“We can’t eat books, Russell. We can’t pay a doctor’s bill with books.”
I never intended to show her the rest I’d brought home, but at the time it seemed like I should. “I forgot something,” I said, and then I went back to the garage and then back to her carrying a wad of twenties and fifties in my hand. I laid it on the table beside her empty plate. She just stood there staring at it, and then after a while she looked up and stared at me.
“That’s my termination bonus,” I told her. “It was a thousand dollars until I bought the books.”
“Really?” she said, and then the tears came into her eyes and she started crying and I stepped up and put my arms around her and held her tight against me.
“I’m sorry I’m so afraid,” she said, and she was shivering in my arms. “I know you’ll do anything to take care of us. I know you will.”
I stroked her hair and held her, and when she was ready she pulled away and scooped up the money and stuffed it into the rooster cookie jar with the money she had been saving for Dani’s school lunches and such. Then she went to the oven and looked in at the tuna noodle casserole she’d made.
“Can you tell the girls to go wash their hands?” she said. Then, a second later, “Wait. Did you know you were getting that bonus?”
“Didn’t have a clue,” I told her.
That night I read for a half hour to the girls, and when I went into our bedroom Cindy was sitting there in bed reading the first book from her set. I showered and brushed and then slid in beside her. She reached out and squeezed my hand but kept right on reading.
“Read to me,” I said, and she said, “Really?”
“Like you used to,” I told her. “I miss that.”
I didn’t care about the words but only the sound of her voice, the way it reminded me of Gee and my mom when I was little. And after a while I had to turn my face to the wall, but I couldn’t bear to let go of her hand.
What happened to the next day, Sunday, I can’t really say. It’s pretty much gone from my memory. A guy loses his job and it’s like, Who am I now? What’s my definition now? Sure, I’m still a father and husband, but part of that definition, a big part, is being a good provider for the family. Losing your job, even when you know it’s coming, is like suddenly having your legs cut off. I guess I went through all the motions that day with my head in a fog, not really knowing who I was or what I was going to do next or how I was going to get that part of my definition back. Especially now that another definition, one I never wanted, the one called thief, was sucking all the energy from me. I mean literally sucking me dry.
The next morning I woke up gasping for air, though I didn’t know why. Couldn’t remember if I’d been having a bad dream or not. But I woke up in a panic with my heart racing a mile a minute, beating hard against my chest, thumping in my temples the way it used to when we were moving door to door against those mud walls. It was the open doorways that scared me the most, the ones that didn’t have to be yanked open before a gun barrel would show itself. A man could stand in those shadows and never be seen, not a ripple of movement until you saw the muzzle flash itself, by which time it’s already way too late.
Anyway, that’s how I woke up Monday morning, out of breath, heart beating like an old generator in those last two seconds before it runs out of gas, like it knows it’s the last gulp of fumes it’s ever going to get. The air was gray and warm and Cindy was sleeping with her mouth close to my shoulder, her little puffs of breath hitting my skin like ice on a raw nerve.
I gathered up my clothes and made it out of the room without waking her. Went into the kitchen to start the coffee, but saw it was only 0530, and damn if I didn’t flash back to that patrol we’d made along the Al-Furat River, that time we stopped for MREs under the date palm and you said, “Any of you morons know that you’re sitting in the cradle of humanity right now?”
I think it was Austin that said, “Damn shallow cradle for all of humanity.”
That’s when you told us the river’s other name was the Euphrates, one of the four rivers where the Garden of Eden is supposed to have been, and you started going on about whether it happened five thousand years ago or fifty thousand or whatever, and for a while we all sat there staring at the water until Moser broke out singing that old Chicago song, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” and every one of us started laughing and joined in on the chorus.
Anyway, that morning I’m standing there with a coffee filter in my hand and I’m staring at my coffeemaker and that song keeps beating through my brain till it’s the only thing I’m thinking, and my body’s getting tenser and tenser and I know I’m going to start screaming if I don’t do something. The only thing I can think to do is to run. So I scratch a quick note to Cindy telling her I’m going for a jog, then I put on my running shoes and head out into the gray morning.
I must’ve done three or four miles before that fucking song drained out of me and I no longer felt like my head was going to explode. I actually enjoyed the run back to the house, though I had to slow to a walk a few times to catch my breath. The light was coming up pink and orange in the east, and being out there in the quiet with just the trees and the smell of grass coming off people’s yards—man, it felt good.
The moment I went in through the pantry door I smelled the chocolate cupcakes, and when I peeked in the kitchen I saw a dozen of them cooling on wax paper on the table, and Cindy was shaking about a gallon of cooked macaroni in a colander over the sink. She smiled at me and said, “You haven’t done that in a while. You want a glass of cold water?”
I nodded, so she hit the faucet and let it run a bit, then filled a glass half full, shoved it under the icemaker on the fridge, then handed it to me. She said, “There’ll be hot dogs and burgers there, the rest is potluck. Should we take our own ketchup and mustard or will they have all that too?”
I’m standing there trying not to look too confused by all this, taking in the cupcakes and the macaroni and the big plastic bowl with the chopped celery and pickles and mayonnaise in it, and our biggest cooler open against the wall and the paper plates and plastic cups lined up on the counter.
But I guess I wasn’t very successful in not looking confused, because after Cindy dumped the macaroni into the plastic bowl, she smiled again and said, “You do remember the community picnic today, right? Labor Day?”
Sometimes I look at her and feel like I’ve never seen her before. Like I’ve been dropped in from outer space or something. Like I’ve woken up inside somebody else’s life.
She blew out a breath and said, “You don’t even listen to me half the time, do you?”
“You told me about this?”
“A dozen times at least. It’s all the girls have talked about all week.”