She said, “Okay, your contributions are to annoy me and break my car.”
“Charlotte, let me give you the answer.”
“Okay.”
“No, darling. Listen to what I’m saying. Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”
She chewed her lip again.
“We return to our visual aid.” Rusty pressed the window button again, but held it this time. The glass slid all the way down. Then he pressed in the other direction and the window rolled back up. “Nice and easy. Back and forth. Like you’d volley a ball on the tennis court, except this way I don’t have to run around a tennis court to show you.”
Charlie heard him tap his foot along with the car blinker as she took a right onto the farmhouse driveway. “You really should’ve been a marriage counselor.”
“I tried, but for some reason, none of the women would get into the car with me.”
He nudged her with his elbow, until she reluctantly smiled.
He said, “I remember one time your mama said to me—she said, ‘Russell, I’ve got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.’”
Charlie felt a weird pang in her heart, because that sounded exactly like the kind of announcement Gamma would make. “Was she happy?”
“I think she was getting there.” He blew out a wheezy breath. “She was inscrutable. She was beautiful. She was—”
“Goat fucker?” The Subaru’s lights showed the broad side of the farmhouse. Someone had spray-painted GOAT FUCKER across the white clapboard in giant letters.
“Funny thing about that,” Rusty said. “Now, the goat, that’s been there a week or two. The fucker just showed up today.” He slapped his knee. “Damn efficient of ’em, don’t you think? I mean, the goat’s already there. No need to pull out the Shakespeare.”
“You need to call the police.”
“Hell, honey, the police probably did it.”
Charlie pulled the car close to the kitchen door. The floodlights came on. They were so bright that she could see the individual weeds in the overgrown yard.
She didn’t want to, but she offered: “I should go with you to make sure there’s no one inside.”
“Nope.” He threw open the door and jumped out. “Be sure to bring your umbrella tomorrow. I am extremely certain about the rain.”
She watched his jaunty walk to the house. He stood on the porch where all those years ago Charlie and Sam had left their socks and sneakers. Rusty unlocked the two locks and threw open the door. Instead of going inside, he turned to salute her, well aware that he was standing between the GOAT and the FUCKER.
He shouted, “‘What’s done cannot be undone! And now, to bed, to bed, to—’”
Charlie threw the car into reverse.
There was no need to pull out the Shakespeare.
6
Charlie sat in the garage, hands wrapped around the steering wheel.
She hated everything about going into her empty house.
Their empty house.
She hated hanging her keys on the hook by the door because Ben’s hook was always empty. She hated sitting on the couch because Ben wasn’t on the other side with his spidery toes hooked onto the coffee table. She couldn’t even sit at the kitchen counter because Ben’s empty barstool made her too sad. Most nights, she ended up eating a bowl of cereal over the sink while she stared into the darkness outside the window.
This was no way for a woman to feel about her husband after almost two decades of marriage, but absent her actual husband, Charlie had been rocked by a kind of lovesickness that she hadn’t experienced since high school.
She hadn’t washed Ben’s pillowcase. His favorite beer still took up door space in the refrigerator. She had left his dirty socks by the bed because she knew if she picked them up, he would not be back to leave another pair.
During the first year of their marriage, one of their biggest arguments had been over Ben’s habit of taking off his socks every night and dropping them on the floor of the bedroom. Charlie had started kicking them under the bed when he wasn’t looking, and one day Ben had realized that he didn’t have any socks left and Charlie had laughed and he had yelled at her and she had yelled back at him and because they were both twenty-five, they had ended up fucking each other on the floor. Magically, the fury she’d once felt every time she saw the socks had been dialed back to a mild irritation, like the tail end of a yeast infection.
The first month without Ben, when it had finally dawned on Charlie that his leaving wasn’t a blip, that he might not ever come back, she had sat on the floor by the socks and sobbed like a baby.
That had been the last and only time she had allowed herself to give in to her sorrow. After that long night of tears, Charlie had forced herself to stop sleeping late and to brush her teeth at least twice a day and bathe regularly and to do all those other things that showed the world that she was a functioning human being. She knew this from before: the moment she let her guard down, the world would spiral into a distant but familiar abyss.
Her first four years of college had been a headlong plunge into a bacchanalia she had only glimpsed in high school. With Lenore not there to slap some sense into her, Charlie had let loose. Too much alcohol. Too many boys. A blurring of the lines that only mattered the next morning when she didn’t recognize the boy in her bed, or whose bed she was in, and couldn’t recall if she had said yes or no or blacked out from the copious amounts of beer she had poured down her throat.
By some miracle, she had managed to clean up her act long enough to ace the LSAT. Duke was the only law school she applied to. Charlie had wanted to start over. New university. New city. The gamble had worked out after a long stretch of nothing working out. She had met Ben in Intro to Writing or Elements of the Law. On their third date, they had both agreed they were going to get married eventually, so they might as well go ahead and get married now.
A loud scraping noise pulled her out of her thoughts. Their neighbor was dragging his garbage can to the curb. Ben used to be in charge of that chore. Since he left, Charlie had accumulated so little garbage that most weeks she left a single bag at the end of the driveway.
She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. The bruises underneath her eyes were solidly black now, like a football player’s. She felt achy. Her nose throbbed. She wanted soup and crackers and some hot tea, but there was no one to make it for her.
She shook her head. “You are so fucking sad,” she told herself, hoping the verbal humiliation would snap her out of it.
It did not.
Charlie dragged herself out of the car before she was tempted to close the garage door and turn on the engine.