But they were beyond all that now. They’d had all their arguments many times. Now there was little else left to be said.
Sylvia rolled her car into the driveway, parked, and waited just a minute, trying to pretend she didn’t see Don’s car. She grabbed the canvas tote bag she was using for a purse and considered looking at herself in the rearview mirror, get some idea what Don was about to see. No reason, she thought. Might as well get it over with.
Don appeared in the backyard. “Don, what are you doing here?” Sylvia opened the car’s back hatch, grabbed a grocery bag, motioned for Don to pick up the other one.
“Nothing. Just come to talk to you.”
“Well, you better talk quick, I’m getting ready to go to sleep.” Sylvia hoisted the bag to her hip fiddled for her keys.
“You’re not asleep now,” Don said.
Don was always saying something stupid, Sylvia thought, always tried to get her off her guard. If he said something dumb enough it was like a smack in the middle of the forehead, stunning you into silence, and he could keep on doing what he wanted. You don’t spend nearly forty years messing around with a man and not learn at least a few of his tricks.
“Come on then. Put the food in the refrigerator.”
Don put the damp packages of fruit and vegetables from the plastic bags and stacked them in the refrigerator. He would have liked a little more to do, keep his hands busy and moving, let Sylvia see him working. She always liked him in motion, doing a chore, sweating, proving he had a plan. His luck, he was in the middle of a break when she decided to check on him, either leaning on a hoe, resting his eyes, or in a just-took-off-my-shoe-to-remove-a-stone position, the exhibit A to her belief that he was of little use and couldn’t be trusted.
Don eased into the tweedy den chair and felt into the dark sides for a remote control.
Sylvia fished from the mound of towels in a plastic laundry basket at her feet. She folded the pile of towels in a mound at the end of the couch. She popped the cotton, smoothed each with the side of her hand. Don watched her pop and fold a few while the lint flew in the already stiff air around them. Don tried to latch onto one piece of lint and follow it to the ground, but the mote kept disappearing before his eyes.
“If you’re just going to sit there, you could fold some. How long you staying anyway?” Sylvia threw a pile of towels to Don on the recliner. He tried to imitate Sylvia’s actions, but he was slow; Sylvia folded three towels to his one.
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s not very polite,” Don said pretending to be hurt. Sylvia laughed through her teeth, the sudden air sounding like a hiss in the room. “I just come to see how you are, that’s all.”
“You see me all the time, Don. You know how I am.”
“I know.”
“Have you been talking to Ava?”
“What about Ava?”
Sylvia stared Don down, debated about whether to get into it with him. “What I do with my time is my business.”
“Who said it wasn’t.”
“Well, just mind your business.”
Don held up his hands in surrender. “Whatever you want. Call me Bennet ’cause I ain’t in it.”
Sylvia glared at Don. How she got hooked up to this idiot she could not say. “You should call Ava sometime. Do you know how to use a phone? Apparently not, you’re here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean with what? Call her and find out.” Sylvia took the stack of dish towels to the kitchen drawer. She considered walking out the door and leaving Don where he sat.
“How’s that little girl you’ve shacked up with?” she yelled.
Don was surprised, though he shouldn’t have been. Of course Sylvia would know about Jonnie. There are secrets in a small town but only if you blind yourself and refuse to know them. Once enough people suspect the abuse, the other woman, the drugs you take, there is a tipping point and the information spills over and out to everyone. Don had learned that the hard way.
“She’s all right. All right. A little girl.”
Sylvia came back into the room and sat opposite Don on the couch. She laughed at him. He clearly didn’t think she knew about Jonnie, but she had seen them together months before. The two of them standing innocently enough at the Laundromat. Don stared with intention into Jonnie’s face like he was interested in her conversation. Don interested in somebody’s ideas! Sylvia had smelled a rat right then.
For a few months when Sylvia was eighteen and worked at the cotton mill sewing elastic bands on women’s underwear, she had taken an older man up on his clumsy advances and shared her body with him a few times. The men at the mill congratulated the man with nods and sly grins. The women were haughty and mostly silent. Sylvia didn’t care. After work and a few times when he told his dull stupid wife he was somewhere else they’d gone together to the reservoir and parked at one of the secluded exits. Both of them had been nervous at first, but that thrill of deceit, the power that came from so much at stake made them both feel bigger and more important than either thought they had a right to be. Sylvia had not felt sorry for the plump, tired wife. It was hard for Sylvia to understand how she’d felt then, how she’d had no pity for the woman at all. If she thought of her at all, she imagined her ugly at waking, her hair a wicked spiked halo, the skin of her heels flaking. Sylvia was sure the wife was common and too comfortable, belching at the table, wearing unflattering hand-me-downs from her grown children. But most confusing to Sylvia now, was how she hated the wife. How dare she have the gall to feel safe in her own skin? That was reason enough to destroy her. By the time Sylvia told her sister about it, the affair was over anyway. Lana wouldn’t judge her, like she wanted her to, like she needed her to, but offered sad forgiveness. Sylvia had not wanted to be forgiven, at least not then.
Sylvia returned to the living room, not sure what to do with herself, not sure what to do with Don.
Don kneeled in front of the chair she’d sat in and put his head on the fleshy part of her thigh. He didn’t want Sylvia to see his face.
“You ever going to let me come back here?” Don said into the soiled denim of Sylvia’s lap.
“Why should I? I see you more now than I ever did. Besides that, I don’t live here anymore. Did you forget that too?” Sylvia asked. What she wanted to feel for Don was underneath the meanness, a smooth emotion like a river pebble, cool words, without venom that declared that she didn’t care anymore.
Don raised his head and looked up into Sylvia’s face.
“You got a drink?”