He should have known better.
As soon as Ruth stepped into the den, she let out a screech like a wounded parrot. Her heavy body went rigid; she spun around glaring, bared her teeth in a snarl, and growled, “You deceitful sneak! How could you do a thing like this!”
“Ruth, please don’t be upset—”
“Upset? Furious is more like it. Defying me, skulking around behind my back, turning Katie’s room into a man cave when I told you to leave it be. How dare you!”
“I didn’t want to go behind your back, but you just wouldn’t understand how much a room of my own means to me. Don’t you think it looks nice now that it’s finished?”
“It’s hideous! That disgusting rug... I suppose you paid a fortune for it.”
“No, it only cost—”
“What did you do with Katie’s things?”
“Stored them in the garage, all except the furniture.”
“And I suppose you gave that to Goodwill.”
“Yes. As old and worn as it was, it didn’t seem to be worth keeping...”
She made a sound like a dog’s growl. “You’ve lost your mind, Wyatt Potter. Katie will be irate when she finds out.”
“She already knows. I called her before I started the makeover. She didn’t mind, she gave me her blessings.”
“Blessings! I don’t believe it.”
“It’s the truth,” Wyatt said. “She doesn’t care about any of the things she left behind. She’s never coming home again, we both know that—”
“I know no such thing. All I know is that you’ve deceived and defied me. I want all of this... junk taken out of here immediately. I want Katie’s things, what’s left of them, put back where they were.”
The path of least resistance had always been Wyatt’s choice when Ruth threw one of her tantrums. But not this time. Worms can turn if the stakes are high enough; he had already half turned by creating his den on the sly, and without even thinking about it he went the rest of the way.
“No,” he said.
“... What did you say?”
“I said no. The room is mine now and it’s going to stay the way it is.”
Ruth stared at him as if she had never seen him before. “I won’t stand for it! I won’t have it!”
Wyatt said resolutely, “But I will,” and closed the door between them and locked himself inside.
Over the next several days Ruth went through her entire repertoire of threats, taunts, fits of pique, crocodile tears, and refusal to cook his meals or do his laundry. All of these had bent him to her will at one time or another, but on the den issue he was unbendable. Whenever her tirades became too much to bear, he retreated into his den. With his headphones on, she could rant and rave and pound on the door until she was blue in the face; he wouldn’t hear her, wouldn’t even know she was there.
When he wasn’t in the den, he kept the door locked and the key on the ring in his pocket. At night he put the keyring under his pillow, in case she had any ideas of trying to appropriate it while he was asleep. Eventually she pretended to give in and settled into an icy, spiteful silence, but he wasn’t fooled. It was only a temporary cease-fire in the war of nerves.
He began spending more and more time in the den. Mainly listening to folk music and Dixieland jazz, his two favorites, and reading Hawthorne, Melville, Dickens. Alone, unbothered. Content.
Until he had the heart attack.
It happened one morning while he was boiling a breakfast egg for himself. When he finally managed to convince Ruth that the chest pains were more serious than indigestion, she drove him grumbling to the hospital. Doctors confirmed the cardiac episode and he was bedridden for three days while they ran more tests to determine the extent of the damage. It turned out to be relatively little; the attack had been mild, his body “delivering a warning” as his cardiologist put it.
Ruth didn’t come to see him during his stay — his only visitor was Charlie Ledbetter — but she did deign to pick him up when he was released and drive him home. The whole way she wore an odd, satisfied little smile that puzzled him until a few minutes after their arrival, when he unlocked the door to his den and stepped inside.
And discovered that he didn’t have a den anymore.
The room was empty.
He swung around to see Ruth standing in the hall behind him, her arms folded across her chest, the satisfied smile wider on her mouth now. No, not satisfied — gloating. A smile of gloating triumph. And he realized she’d resorted to the same key trick he had, but with malice rather than necessary deception: taken the key while he was in the hospital, unlocked the door, then returned it to his keyring so she could savor his reaction.
“My den,” he said, “you stole my den.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. All I did was clean out a pesthole.”
“Pesthole? My books, my chair, my TV—”
“Rubbish, the lot of it. I had it all hauled away.”
“Hauled away where?”
“To the dump, of course. The only fit place for rubbish.”
She turned away from him, still smiling, and waddled into the kitchen. Wyatt followed her, confronted her again in front of the stove. His hands were shaking; he had never before been this angry.
“You had no right,” he said. “No right.”
“I had as much right as you did to sneak around and destroy Katie’s room in the first place.”
“It’s not Katie’s room, it’s mine.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t. If you have any idea of building another man cave to hibernate in, you’d better forget it. The room is mine now.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Mine. I’ve decided it’s too late to put it back the way it was, so I’m going to make it into an indoor garden. Orchids, schefflera, and the like. Once those window blinds are taken down, there’ll be more than enough light.”
“No,” Wyatt said. “No, no, no.”
“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “Yes, yes, yes.”
A thickening red mist formed behind his eyes. Her face shimmered in it, was consumed by it. Dimly he heard a thudding sound. Another. And then the mist was gone and he saw Ruth lying on the floor at his feet, felt the weight of an iron skillet in his hand. He didn’t remember picking up the skillet or hitting her on the head with it, but that was what he’d done: the left side of her skull was crushed.
His first reactions were shock, horror, remorse, but none of them lasted long. A strange sort of calm descended on him. He put the skillet back on the stove, bent to feel for a pulse that wasn’t there. Then he went to what had been his den and locked himself inside.
He knew he should call 911. Or Ruth’s sister Elaine or Charlie Ledbetter. Or drive to the police station and turn himself in. Something. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the empty, ravaged room, not even for a few seconds.
He was still there two days later, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, when Elaine came and found the body and called the police.
Wyatt made a full voluntary confession. The detectives who questioned him were dubious at first when he told him why he had killed his wife. But when he explained in detail the manner in which she’d stolen the one thing that mattered most in his otherwise empty life, they seemed to understand.
He was held in custody in the crowded county jail before and after his arraignment, where he was charged with murder in the second degree. Tom and Katie came for brief visits; Laura called from her home in Minneapolis. They, too, seemed to understand that he’d been driven to do what he’d done, but their expressions of support were tepid and dutiful. They resented him for not being there for them while they were growing up, he knew, and always would. The chasm between him and his children that Ruth had created and his passivity had widened was too great to ever be bridged.