The whole art thing was an idea, nothing more, but it’d worked, and Jacky turned out to be good, he had an eye for it. And there was a market for paintings made by men like Jacky, especially the nasty ones, and Gloria had found an art dealer up north who specialized in those sorts of things, although she’d sell him only one at a time, when she needed the money, because selling the paintings had been like admitting Jacky’s guilt, like flaunting to the world that it was all true, he’d killed and he’d loved it, he was reliving it through his art and she didn’t care. The paintings were awful but they were also a godsend, because she suddenly had money again, and there were no more long days of wondering how she’d be able to provide for herself once her inheritance ran out.
She kept selling to the art dealer until the rest of the paintings were stolen from her house, and he still occasionally calls and asks if she has anything new, but those calls are few and far between. People have lost interest in Jacky; they’ve moved on over the last seven years.
What we need is someone connected to your husband to get murdered, the art dealer had told her once, and she’d actually laughed at that, although the memory of that laugh kept her up for most of the next few nights. That would move his work, put some cash in our pockets.
It was terrible, but it was also true, like most terrible things are. People died every day, and if that person happened to be connected to Jacky, well … It was an awful thought. But it would sell paintings, even the ones of flowers and mountains and bowls of fruit and blocks of smeared color that were all Jacky seemed to make these days. So she still stops at the front desk every week when she leaves the prison, where the guard with the mouthful of big plastic teeth is always waiting with Jacky’s newest canvases, all bundled up, ready to load into her trunk, and she’s considered telling him to throw them away, that she doesn’t need more junk in her house, but she doesn’t. She takes them, every time. Another old habit that won’t die.
She goes straight home after visiting Jacky—she skips the squash at the grocery store, doesn’t feel up to it, her eyes hurt and her legs are tired—and opens the package of paintings. There are five canvas squares. More landscapes. Flat gray land and swirling skies, full of color. Oranges and reds, mostly, swirled together, so they look like madness. She thinks the paintings are probably the view out Jacky’s cell window, the thin slice of the real world he can still see.
The paintings end up stacked in her garage, where they stay, collecting dust.
*
“You’re that Seever woman.” It is the next morning, and Gloria is at the supermarket, although it’s not her regular grocery day, because what else does she have to do? She’s tapping the squash, picking it up and smelling it. She doesn’t know how to look for a ripe one, isn’t sure that it matters, and the woman who walks right up to her catches her by surprise. She is young and plain-looking—not at all pretty, not with the dark circles under her eyes and the spit-up stains on her shoulders. “Gloria, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gloria says before she can think to deny. Jacky’s lawyer had suggested she change her name, but she’d never gone through with it, and after a while it had seemed silly.
“How could you do it?” the woman asks, and Gloria knows exactly what she means, right away, it was a question she’d heard before. So many times over the years.
“I never did anything,” she says quickly. It’s the same old response, the one she gives everyone. “I never knew what was going on.”
“You’re as guilty as he is,” the woman says, and her baby starts whimpering from its seat in the cart, glassy-eyed and flailing. “You should be right next to him when he gets the needle. That’s what you deserve.”
The baby cries out suddenly, and throws its bottle so it hits the floor and goes rolling away. Gloria goes after it, her face hot. This isn’t new, she’d been approached like this before, heard it all. But it isn’t something a person gets used to. Not in a million years.
“Here. Your baby dropped it,” she says, holding out the bottle, but the young woman shrinks away, her face horrified, as if Gloria had taken a shit in her hand and was offering it up like a gift.
The woman won’t take it but hurries away, and Gloria is left with the bottle in her hand, the milk in it still warm.
*
She grills a steak for dinner that night, even though she doesn’t like red meat all that much and she’ll spend the whole night suffering with heartburn. She drinks a beer with the steak, although she would’ve preferred wine, and has a bowl of ice cream for dessert. Because it’s what Jacky would’ve eaten. She still sleeps on the left side of the bed. She keeps three extra rolls of toilet paper beneath the sink in the bathroom, stacked in a small pyramid, because that’s how Jacky liked it. There is no part of her world that doesn’t revolve around him still. There must’ve been a period in her life when she was her own person, when her entire identity wasn’t wrapped up in being the wife of Jacky Seever, but she can’t remember that time. Not anymore. She doesn’t exist as her own person anymore. After Jacky’s arrest, people were always asking if she knew, how she couldn’t know what he was doing, and they treated her like she was guilty of a crime too, even if it was a crime of ignorance. Because that’s what marriage does. It locks two people together, forever and ever, until they’re dead, and even after.
SAMMIE
Lies Sammie regularly tells:
That she wants to have kids.
That she’s glad she doesn’t work at the paper anymore, that the stress was too much for her.