTTERY. The sweat from her palm had wiped out all the rest."
"Son, did you strike her? Is that why you're here?"
"No," Monette said. "I wanted to kill her for it-the money, not the cheating, the cheating part just seemed unreal, even with all that fuh...all that underwear right in front of my eyes. But I didn't lay so much as a finger on her. I think it was because I was too tired. All that information had just tired me out. What I wanted to do was take a nap. A long one. Maybe a couple of days long. Is that strange?"
"No," the priest said.
"I asked her how she could do something like that to me. Did she care so little? And she asked-"
10
"She asked me how come I didn't know," Monette told the hitchhiker. "And before I could say anything, she answered herself, so I guess it was a whatchacallit, a rhetorical question. She said, 'You didn't know because you didn't care. You were almost always on the road, and when you weren't on the road, you wanted to be on the road. It's been ten years since you cared what underwear I have on-why would you, when you don't care about the woman inside it? But you care now, don't you? You do now.'
"Man, I just looked at her. I was too tired to kill her-or even slap her-but I was mad, all right. Even through the shock, I was mad. She was trying to make it my fault. You see that, don't you? Trying to lay it all off on my f**king job, as if I could get another one that paid even half as much. I mean, at my age what else am I qualified for? I guess I could get a job as school crossing guard-I don't have any morals busts in my past-but that would be about it."
He paused. Far down the road, still mostly hidden by a shifting camisole of rain, was a blue sign.
He considered, then said, "But even that wasn't the real point. You want to know the point? Her point? I was supposed to feel guilty for liking my job. For not drudging through my days until I found the right person to go absolutely f**king bombers with!"
The hitcher stirred a little, probably only because they'd hit a bump (or run over some roadkill), but it made Monette realize he was shouting. And hey, the guy might not be completely deaf. Even if he was, he might feel vibrations in the bones of his face once sounds passed a certain decibel level. Who the f**k knew?
"I didn't get into it with her," Monette said in a lower voice. "I refused to get into it with her. I think I knew that if I did, if we really started to argue, anything might happen. I wanted to get out of there while I was still in shock...because that was protecting her, see?"
The hitchhiker said nothing, but Monette saw for both of them.
"I said, 'What happens now?' and she said, 'I suppose I'll go to jail.' And you know what? If she'd started to cry then, I might have held her. Because after twenty-six years of marriage, things like that get to be a reflex. Even when most of the feeling's gone. But she didn't cry, so I walked out. Just turned around and walked out. And when I came back, there was a note saying she'd moved out. That was almost two weeks ago, and I haven't seen her since. Talked to her on the phone a few times, that's all. Talked to a lawyer, too. Froze all our accounts, not that it'll do any good once the legal wheels start turning. Which will be soon. The caca is going to clog the air-cooling system, if you take my meaning. Then I suppose I'll see her again. In court. Her and Cowboy Fucking Bob."