There was an elementary school down the street from her house in California, and in the afternoons Gloria would slowly walk past the chain-link fence and watch the kids playing, shouting and jumping, fighting. Their screams would give her a headache but she walked by anyway because it reminded her of Jacky, who’d always liked kids so much, especially the little ones in diapers, while she’d never had a knack for it. She still remembers the year Jacky dressed up as Santa Claus and went around to all their diners, carrying bags full of candy and toys for the kids, and how they’d shrieked when they saw him, sometimes in terror, but even then they’d refused to leave. And she’d come along, dressed as Mrs. Claus, but only because Jacky had insisted, and when he got an idea in his head there wasn’t any use arguing with him about it, he would never give in. And later at home, while Jacky was in the shower, singing Christmas carols in his off-key tenor, she’d looked through the handful of Polaroids deemed rejects because all the parents had passed on them, and saw that while Jacky was grinning like a kid in every one of them, her own mouth was screwed up so tight she might’ve been sucking air through a tiny straw. That was the difference between her and Jacky, though. He was always trying to be Mr. Good Times, always wanted to make everyone happy. Not that she didn’t want people to be happy, but she didn’t have the enthusiasm her husband did.
She was in California five weeks when she decided to leave, to move back to Denver. California was too much. Of everything. The stores were always too crowded, the lines at the gas pumps were always too long. The sun was too bright. It was too warm, and what a waste that was, since half her wardrobe was for winter. And there were so many different people everywhere she looked, men booming in Spanish and tiny women with black hair and slanted eyes, and plenty of blacks, more blacks than she’d ever seen in her life, playing basketball on the streets and braiding one another’s hair and laughing, big whooping laughs that bounced off the walls and came back to her ears again. A gay couple lived in the house across the street, two black men who were very kind, but she couldn’t even speak to them about the weather without imagining what they did in bed, how they enjoyed each other, so she tried to be extra careful about when she went out, not wanting to get caught in an extended conversation at the mailbox.
And besides, Denver was her home. She’d been born there, lived her whole life there. She hadn’t realized that a place could be a part of someone until she was in California, where everything seemed a smidge off, the brick in the wall that wouldn’t quite line up with the rest, and it was enough to make her miserable.
And she still wanted to be close to Jacky.
So she moved back. Bought a house in the Whittier neighborhood, where she was able to stretch the inheritance her mother had left her further. It was an area where the neighbors were less likely to care who you were as long as you didn’t cause trouble, where people still knew how to mind their own business. It wasn’t all that far from one of their diners, the original one her father had opened, although it wasn’t theirs anymore, or even hers, but had been sold off long before to pay for lawyers and fees and whatever else the courts had cooked up. She doesn’t leave the house all that often, and she tries not to drive past any of the diners if she can help it. She doesn’t want to see something that used to be hers and never will be again. So she stays home and watches the peach tree fighting for life in the cold.
*
She visits Jacky once a week. Visiting is allowed for only a brief window on Wednesday mornings, so she wakes up early to make it to Sterling on time. It’s a long drive. For a while she tried listening to audiobooks as she drove, but she’d found her mind wandering, and she’d realize that half the book was gone and she had no idea what’d happened. She started listening to music, any kind, and then to nothing at all, it never mattered, only the howling of the wind as her car sliced along the interstate ever reached her.
“How can you still care about him?” a girlfriend asked, not long after Jacky was arrested. She’d lived with her mother for a while after the house was torn down in the tiny apartment her mother had rented since her father had died. “You don’t have to deal with him anymore. File for divorce.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Gloria had said. She was tired of these phone calls, sick of being told what to do by women who barely knew her. She’d gone to church with them, had gone shopping and traded recipes and gossiped, but they didn’t know her, and they certainly didn’t understand her marriage.
“He’s a monster, Gloria. He could’ve murdered you in your sleep. Have you ever thought of that?”
She carefully replaced the phone in the cradle. When it rang again, she ignored it. She’d turned the voicemail off, so there was never an answer, and sooner or later whoever was calling would get tired of the endless rings and hang up.
“I’d like some tea,” her mother had said, from the armchair she hardly ever left. Almost a year later Gloria would find her in that chair, her head canted strangely to one side and her mouth twisted into a cruel maw, dead from a stroke during the night. Her mother had never said a word about Jacky since his arrest, never asked questions or tried to talk about it, and Gloria thought that it might’ve been because her mother understood. Her parents had been married for fifty-two years when her father passed, and she thought her mother had a good idea of what she was going through because her father was difficult; he could be terribly mean, but when you were married you made things work, that was your job, you dealt with what was handed out, you made the best of what you got. It was like that old country song. Stand by your man, that’s how it went, and it wasn’t that way anymore, people bailed and filed for divorce at the first sign of trouble, but she hadn’t been raised that way, she’d made a promise and she was going to keep it.
*
“There’s a good sale on squash right now,” Gloria says. “I have to go back tomorrow, pick up some more before it goes off.”
“What kind of squash?”