The Far End of Happy (20 page)

Ronnie listened to message after message. Listening to them felt like speeding through a timeline, straight toward some sort of resolution. Each time the negotiator spoke, he sounded like a patient father trying to coax response from a pouting child. Only Jeff wasn’t Will, whose jutting lower lip inspired Ronnie’s oft-repeated phrase, “May I serve tea from that lip?” Ronnie would reach out, as if to lift a tiny teacup from its surface, and Will would bat her hand away, trying not to crack a smile. No, this was a man with way too much experience in walling himself off, now guarding his solitude with a weapon designed to kill.

The night before they’d left for the shore this summer, she and the boys had been so surprised when Jeff had followed them to the attic for a rare bedtime appearance.
He
does
love
them
, she’d thought. The boys grabbed their blankets, opened the kid-size futon, and piled on with Ronnie as they always did, one on each side, and looked to see how Jeff would join in. He chose to wedge his rear end into the kid-size rocker Ronnie had had as a child, a few feet away. The boys had asked Ronnie to read a favorite book Grandma Jan had given them, Russell Hoban’s
Bedtime
for
Frances
. It had “Jeffrey Farnham” written in front, angled this way and that in Jeff’s whimsical little boy hand.

At one point in the reading, while thoroughly cracked up over Frances’s antics, Will looked to Jeff. Ronnie had too, hoping to bond over what they found funny. Despite the extreme discomfort he must have felt with his hips jammed between the rails of that chair, it looked like Jeff was dropping off to sleep. Will said, “Dad, why don’t you ever laugh?”

Ronnie and the boys waited, but Jeff didn’t answer. “I fear Dad has forgotten how to have fun.” Ronnie smiled at Jeff, hoping to provoke a rebuttal. But this was yet one more conversation where it seemed that Jeff wasn’t present.

• • •

“Hello, Ronnie, this is Peter McLaughlin from Vegan Delights. Sorry to bother you on such a day, but I felt the need to connect. Don’t worry about the interview you promised me. We can work on that once your personal life resolves. I worked early this morning, came home to watch the noon news on TV while lying on the couch, and fell into a nightmare. My children were playing on their swing set, and soldiers were up in the trees watching them through their rifle sights… Anyway, if this is haunting me, I can’t imagine how you’re doing. Once you come out the other side, drop by the store. Smoothie’s on me.”

“Ronnie? Where are you?” Naked fear almost rendered her brother Teddy’s voice unrecognizable. “I keep calling the house and getting a busy signal, but then no one picks up, and I don’t know how many messages I’ve left on your cell. I’ve been trying to call Mom, but she isn’t picking up either. You never got back to me after your call this morning, and then I got a text alert from the
Allentown
Patch
about the standoff. God, Ronnie, I thought you were making this shit up! Please, if you pick up this message, call me, would you? And next time you see Mom, just reach into her purse and switch on her damn ringer.”

They may have been raised in different homes, but she’d never stopped feeling close to Teddy, and his panic seeped into her now as if beneath a shared skin.

That was it. She couldn’t listen to these anymore. She was about to hang up when she again heard Amber’s voice.

“Ronnie, hi, it’s Amber. I finally got tired of standing at the barricade, but I couldn’t go home, with all this, you know, drama in the air, so I went over to put in a few hours stuffing envelopes at the township building. The office staff and a few supervisors were watching an update about the standoff on TV in the lobby. Gawking, really. But here’s the thing. The office manager said, ‘Jeffrey Farnham. That name sounds so familiar.’ She was walking away from me so I followed and said it’s because I work for him part-time at the store and she said no, it was something more. She goes to her planner and flips back through the months to July and punches her finger a few times at the writing on one of the squares.

“I ask her what’s up. She says Jeffrey Farnham came to see her in July, complaining about his tax reassessment. Like, screaming at her. She looked up the records and saw that the added farm store would explain it, and he says they’ve been fixing the place up for over a decade without a tax hike. She said assessments are done from the exterior so any internal improvements wouldn’t have mattered, and if they missed any external improvements, he was lucky. He demanded that the assessor be fired, and the collector too for slapping him with a late fee when the bill arrived late in the first place. He slammed his fist down on her desk. Sent papers flying to the floor. I said whoa, that can’t be our Jeff Farnham, right? He’s no fist slammer. So I ask was this guy about five ten, thick brown hair, a space between his teeth? Or wouldn’t you remember? And she says oh yes, she remembers, because he was so irate she had to ask him to leave. It was Jeff all right. And here was the weirdest part. Before he left that day, he pulled out a checkbook and made a payment on the taxes. And I said that part doesn’t sound weird at all, because Jeff is a straight-up kind of guy. It was the amount, she said. Fifteen dollars. On an overdue bill of more than four thousand.”

There was a pause on the line. “Guess that’s it. Sorry to leave such a long message. I’m glad you have one of those services because if this were a machine, it would have beeped me off four times already. And maybe you don’t want to hear this today. But then I kept thinking, maybe you would. Know that we’re watching here and praying. Hope to see you tomorrow.”

