A Long Thaw (11 page)

It wasn’t her fault; it wasn’t anyone’s fault. But why were they even thinking of fault, of blame? Why had she apologized? What else could he have said? He knew that he hadn’t said the right thing. It became clear in the coming days and weeks. Deirdre had taken responsibility for this disappointment, and in trying to exonerate her, he had highlighted the disappointment itself.

Deirdre named Lilly for her grandmother. Allen remembered it vaguely from one of their earlier talks about baby names, in the first weeks of her pregnancy when they had been more generous with their imagination.

When they were home from the hospital, the gender divide seemed more obvious in Allen’s house. ‘Four against one,’ Deirdre said, with a tired smile.

Juliet was thirteen and took great pride in being her mother’s helper. She could care for the baby while Deirdre slept. She could occupy Hannah and make dinner. She shrugged off the praise from relatives, but Allen could see how she soaked it up, basked in the glow.

Allen remembered how it had been when Juliet was born, the way Deirdre met him at the door when he came home from work, handing him a screaming baby. Even with Hannah, he’d return to find her frazzled. But this time they had it covered. The girls. They had each other.

Allen was expendable in this new world.

Rachel is sitting in her car, parked on the side of the road. Allen only notices because he’s getting his mail from the box when he sees something familiar out of the corner of his eye. She gets out of the car and he slams the mailbox shut. He walks to the house without acknowledging her, the stack of mail tucked under his arm.

He should have known it was all going to come out and, in a way, he had. He’d known it would come out
some day
. And, once Juliet had been in touch with his mother, he knew it would be sooner rather than later. But he’d thought he had time, that he could get through the holidays at least. How was he supposed to know Juliet would get an apartment with Abby?

Rachel catches up to him as he’s unlocking the front door.

‘You dropped one,’ she says, holding out a white envelope.

Allen snatches it from her and walks inside. She follows him in without invitation.

He throws the mail onto the counter, takes off his coat and begins to go through the pile. He sorts the bills from the credit-card offers.

‘Get anything good?’ Rachel takes a seat on one of the barstools.

Allen glares at her. ‘What do you want?’

‘Well, a few things,’ she says, taking her coat off and folding it in half, laying it across her lap. ‘First, to apologize.’

Allen leans back against the refrigerator and folds his arms across his chest. He says nothing.

‘For Thanksgiving.’ Rachel is looking at her hands, patting the fabric of her coat. ‘I never should have attacked you like that. It was juvenile and I’m really embarrassed about it. I should have come to you in private. I should have asked you to explain it to me.’ She looks up at him. ‘So that’s what I’m doing now.’

Allen shakes his head. ‘So you’re giving me an opportunity to explain myself to you? Aw, shucks.’

Rachel blinks. ‘That isn’t how I’d put it.’

‘No?’

‘No. I mean, you’ve been lying to us all these years. Don’t you think it’s time to tell the truth?’

Allen turns his back on Rachel and yanks open the refrigerator. ‘The truth.’ He pulls out a beer, slams the door shut and snaps the bottle open on the edge of the counter. The cap clatters to the floor. He faces his sister. ‘The truth,’ he says again, dragging out each word, ‘is none of your goddamned business!’

Rachel’s eyes open a bit wider. ‘Oh.’ She stands up and begins to put her coat on. ‘You know, when Daddy was sick, he used to tell me not to worry. That you’d take care of us when he was gone. I remember thinking he was crazy. You were only seventeen. But you did, Allen. You took care of me and Mom. You’ve been taking care of Mom ever since.’ Rachel bends down and picks up the bottle cap. ‘And when Abby told me that you’d abandoned those girls, well, I thought
she
was crazy. That’s not Allen. Right?’ She places the cap on the counter. ‘Who are you, Allen? Did I ever really know?’

Allen takes a long swig of beer.

‘Keep your secrets. But they may be all you have left.’ Rachel pulls open the door and leaves.

She had long dark hair that was pulled high on top of her head and then fell down to the middle of her back. She wore a blue vest, indicating that she worked there, and baggy grey pants that hung low on her hips, showing her hip bones and a tattoo that circled her navel and disappeared below the waistband. Something with wings.

‘That hurt?’ Allen asked. They were standing next to each other in the ethnic-foods aisle, which Allen called the spaghetti aisle. She was lining up cans of tomato sauce.

‘Like a bitch,’ she answered, winking at him, the right corner of her mouth twitching up.

Allen laughed. He hadn’t been expecting that. The honesty and the language. She probably wasn’t supposed to talk to customers that way. It made their interaction feel charged, intimate, right from the beginning.

‘What is it?’ Allen threw the cans of Spaghetti Os for Juliet into the cart and turned towards her.

She pulled the waistband lower, below the curve of her abdomen and the distinct mark of a tan line, low enough to show pubic hair if it hadn’t been removed somehow.

‘An eagle?’

She nodded, hitching her pants up again and letting them droop back down. The waist caught on those sharp hip bones – all that kept them from falling around her ankles.

‘Patriotic?’ Allen blinked away the image of her like that: standing in a tank top and that blue vest, the black eagle across a bare stomach, bare legs, bare everywhere. All the way down to her toes.

‘Hardly.’ She was wearing a name tag that said ‘TINA’. ‘Eagles are powerful. Fierce. And rare.’

Allen nodded. ‘Is that how you are?’

Tina kept her eyes on his. ‘Yep.’ She crouched and shot a few more jars with speciality price tags. Allen took a step back, thinking the conversation was over. She looked at her watch and tipped her head up at him. ‘I get off in fifteen minutes,’ she said, and then she grinned, arching her eyebrows suggestively. ‘How about you?’

