“Well, I...”
“Don’t try to give me any answers until I tell you about it. But first I’ve got to ask some questions. Can you keep something from Lee?”
She couldn’t understand what he was driving at. “I... I guess so.”
He looked at her keenly. “Is there anything you do keep from him? Is there anything you’ve kept from him?”
She felt her face get sort of hot and she said, “Yes.”
He stood up. “I’ve cut myself a piece of something, and I’ve got to have some protection.” He took an envelope out of his hip pocket. It was a long envelope, sealed and folded double. He slapped it against the knuckles of his other hand. “I want this in a safe place. I can’t give it to Lee. I know him too damn well. He’d open it and tell himself it was for my own good and he might do something stupid. You think you can hide this where he won’t find it, and keep your mouth shut about it?”
“Y-Yes, Danny.”
“It’s insurance against anything happening to me. But suppose I’m dealing with somebody that gets too mad to be smart. Then something happens to me. As soon as you find out, then you take this to the cops. It will make good reading. You can open it and read it yourself before you take it. But don’t you open it unless I’m dead.”
“All right.”
“I mean that. I don’t think I’ll get hurt so long as I got this kind of insurance, though. If everything goes just like I want it to go, I’ll be back one of these days to pick it up. Will you do this for me?”
“Yes. I’ll do it, Danny,” she said and held out her hand, but he didn’t give it to her.
“I want to know where you’re going to put it, Lucille. Show me the place first.”
She remembered the hiding place she used, the old brown shoulder bag that hung on one of the back hooks of the closet. Danny followed her into the bedroom and she showed him the purse. He shook his head. “I don’t like it. Suppose you’re out and you get a guy working in here. Maybe he takes it, or looks in it.”
“Under the mattress? Lee wouldn’t find it there.”
He looked at her almost with contempt. “I’ll look around, honey. I’ll find a place.” She followed him as he went through the house. They ended up back in the kitchen. On the counter top under the cabinets was a row of graduated metal containers, yellow with a design on each of three ducks on a pond, and each one labeled. He took the top off the largest one the one that said flour.
“I don’t imagine you do much baking.”
“Not very much.”
“This ought to do,” he said. It was more than half full. He took it over to the sink. She stood a half step behind him and watched him work the envelope down until it must have been near the bottom of the can. He dusted his hands over the sink. “Okay,” he said. “Put it back.”
She carried it over and put it with the others. He gave her a cigarette and lit it. He looked down into her eyes and it made her feel uncomfortable. “Don’t open the envelope.”
“I won’t. You told me already.”
“And I’m telling you again. You’re my brother’s wife, but this is important to me. It’s more important to me than you are, honey. If I should come back for it, and it might be any day from now on, and it’s been opened, I’m going to work you over a little. You understand?”
“First you ask me to do you a favor and then you start talking about beating me up.”
“I just want to make sure you understand. I’m... glad you’ll do it. You’re the only one I could think of. I’ve sort of... cut loose from old ties.”
She looked up at him and thought about how he had been in jail, and looked at how wide his shoulders were, and how he had a kind of nice, reckless, wild look, not like Lee. It was funny two brothers could be so different. It wasn’t that anything should happen, but it just did. She knew that it started right there while they were looking at each other. The house was so quiet. And they didn’t say anything. And she knew she should look away, but she just kept looking at him and he kept looking back. She felt her breath get shallower and her breathing get quick. She saw his chest lift as he breathed. In the socket of his throat, above the blue and white shirt, there was a curl of harsh blond hair. There was no sound but the buzz of the refrigerator and some distant traffic and the noises of small kids playing in one of the back yards.
When he took hold of her she expected it, but not the quickness and the roughness of his grasp. She started to squirm and fight him, scared then, and thinking of Lee and of marriage and all that. She writhed away from him and half fell back and her shoulders crashed against the cabinets and she heard a dish fall inside. That was when he hit her with the back of his hand across the mouth and she made a kind of moaning sound and fell into his arms. He half carried and half dragged her into the bedroom and she could not stop making that moaning sound, and her body felt all loosened as if all the tight muscles had come untied. He was rough and harsh and contemptuous with her, rougher than Lee had ever been. It was like being punished. But, when she could have sworn that she could not respond to treatment like this, her response came in a quick upward blinding spiral.
She lay there too exhausted to move and, with her eyes half shut, watched him fix his clothing, latch his belt tight, turn and stand over her and light another cigarette. He cursed her and he cursed himself. He labeled their foulness with words she had never heard before. He cautioned her about the envelope and he left. She heard his heavy step in the kitchen, the bang of the screen door, and a few seconds later, the slam of his car door and and the angry roar of the engine, the sudden yelp of tires as he started up.
A long time later she got up and put on her robe and phoned Ruthie and said she had a headache. She took a hot bath, and then put on different shorts and another halter and fixed the rumpled bed and got the board out again and did some more ironing. Every once in a while tears would start to run down her face. She didn’t feel as though she was crying. It wasn’t like crying. All of a sudden the tears would run again. It was like, long ago, when the dog, Taffy, was killed by a car. She wouldn’t even be thinking of Taffy. She would be doing her homework or she’d be talking to a friend on the phone and the tears would come out of no place and it was the tears that would make her remember Taffy.
After that she thought about Danny so much that it seemed to her that she thought about him every minute of the day. When she remembered what he had called himself and what he had called her, it gave her a hollow-tummy feeling of excitement.
But when he came back, the day before yesterday, came back while she was sitting on the front porch in the early afternoon reading a magazine, he nearly startled her out of her wits. He had come in the back and he came through the house without the slightest sound to the open front door and spoke her name. Her heart fluttered and felt as if it were trying to jump out of her chest.
She went in, and felt too shy to look directly at him. He said, “I should have known it when I got my first good look at you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Of all the guys in the world, he’s the one who has to hook up with you, Lucille.”
She looked at him then. He was grinning at her, but it wasn’t a warm grin. “You made me do it.”
“That’s right, Lucille. I made you do it.”
“Why don’t you get your envelope and get out?”
“I don’t want it yet. I want you to keep this, too.” He handed her an unsealed envelope. “Go ahead. Look in it.”