March 17, 2009
On Tuesdays she goes to the grocery store, stocks up her fridge with plastic totes of salad greens and skim milk and ground coffee. She still hasn’t gotten used to shopping for one—it’s strange, not to buy all the things Jacky used to eat, the potatoes and cheeses and gallons of rocky-road ice cream. And all the red meat. She hardly ever eats meat now. There are even times she forgets to eat altogether, when she’ll come into the kitchen in the morning for a cup of hot tea and find it completely untouched, and she’ll realize that she didn’t eat at all the day before. This never fails to surprise her, because it doesn’t seem like eating is something a person could forget. She doesn’t buy much at the grocery for that reason, and even so it sometimes goes to waste, the lettuce leaves melting into black goo at the bottom of the produce drawer, the quarts of milk separated and sour.
It’s Tuesday, but she’s not going to buy food. Instead she’s going home, to the big house on the northeast corner of Sycamore Street, the brick place on a quarter-acre lot with the thirty-foot evergreen planted right outside the front door. That tree cost a small fortune to plant, and the roots would break into the foundation and the sewage lines at some point, but she’d once told Jacky that she wanted to live in a house with a big tree right outside the front door, and he’d stored that information away, kept it for later. Jacky always had a good memory for those kinds of things, and he loved surprises, and she was surprised when he bought the house, even more surprised when she woke up to the sound of men planting the tree in the yard a week after they moved in. Jacky liked to make her happy, he said that was a husband’s main job. To make his wife smile.
“I’m sorry for all the times I’ve made you cry,” he had said, a week before he was arrested. She was packing, carefully laying out outfits and rolling up socks to tuck into the shoes already in her open suitcase. They’d done a lot of traveling over the years of their marriage, and she’d become an expert at packing. Toiletries in gallon freezer bags, in case they exploded, which they were so apt to do when flying into Denver. A pillbox to keep her jewelry in, the compartments keeping the necklaces from getting tangled. Socks tucked into shoes to save space.
“What was that?” She’d been busy with her packing, trying to keep all the last-minute details straight. She was going on a trip with her mother, to see the arch in St. Louis, or farther on, to Chicago. The trip had been Jacky’s idea, and later, she realized that he’d been so adamant about her going because he knew what was going to happen and he didn’t want her around to see him arrested. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
“I’m sorry for the times I made you cry,” Jacky had repeated, slowly. He was sitting in the armchair by the window, looking out on their quiet street. There was a car parked at the corner, the same place it’d been every day for the last few weeks, and she could see the shoulder of the man sitting behind the wheel, his fingers drumming on the dash. She hadn’t said anything to Jacky about the car and the men who were always around, but she knew he already knew, and that they were cops. She knew that by the clothes they wore, the way they wouldn’t meet her eyes when she drove by. They’d been married for almost thirty years but Jacky still thought she was oblivious, that she didn’t notice the little things. It was the running joke between them, and she’d always gone along with it, but she’d noticed the cops, their shifty eyes and their suit jackets that were cut too loose around the waists to hide their weapons, and she’d known something was going on.