Fifteen dollars. What the heck was that about, when he’d left twelve hundred on the table that morning?

But July 19. The significance finally struck her. It was weeks before the vacation where she had met and started interviewing Kevin and more than a month before the notion that she might leave her husband first gnawed on her bones.

Whatever torment Jeff had been keeping private had already started to swell within him, pulling him apart at the seams, and she hadn’t seen it. Amber’s information had damned and redeemed Ronnie, all at once.

The rest of the messages would have to wait. A familiar male voice shouted from the other room.

It was Rob White, Ronnie realized, when she entered the banquet hall and found her mother turning down the volume. He was saying that parents were to pick up Hitchman Elementary School students, that bus service had been cancelled, and that they should bring ID as an added precaution. The SERT troops, the state helicopter, the people who weren’t allowed home from work, those standing at the barricade or glued to their televisions, feeling powerless to continue daily life, and now the hundreds of working parents who would have to figure out a way to pick up their children… If Jeff was thinking his life had come to nothing, she wished he could see the widespread effect his actions were having today.

Her mother turned off the TV. Ronnie watched as the image of New Hope Farms faded to black.

Beverly’s troubled expression begged a question and Ronnie wasn’t sure she wanted an answer.

“Did something bad happen at the farm?”

Beverly shook her head. Like her mother, Ronnie looked to the blank screen, as if it might come alive and offer answers.

“What did Janet end up saying to him?”

“I couldn’t really hear.”

“Do you think he saw her?”

Her mother shrugged. Her mouth quivered; she was breathing in spurts.

Dread constricted Ronnie’s bones. Her mother was not a crier. “What is it?”

“There was this loud bang and then all this debris and… God, Ronnie, I think he shot at her.”

Her mother’s words sucked the air from the room. Ronnie needed fresher air. She turned to…to whom? To do what? Go where? There was no escape from this goddamn day. “And Janet?”

“They put her in a police car. I assume she’s on the way back.”

The words had sounded steadier. Ronnie studied her mother. “You okay?”

“This isn’t some madman doing this,” her mother whispered, her hand twisting the ring on her finger. “This is
Jeff
.”

Ronnie nodded. Took her bearings. Beverly here, safe if rattled. The boys with Beth. Playing, probably. Janet on her way back. And Jeff…

Ronnie pulled out a chair and sank into it.

Jeff was the madman.

The sound of that gun.

Horror pounded in Beverly’s skull. Freeze-dried her stomach. Frazzled her nerves. She felt fried in that high voltage moment, as powerless to leave as a woman strapped to an electric chair.

Dom. Beverly had never really let him go. She’d measured all others against him, as if to will him back into her life, completely setting aside his inability to deal with the fact that he was going to be a father. Ignoring that even though they had spoken in his last days, he at the Jersey shore and she in Pennsylvania, he had never revealed his fear. Had never, it now seemed, truly exposed his heart.

Beverly put her hand to her abdomen, as if still protecting her baby. For years she berated herself for going back to Bartlesville and finishing high school rather than staying with Dom. She should have been there for him. He’d needed to hold her, and Ronnie within her, to make tangible the love she’d promised. Love that would have healed him. Saved him.

If Ronnie hadn’t called her—if Beverly had seen the Bartlesville standoff on television and realized it was Jeff—she would have wanted to crawl right into the set to see how it went. This was what had tortured her the most all these years, that she hadn’t been there for Dom. What had he gone through in those final hours? Beverly only hoped that a lifetime of wishing to know this hadn’t shifted enough energy to bring on today’s terrible events. Ronnie may think she only read style magazines, but Beverly read Oprah too. She knew intention was powerful.

But if she had been with Dom that night… After what she just saw on the television, who knew if she and Ronnie would still be here today? This was some bad shit going down.

Something was changing within Beverly at that very moment. Her hands tingled as if Dom’s spirit were there, holding them. Not his broken spirit, but Dom, fully restored.

Beverly closed her eyes, curled her hands around his, and told him what she’d wanted to say for the last thirty-five years.
Thank
you, Dom, for giving me Ronnie.

The tingling ended.

Beverly opened her hands and let him go. She opened her eyes and set them firmly on the future.

Looking at her daughter, with her head down on the table, her eyes closed—no doubt trying to preserve every scrap of energy she could find for what might still come on this godforsaken day—Beverly realized she was done looking to the dead and missing for love.

Jeff. Shooting at his mother.

When Ronnie lifted her head, her vision started to swirl. She stood and touched the end of each table to steady herself as she made her way to the restroom at the back of the fire hall.

Once inside the stall she pressed her cheek against its painted metal door. When these bouts hit, blurring her edges, the cool helped reinforce the limits of her skin.
This
is
where
Ronnie
ends; this is where the rest of the world begins.

What a fucked up world it was.

She closed her eyes and again retreated, first to a world where she was defined by her talents instead of her relationship to Jeff, and then to one where the ocean’s lullaby assured her that everything would be all right.

