She was almost intolerably shy — he remembered this from high school — as she took his name, mumbling, and led him into an examination room. He laid the cat down on the counter. It was panting shallowly in pain, blood oozing from its open mouth. Christine came back with a veterinarian, a bossy, red-haired woman who said the cat would have to be put down. She asked if it was his, he shook his head, and she told him to leave the room, then she and Christine together administered the shot that ended the cat's life.
He sat in the truck in the parking lot, waiting for her to get off work. When she saw him there, she turned around and went back inside. After a couple of minutes she came out again, her breath streaming in the cold, and got in on the passenger side. She had antibiotic lotion and bandages and cleaned his arm where he'd been scratched, and when she was done he drove her to the pub and they drank for an hour or so without hardly even speaking. Then he took her home.
After this evening he would stop several times a week to wait in the parking lot for her shift to end. They would go to the pub, or down to the river to watch the water, and in this quiet, unhurried way, over one long winter, they fell in love.
“Her hair,” he said to Penny, “was so blond and straight it looked like thread against the pillow.”
According to Guy, Irene never thought he was good enough for her daughter (Henry's opinions on the matter could not be discerned, as he was even then fading out of the hearing world). But Christine didn't care. She'd inherited the red farmhouse from her grandmother, and she asked him to move in with her. They planned a future: a garden in the back, a dog and cats, children to run through the house.
“This house,” he said, looking at Penny. She nodded.
“Then, the accident. I was driving. I was not drunk — current appearances to the contrary. Irene blamed me. Maybe she was right to. I don't fucking know at this point, to be completely honest with you. All I know is that Christine got thrown from the car, and by the time I woke up she was gone.”
Penny said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“While I was still in the hospital, Irene packed up the entire house. She moved my stuff into an apartment. Christine's things,” he said, “she put in the shed.” Exhausted by the effort of talking, he leaned back in the lawn chair, still looking at her. His eyes were bloodshot. In the distance, the shrill wheeze of a lawnmower cut the air.
Penny stood up. “Come on,” she said. With the key to the shed in her pocket, she led him down the grassy slope to the door and unlocked it. Windowless, musty, and hot, the inside of the shed was as orderly as you would expect from someone like Irene. Cardboard boxes, all the same size, sat stacked evenly against the walls. A few pieces of furniture — a loveseat, a desk, a standing lamp — were shrouded in plastic, looking ghostly in the light. Guy moved around, touching each item with the tips of his stubby fingers. This close to him, the smell of alcohol was even stronger, and it was mixed with an acrid, unhealthy odor of sweat.
He pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his back pocket and began opening the boxes, setting each down on the floor before moving on, pulling some things out — a sweater, a doll, a book— and then racing on to the next, like a frenzied addict facing an unprecedented supply of his chosen drug. He heaved boxes aside and started in on new ones. At last he found one that attracted his full attention. First he pulled out a set of large books wrapped, like everything else, in plastic, then sat down in the midst of his mess and began turning the pages of one of them. It was a photo album. Penny came up behind him and looked over his shoulder, but for all he cared she may as well not have been there.
A blond girl graduating from high school in a light blue gown.
As he turned the pages she changed her hair and her glasses; had a vacation on a beach somewhere; went off to college and hugged a dog — her own or someone else's, Penny didn't know — and celebrated a birthday with three friends and a blazing cake.
Guy touched this last photo with his right hand. “Will wonders never cease,” he said.
Penny wanted to ask what he meant. That a girl's mother would pack away her entire life and leave it to molder in a shed? That the girl looked the same as he remembered her, or completely different? That he still loved her, was that the wonder? She could not ask. There was a scuffling behind her, and she turned — expecting a mouse — and saw Irene in the doorway of the shed, sunlight flooding in around her, looking tiny and betrayed. As her gaze moved from Penny to Guy, it took on the unmistakable shimmer of hatred. It looked exactly as if she were thinking the word motherfucker. He glanced at her and turned back to the album without reaction. It was clear to Penny, as he touched the photograph, that his dishevelment, his smell of liquor and sweat, his too-big watch reminding him he had nowhere to go, all these things were the consequence of the girl's death and not, in any respect, the cause of it. And it was equally clear that Irene's primness, her financial and domestic concerns, even her shouting at her husband, were also consequences of this death, instruments she used to wall off the tragedy of her life— her loss, and her cruelty — and keep it hidden.
“Murderer,” Irene said. “Murderer.” She enunciated each syllable distinctly, evenly, and for the first time Penny saw her looking down instead of up.
“Guy,” Penny said.
“She'll have to drag me out of here,” he said matter-of-factly, “and I'd like to see her try.”
After Irene turned on the heel of her orthopedic shoes and left, she disappeared from Penny's life for a long time, so completely as to seem almost imaginary. Penny sent the rent checks by mail and received no confirmation in return. She didn't see Guy, either. The shed was relocked, minus a few boxes, and she and Tom were busy. They were wrapped up in their life together, now finally and fully unpacked, and went to faculty dinners and took walks in the woods. On a quiet Wednesday morning Penny stood in the bathroom with the results of the pregnancy test in her hand, knowing that everything was about to change. When Tom came home that night she was sitting on the couch, where she'd sat, unmoving, for two hours.
He put his leather bag down immediately, sat down beside her, and took her hand. “What happened?” he said.
“It's now,” she said. “We'll be parents now.”
He leaned over and kissed her forehead solemnly, then leaned down and kissed her stomach, too. After that, his smile broke open and stayed for days, and it was the confident smile she'd counted on. At various times in the past she'd been annoyed by his self-assurance, his ability to picture himself a success. When he'd asked her to marry him, she'd seen in his eyes that he'd never doubted she would say yes. He'd also known that he could ask Penny to follow him to this town; that she would understand the importance of his job. She'd felt he could use a little more self-doubt, a little humility, but now she needed his strength. And he was as sure that they would succeed as parents as he was about everything else. In his certainty about the future she was able to locate a confidence of her own, and to forget the radically conflicting desires that had been tearing at her. All desire to scream the word “Motherfucker!” in somebody's face evaporated. She knew they would have the life she'd constructed in her mind, in this house or another one like it, a house with a family.