“Thank you,” the voice said.
Kevin just nodded. He couldn’t lift his gaze from the counter...
...until Chuy glanced up from the Maxim he’d been reading and said, “Sweet Jesus, Mami, put some meat on them bones.” And only then did Kevin notice the familiarity of the money-crumpler’s voice.
Kevin’s head snapped up. The glass door drifted shut behind her. He saw the blond streaks in the brown hair, the jeans and the pale pink T-shirt and the tanned skin — all that artifice and yet still he knew, even from the back, even through the thick glass, he knew. Her. Kevin grabbed the steno pad and pen he kept under the counter. He made it outside just as her black Ford Explorer was pulling out, past the pumps and onto Route 34, just in time to scrawl her license-plate number onto the pad.
When he walked back in, he noticed Chuy staring at him. “Tried to catch her,” Kevin said. “She paid too much.”
“Oh,” said Chuy. “I thought you wanted her digits.”
“Digits?”
“Bony booty call.” Chuy grinned. “Thought maybe you like ’em anorexic.”
Kevin stared at his manager. His face felt hot, and so he turned away. He didn’t want Chuy to see his skin reddening.
“Dude, I was just kidding.”
Kevin couldn’t look at him. He stared at the floor. “I don’t like them that way,” he said. “I don’t like them that way at all.”
Her name was Sarah Jane Ledbetter. Kevin was sure she never used her middle name, but he always did, on paper and in his thoughts. There was something comforting in all three names. The completeness of it, as if she were already dead.
A year after she killed Kevin’s daughter, Sarah Jane Ledbetter had left her job. She had packed up her belongings and sold her large, comfortable house in Larchmont and moved three hundred miles north to her second home — a lake house, Kevin had heard, in the mountains near Pinekill.
“I’m glad she’s gone,” Candace had said, late one night in the quiet of their bed.
“Who?”
“You know. Ledbetter.”
Kevin switched on the light to see Candace turned away from him, as she often was during the year following their daughter’s death. He watched his wife for a long time — the soft honey hair, the round shoulders moving with her breathing.
“Aren’t you glad she’s gone, Kev?” she said, a little louder.
“She’s not gone,” he said. “Not yet.”
Three weeks later, Candace filed for divorce.
Patience was one virtue that Kevin had always possessed. In his previous life, he had supported his family as a food stylist and photographer, but it was in nature photography — his passion — where that patience came into play. Kevin could watch a robin’s nest for hours, waiting for the sun to hit the pale blue eggs in a way that made them glow. He could sit inches away from a mother deer with her fawns, perfectly still, do it long enough for them to think of him as something inanimate, something safe. Once, in the woods surrounding the White Plains Reservoir, he’d experienced such a reward — the mother gently licking pollen from the face of the fawn. The look in the black eyes — so soft, so protective. Love. It was Kevin’s favorite photograph. Perfection took time. Kevin was aware of this, and he appreciated it. He had all the time in the world back then. He liked to let go of it slowly.
Kevin stopped taking his nature photos after his daughter’s murder. He no longer found joy in watching things. Not after all those weeks of watching Rachel in the hospital bed, her little chest rising and falling at the whim of the ventilator. A machine doing Rachel’s breathing, until even the machine couldn’t do it anymore and her heart stopped and her brain stopped and there was nothing left to watch. No more Rachel. Nothing to love.
Kevin tried with Candace. He did. But as much as he wanted his wife to feel cherished, that part of him had stopped breathing along with his daughter. “Let it go, Kev,” Candace would say. “Let it go and just grieve with me.”
But Kevin couldn’t. Not yet. All he wanted was justice, and yet no one wanted to get it for him — not the police, not those lawyers, not even Candace.
He had to go out and get it for himself.
After Candace left him, Kevin sold his photography business. He let his few remaining clients know that he was retiring. “I’m moving upstate,” he said. He was vague about it, though his plan was not vague at all.
Kevin found a six-room cottage on the outskirts of Pinekill with three acres of land and a clean, dry cellar. He bought it upfront, paid in cash.
He located the only gas station within a twenty-mile radius of Pinekill, got a job there. With his usual patience and competence, he made the improvements on the cottage that needed to be made. And then, without joy, Kevin watched. For three years, going home every night to his quiet cottage, he would unlock the door to the cellar. He would stare into its emptiness. He would wait.
“You know why marriage doesn’t work?” Chuy said to Kevin while he was closing out the cash register.
Kevin was trying to add up the bills and get them into the lockbox as fast as he could, so he could go home and put his plan into action. The last thing he needed was Chuy waxing poetic on marriage when, far as Kevin knew, Chuy’s longest relationship had lasted one and a half weeks, with a Poughkeepsie cocktail waitress he affectionately referred to as The Perfect Rack. Still, he was Kevin’s boss and so Kevin sighed and put down the stack of twenties he’d been counting and looked at Chuy, sitting on the stool the shorter clerks used to reach the chewing tobacco, Daily News sprawled open in his lap. “Why doesn’t marriage work?” Kevin asked him.
“Men marry women hoping that they will not change. Women marry men hoping that they will change. Everyone’s disappointed.”
Kevin looked at him. “That’s very insightful, Chuy.” He meant it.
Chuy nodded. “Vaughn.”
“Excuse me?”
“Vince Vaughn.” He thumped his hand against the newspaper.
“The actor?”
“Bet your ass, the actor. He says that right here in this article. Freakin’ genius. Knows marriage, knows life... When I get famous, you know who’s going to play me in the movie?”
“Vaughn?”
“Bet your ass.” He held up the newspaper so Kevin could see the page-sized article he’d been reading — huge picture of the actor on the red carpet at the premiere of his latest film, grinning beneath the thick black headline: I VAUGHN TO TELL YOU. “Vince freakin’ Vaughn.”
Kevin went back to the twenties. Near the bottom of the stack, he got to the crumpled twenty — her twenty — and his breath caught. Soon, he thought. Soon...
When Kevin had finished counting the money, Chuy closed the paper and cleared his throat. “Hey, uh...”
“Yes, Chuy?”
“Nothing. Just...”
“What?”
“Your ex-wife. I bet she wasn’t a skank.”
Kevin looked at him. “No. She was not.”
“Didn’t think so. You seem like a classy dude. I bet you had a nice house too.”
“It was.”
“Did you have any kids?”
“Where is this leading?”
“I guess I’m just... just wondering why you decided to leave all that. Pretty wife, nice house in the ’burbs. If I had a shot like that, I don’t think I’d ever let it go.”
Kevin slipped the locked metal box into the wall safe and worked the combination. “Okay,” he said. “All done.”