“Now?” Dickie says.
Tom shrugs. “Didn’t know the Fourth of July was a school night. Anyway, we just wanted to see . . . to say hello.”
Dickie looks hard at Tom, who looks hard back. He shakes his head. “Night, assholes,” he says. He is about to close the door on them when Tom quickly slips his foot in the crack.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Tom?”
Tom doesn’t answer. Keeps his foot in the door, his eyes sifting the dark hall beyond Dickie’s shoulder.
“Fuck off!”
That’s when he hears a woman’s voice from within: “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Dickie calls, glaring at Tom.
Tom’s gaze grasps for her shape in the dark but as far as he can see there’s nothing. Her voice sounds nothing like Beth’s. He looks back at Dickie, who’s still scowling in his hula girl shirt. He feels Hot Pocket tugging his shoulder while offering mumbled entreaties that they should probably head home. Sighing, Tom removes his foot from the doorframe. The door slams in his face.
? ? ?
When they get back to the party, Brindy tells him Beth has already left. Not only didn’t she stay for the fireworks, but also? “She seemed upset.”
Driving home alone in Hot Pocket’s SUV, Tom feels the mountain ranges on either side of him, visible only as a darker blackness in the black.
Reeling through the apartment door, he calls her name a couple of times. No answer. But the living room pillar’s there and she’s lit it up. He walks toward it like it’s a beacon, sees on the mantel of the fireplace all these photos of the new her—of her and him, her and her mother, some just of her, of Elizabeth—not his Beth but Elizabeth. Looking pared down and stiff, clad in tight-fitting, sharply cut dresses of every shade, her lips a hard red line that is only half-smiling on one side. In the center, the urn filled with her mother’s ashes, which she refuses to scatter. As he turns and makes his way to the bedroom, he passes the workout gizmo she ordered off the Home Shopping Network, something between a NordicTrack and a treadmill, called the Gazelle. The Gazelle is for days, she said, when she doesn’t feel like “facing” the fitness center, whatever that means. There are so many things he no longer understands.
There, between the display for calories burned and miles Gazelled, she’s taped a photo of herself taken at the staff barbecue a couple of years ago, which she attended during one of her visits, when still in the process of losing. She’s folded the picture in half so it’s just her, but when he unfolds it, he sees himself, red faced and grinning noncommittally at the camera, one thin arm dangling around her shoulder. Beth is leaning into him, smiling broadly into his armpit, a big S of dark shiny hair obscuring one of her eyes. She’s wearing a long black oversize sweater, a long dark skirt. My fat dress, she calls it now. That night, some asshole coworker’s skeletal wife apparently took a cheap shot at her weight and he didn’t defend her. At least this is what she claimed when they got home. He doesn’t remember not defending her. He guesses she Gazelles about five miles a day now while looking at this half of the picture, in which she is smiling but also looking a little scared, like the camera could give her a clip to the jaw anytime. This was the girl he fell in love with. The girl who loved sad music, the girl who wanted nothing more than to lie with him in the dark and let wave upon wave of lush, dark electronic sound wash over her. This might be the only photo of her left. Maybe she keeps the others hidden in a box somewhere, but probably she just got rid of them.
I did this for you, you know, she always tells him.
Did you? he wants to say.
Because he doesn’t remember ever asking for kumquats or hybrid cardio machines, but who knows? Maybe all this time, all the little ways he looked at her and didn’t look at her, all the things he said or didn’t say or didn’t say enough added up to this awful request without his knowledge or consent, like those ransom notes made from letters cut from different magazines.