“Who would have a plan for something like this?”
“Maybe we should have bought dry goods over the years, or canned food, put them in the garage just in case.”
By we, she really meant him, as in Seth should have planned for the pulse. Even though his snooping wife possessed the information they would have needed.
“But we didn’t,” he replied. “So now we’ll have to figure out something else.”
Natalie didn’t care for this answer or the tone of his voice or both. She looked at him coldly and walked away.
It was true Seth was guilty of far worse crimes than his wife. Had Natalie gambled away their savings? Had she stolen an unconscionable amount of money from her own father to fund a descent into financial madness? No. But it was also true that Natalie was a woman with champagne tastes, who never expected to work for a living, and that Seth for much of their marriage had secretly felt like an inadequate husband.
Natalie had already married and divorced when Seth first met her. She’d still been working in the office then, and he often saw her in the break room, reading a magazine or sometimes a book. Men always stopped to talk to her, but he never saw anyone sit down, probably because they were too intimidated to try. Seth wouldn’t have bothered, either, only one day Natalie looked up as he walked by, and something about her eyes compelled the word Hello to pop out of his mouth. Before he could stop himself, Seth asked if he could sit down, and in that little beat of time, before Natalie answered, Seth saw how their futures were balanced evenly between her acceptance or denial.
She hadn’t made it easy on him, but eventually they turned that initial conversation into a relationship. Over a period of weeks and months he grew to know the real Natalie, the girl of childlike hopes and dreams and fears hidden behind a façade of blonde beauty. Her father, then three years dead, had taken to his grave the security she enjoyed since childhood, and naturally she assumed Dan, her first husband, would step into that gaping hole. Instead she found him in bed with a tattooed bartender six weeks after their wedding. Natalie had married Dan for his money first and his Christian Bale looks second and had given little thought to what kind of man would drive a BMW M5 and wear solid platinum Swiss watches and spend more monthly dollars at the salon than her. In Seth, Natalie clearly was looking for something different, but she’d never been subtle about her desire to live a financially comfortable life.
He’d spent many, many hours blaming Natalie for his gambling debts. It was easy to do, because when she became pregnant, Seth proudly announced his wife could quit her job and assume the role of full-time mother. A recent promotion made it feasible, just barely, for them to get by on one salary…at least until they learned Natalie was going to have twins. By then Seth couldn’t bring himself to retract the offer, and the only way to remain financially solvent, he realized, was to earn more money. To be more like Dan and less like himself. But since he didn’t possess the looks or experience or social connections to land a more lucrative job, he had no choice but to find a second one. So on a few evenings each week he delivered soft drinks for a local bottling company and told Natalie he was “working late.” Seth lied to his wife because he couldn’t bear to admit financial impotence. He lied to himself by ignoring the way this deception only deepened his self-loathing.
But when Ben and Brandon were born, the moment he held those vaguely purple children, the darkness receded into the distance, and for the first time in his life Seth felt like a man. As he held back tears and watched Natalie nurse the boys, he promised himself the mother of his children would never have to work away from home again. And for a while it seemed like his plan would work, especially when his boss lauded his efforts and promised a bigger promotion the following year. All Seth had to do, or so he thought then, was stick it out for a while, work the two jobs, and eventually everything would be okay.
Which might have proven true if Natalie hadn’t complained about being left alone with the twins all the time. Even when Seth was present, she froze him out with cold stares and silence and paradoxically spending most of her time sequestered with their sons. If Seth tried to join them, Natalie would hand over the boys and go find something else to do. If all that weren’t enough, she began to refuse sex, rudely, a habit that dragged on for months.
Because he was trying so hard to give Natalie the life she wanted, and because she seemed so ungrateful for his efforts, Seth began to resent his wife. Whether she knew or didn’t know about his job hauling cases of soda was not the point. The point, as he saw it then, was Natalie desired a certain lifestyle, and Seth knew only one way to provide that lifestyle. He was out busting his ass to make extra money, and she resented him for not being home. Eventually the darkness returned and became more oppressive than ever. He feared, if something didn’t change, he would fall into a black hole of dread from which there was no recovery. So one night, when he wasn’t delivering soda, and before he was forced to head home and face his angry wife, Seth stopped by the Indian casino to play a few hands of blackjack.
The boys shared a bedroom and a bunk bed. They alternated weeks on who got to sleep on top. Seth found Natalie in the room with them, sitting on the floor, playing backgammon. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the boys play a board game.
“Dad,” said Ben. “When’s the power coming back on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even our iPads don’t work,” said Brandon. “I charged mine all night. I want to play Minecraft.”
Natalie was focused on the board and didn’t look up at him. When she rolled the dice he nearly yelled Hard eight! Craps being his second-favorite game after Blackjack.
“You might not be playing Minecraft for a while, son. But your mom and I are going to take care of you. You’ll always be safe with us.”
“Why wouldn’t we be safe?” asked Ben. “Is something bad going to happen?”
“No,” said Natalie. “Your dad is being silly.”
She stood up and finally looked at Seth.
“Honey, can I talk to you for a minute?”
He followed her into the living room, the farthest point in the house from where the boys were playing.
“Are you trying to scare them?” she asked.
“Of course not. But they must know something is going on. I wanted them to know they’re safe with us.”
“Instead you scared them.”
“They didn’t seem very scared.”
“Well, you scared me.”
He couldn’t tell if Natalie wanted to slap him or be held by him.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” he finally said.
“At the grocery store I thought you had changed, you seemed confident then, in charge. But now you’re back to your wishy-washy self, not sure about anything.”
“What is there to be sure about? We don’t know what the hell is going to happen. No one does.”
“Maybe you’re worried about her,” Natalie said. “Your girlfriend.”
“My what?”
“You think you’re so goddamned smart. You think I don’t know all about her? Working late, my ass.”
Before the first, life-changing trip to the casino, Seth had been an amateur gambler, mainly betting on football games and sometimes a March Madness bracket at work. What hooked him that first night was winning three hundred dollars almost by accident, betting conservatively and squirreling away his proceeds instead of subjecting them to possible losses. The next night he returned to the casino armed with that $300, and somehow, miraculously, won almost $11,000 during a four-hour run. This time he doubled down, split hands, and in almost every case saw the cards he wanted. On the way home he kept looking at the check, issued in his name, an amount greater than he could make delivering soda for an entire year.