The doorbell rings one afternoon, and there’s a young man standing on the front steps, a handsome one with light hair and good skin. Not zitty and pockmarked like some of the other boys she’s seen, who’re constantly scratching and picking at their faces. At least it’s not a girl—there was a time when Jacky would have sent home any number of young women, girls he’d met while he was out doing whatever it is he does during the day, sent her to Gloria to do things around the house for cash. Beautiful young girls with lean thighs and bright smiles, who’d come over in short skirts and thin T-shirts, not clothes to work in but to be seen in. Once, she caught Jacky staring out a window at a group of girls working in the garden, and it’s not that she minded so much—all men looked at young women, hell, cars passing by on the street slowed to watch the girls at their raking—but did he have to do it right in front of her? But she didn’t say anything, didn’t tell him that it hurt her feelings, that it made her feel insecure. She was forty-five, and she felt every minute of it, every year. In the creaking of her knees, in the bags under her eyes. And those young girls, they made her feel terrible, but what could she say without looking like a complete fool?
“Mr. Seever isn’t home from work yet,” she tells the boy. She’s flustered, even though she’s dressed and has her makeup on—young men always make her feel awkward, especially the good-looking ones. She knows it shouldn’t matter what a boy half her age thinks, but somehow it still does. “You can wait for him here, if you’d like.”
The boy follows her in, sits at the kitchen table, and enthusiastically drinks the Coke she pours over crushed ice. She’s irritated at Jacky, because she was in the middle of reading a novel, one from the library that seemed like a stinker but she checked it out anyway; it was like a puppy with big, drooping eyes at the pet store that she had to take home. And now, after starting to read with the lowest of expectations, the book is turning out to be something great, but she can’t leave the boy alone in her kitchen so she can get back to reading—instead, she has to sit there and make small talk and be friendly and keep from glancing at her wristwatch, desperately listening for the sound of Jacky’s car pulling into the driveway.
But the boy seems to sense how uncomfortable she is, and makes it easy.
“I’m here to do some chores for your husband, ma’am,” he says. “If it’s all right, I’ll get started and let you get back to whatever you were doing.”
“That would be nice,” she says, relieved.
There’s a pause, and Gloria twists the tissue in her hand. It’s moments like this, she thinks, in which important things happen. Choices are made. She could take a step forward, throw her arms around the boy’s neck and slip him the tongue. Drag him up to her bedroom and undress for him, slowly, and move her mouth over all that tight, young flesh. It would serve Jacky right, to have his wife sleep with the boy he sent home to work, because he’s been cheating since the beginning, she knows it and ignores it, and she usually tries to put it out of her head, because it’s just sex, and every man has to have fun, but then there are days when Jacky will take her to the restaurant and she’ll see him looking at one of the waitresses, and the girl will stare right back at him with her dark eyes, and Gloria can practically feel the heat in those looks, and she’ll see how she’s being neatly pushed to one side. Jacky thinks she’s a stupid, unsuspecting housewife, but she knows everything. She’s half-tempted to do something crazy to get back at Jacky, but doesn’t when she realizes it’s probably her library book influencing her even though it’s on the other side of the house. It’s the kind of book where anything is possible, where animals talk and houses fly; the kind of book where a woman can get any man she wants, even if her own father called her ugly and fat, even if that man is a boy wearing a faded T-shirt and a pair of bright-white sneakers. She wants to do something, but instead she doesn’t do anything at all. That’s her deal, like they used to say.
“So what does my husband have you doing today?” she asks, delicately clearing her throat.
“I’m digging.”
“Digging?” For the first time, she realizes he has a shovel propped up against his chair, the worn metal edge balanced on her kitchen floor. It’s smallish—she can’t remember what it’s called, a shovel like that. Not a trowel—a spade, like in a deck of cards.
“Yeah,” the boy says, wrinkling his nose in amusement, like he’s giving her the punch line of a joke he doesn’t quite understand. “Mr. Seever wants some holes dug in the crawl space.”
*
That boy who digs the crawl space, he comes to the house a few times, and he’s always friendly, always smiling. And then he’s gone. When Gloria asks about him, Jacky is vague and distracted.
“Oh, he won’t be back around,” Jacky says. “He found something else that suits him better.”
*
Every marriage has rules, not ones that are written down or set in stone, but they’re there just the same, creating invisible fences that only two people can see. And if her own marriage only had one rule, Gloria thinks, it is this:
Gloria knows nothing.