Then they found out about the man. It soon became clear that the only thing that might be worse than Melissa having this baby with no father on the scene would be having this baby with the father on the scene.
His name was Lester Cody. He was thirty years old and a regular customer at Denny’s. He’d never hung on to a job longer than three months, and none of them had ever paid a penny more than the minimum wage. He always ended up injured. He hurt his back, damaged his shoulder or sprained his ankle. Yet luckily, no matter how badly he might have gotten hurt, he could still play his Nintendo Wii. He lived in his parents’ basement and still had Spider-Man posters on his bedroom wall. His favourite hat was adorned with a plastic dog turd.
Ellie cried for the better part of a week before she was able to accept the situation. Her daughter was really going to have this child, she was not going to marry Lester Cody, and Ellie was going to become a grandmother.
This baby’s coming, she realised. There’s not a damn thing I can do about it. So, she took up her knitting again.
Sometimes, it was all more than Wendell Garfield could stand. There was tension between his wife and daughter, and Ellie wanted to have constant debates with him about what their girl was going to do with her life. Now, there was all this new talk about the baby. How would Melissa manage? Would she need to move back home? Would the man who got her pregnant step up to the plate and accept some responsibility?
The discussions never stopped.
Wendell Garfield wondered if all this had driven him into the arms of Laci Harmon. Perhaps it would have happened anyway.
Three
Wendell
Wendell and Laci both worked at the Home Depot hardware store, him primarily in plumbing, and her over in home lighting fixtures. They’d had coffee breaks together, talking about their families, the joys and – mostly – heartaches of raising kids. She had two boys aged fifteen and seventeen who did nothing but fight with one another. Laci confessed once, only half jokingly, that she wished they’d have one final free-for-all battle and kill each other.
Wendell laughed. He said he knew exactly how she felt.
He always found reasons to stroll through the lighting section.
Laci often seemed to be passing through the plumbing supplies aisle.
It started with friendly teasing, then comments with double meanings. When Laci wandered by, she’d narrow her eyes and say she needed help with her plumbing. When Garfield was over in light fixtures, he’d bump into Laci on purpose and say he wondered if she could help him keep his light switch in the up position.
It was all in fun.
One day Wendell had been asked to assemble, for display purposes, a vinyl-sided garden shed. He was inside the nearly finished structure, tightening up some bolts to make sure the thing wouldn’t blow down in the wind. Suddenly Laci Harmon stepped inside, slid the door shut behind her, and placed his right hand on her left breast.
It was a Thursday. That night, when Ellie was doing the weekly grocery shopping, Garfield slipped away from home and met Laci at a Day’s Inn hotel. They had been finding ways to get together once or twice a week since then, always in places that were nicer than a vinyl-sided garden shed, although not always by much. One of these places was Laci’s Dodge minivan, for example. Garfield longed for these moments away from home, away from the endless stresses that Ellie and Melissa provided.
*
He’d only just put down the phone from speaking with the police when it rang again.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh, Wen, I just had to get in touch.’
‘Laci, this isn’t a good time.’
‘But I can’t stop thinking about you, about what you must be going through,’ she said. She wasn’t whispering, which told Garfield that she was alone in her house.
‘Where are your husband and the boys?’ he asked her.
‘They’re out. It’s just me here,’ Laci said. ‘Wendell, you have to talk to me.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Have they found out anything? Do the police know what happened? I saw the press conference. I watched it at six o’clock, and I watched it again at eleven. It was very moving. You were very good, if you know what I mean. You held it together really well. I think, if anyone knew anything, if they knew anything at all, they’d call the hotline if they saw your appeal.’
‘I was just speaking to the police,’ Garfield said. ‘They haven’t received any good tips.’
‘I feel … I feel so … It’s hard to explain,’ Laci said. ‘I feel guilty in a way, you know? Because of what we’ve been doing, behind her back.’
‘Those things don’t have anything to do with each other.’
‘I know that, but I keep thinking, what if someone finds out? What if someone finds out what’s going on between us? They might think it has something to do with what’s happened to Ellie. And if, God forbid, something has actually happened to Ellie, then how is it going to look if—’
‘Laci, please, don’t go there,’ he said. ‘Maybe she just decided to go away for a while, to clear her head.’