Tina had a brown van parked in one of the spaces furthest from the store. Employee parking, she joked. All of the spaces near it were empty now, the store closing in another hour. Allen left his groceries on the back seat of his car, considering which things might melt and deciding there was nothing too sensitive. It was an August evening, just turning dark. Cool. The groceries would keep.

Tina swung open the back door of the van and grabbed Allen by the arm, pulling him inside. The floor was covered with a thick orange carpet. Allen knelt down, so as not to bump his head. Tina pulled the door shut and turned to him in the near pitch blackness. She shrugged her vest off and pushed against his shoulders. He fell backwards somewhat clumsily and she giggled. She climbed on top of him, sitting on his hips, undoing his shirt. The first buttons she did quickly and then she slowed down as if they had all the time in the world. She moved her hands up his belly and rested them in his chest hair. She leaned down to kiss him and he slid his hands up her back, the first time he had touched her. She sat up and pulled off her tank top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She had small breasts with nipples hardly the size of quarters. Perky. She didn’t wear a bra because she didn’t need to.

At first, this thought made him panic. How old was she? But then he remembered the tattoo and a person had to be eighteen to get a tattoo. These were the breasts of a woman who had not had children; had not breastfed three babies. He hadn’t seen breasts like these in more than thirteen years.

He cupped those breasts, took them into his mouth and sucked. She pressed them against his chest as she nibbled his earlobe, reached into his pants. She wasn’t after a lot of foreplay, Allen realized.

She rolled off him long enough for them to unfasten each other’s pants, kissing each other hard. She arched her back, pulling her pants and panties off in one motion and rolling back to him to help him with his.

She had a condom, thank God, because he certainly didn’t. He had not thought this was a possibility when he’d left his house a half-hour ago. Not in his wildest dreams.

She put the condom on him and climbed on top. She was shaved completely bare and he thought this made the sensation of skin against skin even better. She leaned back against his knees, letting him feel his full length inside her. Then she leaned down, straightening her legs and bucking against him, moaning in his ear, coming hard and loud enough for anyone outside the van to hear.

He came quickly after that, thinking,
Is it really this easy?
And that was what he thought for the rest of the night – when she didn’t ask him to hold her because she had to get going, when he came home late to Deirdre, mocking his confusion in grocery stores, taking an hour to do what would take her half that long. He offered to put the groceries away, so she wouldn’t feel the lukewarm milk jug, the chicken breast beginning to thaw. And she had thanked him.

And when he started meeting Tina after her shifts, parking beside her van and waiting for her to grin when she saw him, getting pulled into the back and falling into each other, bringing groceries home to a grateful family, playing the oaf, the dumb guy dazzled by lights and packaging – again, he thought,
Is it really this easy?

Growing up, the right thing and the easy thing had always been the same. Born with just about every advantage an American could wish for, Allen had never faced a particularly difficult dilemma. He was white, male, straight, able-bodied. His parents had given him the right God to fear. His school system prepared him for college. His family was working class, but he’d slept every night of his childhood under the roof of a house his father owned.

Decision-making was simplified by parents and priests and commanding officers, and the mere fact that his lucky life didn’t give him access to any real trouble. That was how he’d got his reputation for being such a stand-up guy when really he stood around and watched life happen to him. His grades in school, helping his mother pay the bills after his father died, proposing to Deirdre after that first pregnancy scare and going through with the wedding even after she got her period: these were choices he’d never felt he had to make. They were all that made sense; they’d made themselves.

And the longer you did the right thing, Allen found, the harder it was for the wrong choices to find you. He never had to turn a joint down in high school: he wasn’t at those parties. He was never unfaithful to his wife: he never saw the opportunity. Tina had made that happen. He hadn’t sought it out: it was offered. It was not a choice that Allen made: it was something that had happened to him. She had asked him to go, she had pulled him into the van, she had kissed him and taken off her shirt and put the condom on him. It was her.

And although he knew it was the wrong thing, it didn’t feel wrong. It felt like everyone was happy. That fall, things came easier. There was a new balance in the house, a new calm. Deirdre was uninterested in sex and Allen didn’t push her. She was relaxed around him, let him into the circle more because of this, he felt.

He thought that his urgent need for Tina was bound to end at some point and he would go back to his monogamy and it would never hurt anyone. He felt this even as he rushed from work to the parking lot of the grocery store, even as he threw things into his cart, knowing that the quicker he shopped, the more time he’d have inside the van, inside her body. Sometimes he met her on days he didn’t need to pick anything up. He’d leave work early, get her to take a break.

It had occurred to him that Tina might tire of the arrangement. Allen was good-looking, fit, but he was older than her and he had a family. They never spoke of it, but he knew she’d seen his wedding band, the package of Pampers in his cart. She was no idiot. Eventually she would move on to someone who could give her more.

That was what he assumed had happened the night she walked towards his car with a scowl on her face. She hitched her purse higher on her shoulder and shook her head as he moved to open his car door. She stood at the window, bent over, her navel at about eye level.

‘Your wife was here today,’ she said.

At first he didn’t understand. He was wondering how Tina had recognized her.

‘She knows.’ It hit Allen in the chest, took his breath. ‘She was screaming at me like a madwoman. You’d better go home.’

Allen said nothing to her as she climbed into the van beside his car and drove off. He watched his hands shaking on the steering wheel. He tried to calm his breathing. He turned the key in the ignition and drove home in a blur. How had she found out? Allen had not been so stupid as to hide evidence in the house. There was no evidence. No love letters, no naked Polaroids, no secret wish to be caught. Someone must have seen him. He had thought he was being so careful. The parking lot was always dark and nearly empty. He’d never seen anyone he knew. But someone must have seen him and told her.