“We went at it pretty hard,” he said as he massaged his knee, which had swollen to the size of a grapefruit.
“All done behind my back,” she said.
“He asked me to help.”
“So what’re you saying? The two of you are friends now?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t have any others that I’m aware of.”
“There’s me.”
Sully arched his eyebrow at this but offered no comment.
“And Mother Ruthless.”
“I don’t think she’d have been much help pulling up stumps.”
And just that quickly she was close to tears. “I guess I thought you were all mine.”
“You want me to beg off, next time he asks?”
“No,” she said, though the ground under her feet had suddenly shifted, and part of her was screaming, Yes!
The next day, Zack came into the restaurant as she was closing up, something he seldom did. She’d never told him he wasn’t welcome there, but somehow he knew that Hattie’s was her domain, just like the garage and now the shed were his. “People are saying they saw you and him last night,” he told her.
“Who’s people?” Not even bothering to ask who the him was. Well, people had been talking for years, including, unless she was mistaken, her now-incarcerated son-in-law.
He recited the name of the motel.
“And you believe them?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Good,” she told him. “Don’t.”
“I just don’t like to hear it,” he said. “If I’m hearing it, Ma’s hearing it.”
Oh, her again. “She can’t think any worse of me than she already does.”
“Kids talk at school, too. You want them saying things to Janey?”
“What are we discussing here? What you just told me you didn’t believe?”
“All I’m saying is I don’t like to hear it.”
“Yup. You already said that.”
Once he left, she played back the conversation over and over until she began to grasp what he was telling her. She could have Sully. Sully could have her. They just had to be more discreet. Be happy, she told herself, and part of her was. But it also meant that her husband didn’t think she was worth fighting for, and how was that supposed to make her feel? Or that Zack, for whatever reason, was forging his own relationship with Sully? Or the fact that in his life she was only the second most important person named Ruth?
Sully was right about one thing. It’d taken Zack a while to fill the shed. Years, as it happened. But then came the day when she passed the kitchen window and was surprised to find that the view was partially obscured by an aluminum ladder he’d left leaning up against the wall. A stiff wind the day before had knocked a shutter loose, so he probably was fixing it. But in the following weeks other things turned up leaning against the house — a pair of snow skis, a dresser with no drawers, a wrought-iron bench. She could almost feel the pressure each inanimate object was exerting on the skin of the house. All this shit wanted in. Then one afternoon she came home to find that first vacuum cleaner disassembled on the living room floor. It was possible that repairing whatever was wrong with it was simply taking longer than he’d planned. Maybe he meant to have the mess cleaned up by the time she got home. But there was another explanation that made even more sense. His mother had died the week before.
Ruth remembered how it’d been when Saigon fell, the last Americans climbing onto the embassy roof to await the choppers that would ferry them home.
Home? The bitch of it was, Ruth was already there.
—
IN THE KITCHEN that was finally hers and yet somehow wasn’t, Ruth ratcheted open the window over the sink. Outside, Zack had moved his truck and was now pulling her car up beside it. A nice gesture, except that in order to get behind the wheel he’d have to push the seat back as far as it would go and would never remember to pull it up again for the simple reason that that would mean he’d done two things in a row right, and in all the years they’d been married that hadn’t happened yet.
She was still at the sink, staring out into the yard, when he came back in, scratching his belly thoughtfully. In pursuit of an elusive thought, most men scratched the location where they imagined it might be hiding, but not her husband. “Sorry,” he said weakly. “I was going to do those.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, putting the rubber stopper over the drain and turning on the tap, all the fight having suddenly drained right out of her. When she reached under the sink for dishwasher soap, there wasn’t any.
“You have a bad day?”
“Nope,” she said. “It was just peachy. Like all my days.” On the wall was a chalkboard he’d picked up at a yard sale, and on its tray a tiny sliver of chalk. She started to write dishwasher soap on the slate but saw it was already there, in her own handwriting, so instead she wrote chalk.
“What’s the matter, then?”
Two responses immediately suggested themselves: everything and nothing. Both true, neither accurate. “I just…”
“Just what?”
“Just once I’d like to come home and find…”
“What?”
A new life. It would be nice to come home some afternoon and find a whole new life. Yet how crappy a wish was that? Pretty crappy, she had to admit. Was she actually wishing her husband dead? Not really, or at least she didn’t think so. What she had in mind was more along the lines of a parallel universe in which he’d never existed in the first place. Because how great would it be, after a long day at the restaurant, to come home to a quiet house? To call out a lusty hello and hear no answer? Heaven. Instead of foraging in the fridge for something to cook her husband for dinner, she could just make herself an enormous bowl of popcorn and eat it while reading a book on a sofa that was neither grease spotted nor redolent of male. Later, getting sleepy, she’d put the book down, look around the room and instead of revulsion she’d feel…what? Satisfaction. Contentment. Herself, her nature, her daily life — everything in sync. Minus Zack and his clutter, these same rooms would be spare, even stark. She didn’t crave better, more expensive possessions, just fewer of them. Less of everything, really. The world she’d create for herself would be sparse and orderly and clean.
Earlier, when she suggested to Sully that he go to Aruba, she hadn’t just randomly picked that island out of the Caribbean hat. During a thaw that winter, when the crusty, dirt-speckled snowbanks were being tunneled out by torrents of diuretic brown water, she’d made the mistake of pausing in front of a Schuyler Springs travel agency, the windows of which — the heartless bastards — were full of island-vacation posters. Inside, she scanned a thick, three-ringed binder full of blue resorts. The one she liked best, in Aruba, featured suites with enormous, white-tiled bathrooms. There were billowing white sheers over French doors that opened onto a long stretch of empty sand, the surf beyond so close you could almost hear it. A shower with no door, nor curtains, just silver shower heads coming down out of the ceiling. Across from each was a gleaming white vanity, perfect for a woman traveling alone.
Because she certainly would be traveling alone. She had no desire whatsoever to go there with Sully or her husband or any other man, including Brad Pitt. To allow a male into a bathroom that pristine would be a desecration.
“Are you guys fighting?”
Neither Ruth nor her husband had heard their granddaughter approach. Only when Zack yipped in surprise and danced out of the doorway did Tina become visible. To Ruth it was unnerving how silently she moved through their home, the only member of the family who could descend those creaky back stairs without making a sound. Was she like that at school, too? Was that why her teachers never seemed to pay her any attention? The remedial classes she was always placed in were full of rowdy, hyperactive boys, so probably they were just happy to have one kid who neither demanded nor seemed to expect anything from them.