“I never lied to you!” I protest sharply. “I just wasn’t willing to be monitored.”
“Bullshit.” His voice is loud now and he stands up, his palms bracing against the table. “You have feelings for him, too? That lowlife barely reporter, who makes $30,000 a year and lives in a one-room apartment in the East Village? Where all the hippies and the druggies hang out?”
I gape up at him. I never told Henry where Cash lived.
“I know everything about him, Zoe. He’s involved in my life now. I need to know these things, do you think I’m haphazard? Do you think I can afford to just let people in? I will not let my life, my wife, be compromised in that way.” He’s practically yelling, even his hair has taken on an unusually disheveled appearance.
“Henry, are you insane?” I spit.
He leans close to me, his eyes flashing, small dots of white spittle have foamed the corners of his mouth. “Zoe, do not question me about this. I will know what you are doing. I will know who you are spending time with. I will know—”
My heart races. I’ve never seen Henry angry, not like this. Cold, calculating, yes. Not this wild rage. My hands shake and I mentally swing between wanting to fire back at him and calming him down. “Henry, I can’t live like this! Under your rules, your roof, your thumb, your—”
He’s so quick, I hear the glass shatter before I realize what he’s done. The smell of whiskey stings my nostrils and pierces the back of my throat. The wall behind me drips brown amber liquid.
His voice is low, hard and barely controlled. “Then get out.” He spins around, and is gone.
? ? ?
I don’t get out. Where would I go? Lydia’s? I could hear the I told you so out the side of her mouth, lips twisted in a smirk. Or worse, if she reacted with pity, like I was seeking refuge at some kind of abused women’s shelter. No. In the end, I stay in the apartment. Henry’s office door is closed and I wonder if that’s where he’ll sleep. The room has a long, black leather sofa and once or twice when he’s been working late, he has slept in there. Never out of anger, that would be a first. Isn’t sleeping on the couch a sitcom staple? Pillows flying down the stairs and a hapless, balding, middle-aged man scrambling to catch them: Linda, please, I’ll take out the garbage. These are normal, married people things. Truthfully, I have no idea what normal, married couples are like, outside of movies and television. I’ve never witnessed it.
I think of Evelyn, precancer, with her thick, dark hair, red string bikini, and cutoff jean shorts in the driver’s seat of a borrowed black convertible, blasting Bruce Springsteen all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway to Capitola Beach. She’d spread blankets, twist and heave a heavy umbrella into the ground, and sit, smoking cigarettes and humming softly under her breath while I dug holes in the sand.
“We need a radio, bud, don’t you think?” I loved bud. She never called me darling or sweetie. She and I were pals, united against the world. I was twelve, edging into teenage angst while reaching back to my mom, my bud, with one hand. “I’ll find us one.”
I shrugged because I was collecting baby crabs, their soft, gray bodies scuttling up the sides of the yellow bucket and sliding back into the mush at the bottom. The wind picked up, my hair whipping around like sandy cattails, slapping at my eyes. I eyed the girl on the blanket next to us, her hair pulled back taut against her head and held in place with a hair band. Evelyn never had a hair band with her in her life, I was pretty sure. She wasn’t a “Band-Aid in every pocketbook” kind of mother.
Evelyn screamed when the umbrella uprooted and skipped dangerously across the sand, toward the ocean. Beachgoers shouted, pointed, and ducked, but no one jumped up. She stood helplessly and watched our only beach umbrella pinwheel away. She flopped back onto the blanket and gave me a dazzling smile, all sparkling teeth, and shrugged, like it didn’t matter. Like we could just buy another one, which of course, I knew we couldn’t. I squinted down the beach, but the umbrella was gone. I went back to my digging, scooting down toward the wet sand, but she never called me back.
When I wandered back up to the blanket, a man sat next to Evelyn, his chest tan and shiny, his dark hair slick.
“Bud, look! This nice man here brought our umbrella back!” She rubbed his bicep.
“Hi, Hilary. Your mom was just talking about you. I’m Michael, but people call me Mick.”
“Not Mike?” There was a Michael in Mrs. Hoppit’s sixth-grade class, but everyone called him Mike.
“Nope. Mick. It’s Irish.”