• • •

The last weekend in September, Ronnie had left the boys alone with Jeff. The timing was questionable at best, only a few weeks after Jeff’s commitment, but Ronnie couldn’t take living under the same roof with him any longer. She needed a retreat, and a Facebook post offered a way to do so while exploring new income streams. A friend from college, Dodie, had posted a link to a three-day conference in Manhattan that could help Ronnie find additional freelance writing assignments. Its price would be reasonable if she skipped the conference hotel and stayed with Dodie in Brooklyn.

Ronnie took every precaution. Should Jeff be unable to withstand the rigors of a weekend of solo parenting, Beverly could provide backup. Janet would be home as well. Her lawyer assured her that, unless there was evidence of her having an affair, her custody was secure; Pennsylvania courts were not overly fond of alcoholic fathers. She’d kissed her sons good-bye and forced herself not to look back.

The seminar was exhilarating for someone who had spent so many years locked away renovating a farmhouse. Perhaps overly so: by the end of the third day, exhaustion had caught up with her. Rather than risk driving three hours on Sunday night while she was so tired, she called Jeff to say she’d make sure to get extra rest Monday morning, then come straight home.

She lied.

The next day, Ronnie headed over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge before the morning sun was high enough to warm her shoulders. But she couldn’t relinquish her freedom. Not yet, when it was barely tasted. So instead of heading west, toward the farm, she headed south on the Garden State Parkway toward the only home that had never demanded a thing from her.

When she emerged from the car across from her father’s house—Kevin’s house—the warmer air greeted her. The ocean had a long memory and stored the summer’s warmth well into autumn. This was the first time she’d been here off-season, and the silence stunned her into a new depth of reverence for the place.

As always, Ronnie headed straight to the beach. She felt so free walking out to it, without a thought to arranging child care, without reporting to Jeff why she was going out and then defending it three times, without leashing Max.

Max. Her thoughts snagged on her little dog and the night Jeff had left him out all night. When Ronnie had opened the front door the next morning, he’d rushed inside, shivering.

Later, when she woke Jeff to confront him, Jeff said the dog had followed him out for his last smoke. “Guess he never came back,” he said thickly. “A simple mistake. Anyone could make it.” She swallowed her anger, unsure who she was in this scenario: someone who deserved to defend her principles or a class-A bitch? But when Ronnie went into the bathroom to wash up, it was hard not to notice that she’d showered three times since she’d last washed the towels, and Jeff’s still lay on the shelf, unfolded.

She’d been Max’s sole caretaker of late, and the feeling that she had abandoned him seized her. But as Ronnie trudged through the loose, deep sand, she pushed thoughts of Max out of her mind. That rabbit hole would lead her to the boys. For just a half hour or so, she wanted what peace this setting could offer. Her footsteps eased as she reached the sand tamped by the ocean.

At the water’s edge, Ronnie dipped her fingers and pressed them to her forehead and lips. Gone were the motorboats and wave runners that crashed through the August waters. The ocean was free to swell its strength again and again without the need to hold anyone else afloat. Today Ronnie needed a similar chance.

Standing there for some time, Ronnie realized she no longer felt hopelessly adrift, as she had before she met Jeff. His love had encouraged her to grow in ways neither of them would have predicted, and now Ronnie had no choice but to leave him. A tragedy, to be sure, but another she would survive.

A gust whipped sand across her face and into her hair. Before it could fully claim her as part of the setting, she ran back to the house and up the steps until her heart was thundering like the surf.

Ronnie ran her hand across the nicks in the door frame, feeling a notch taller in this unencumbered state than she’d been just months ago, and knocked on the door. No answer. Kevin must be at work.

Relieved, Ronnie sat on the deck in a patch of sun. She put her feet on the railing, lifted her face to the sky, and—her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. It took several rings for her to process the intrusion. But she refused to disturb her hard-won feeling of peace and—God help her—when she pulled out the phone and saw the picture of the tractor she used as Jeff’s avatar, she shut off the phone. He had to learn to get by without her. It was no less than the divorce court would demand of him.

She settled back into the chair to listen to the surf and soak up what remained of the summer sun.

“Look what the waves washed in. Sleeping Beauty.”

Ronnie startled awake and saw Kevin standing beside her, holding a bag of groceries.

“Oh my god. What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

She’d been sleeping for twenty minutes. “I’ve got to go.”

“But you didn’t tell me why you’re here yet. Pretty sure you didn’t even say hi.”

Ronnie smiled. “Sorry, I did knock, but you weren’t home, so… Hi, Kevin.”

“Hi, Ronnie. Well, don’t keep me in suspense. Where is it?”

“What?”

“I assume you’re here to show me the magazine?”

“Oh, no.” She waved her hand. “Long lead time for print. That won’t be out for a few more months. I’m just stopping in on my way home from New York.”

He laughed. “You are not a poster child for energy conservation. That’s quite a detour.”

“I just needed escape, I think. And peace. And my car pointed here.” Ronnie stood. “I wasn’t trying to trespass or anything.”

“I’ll tell you whether I believe you or not after I count the flatware.” He unlocked the door. “Come on in. I finished up a project this morning, and before I start the next, I thought I’d grab an early lunch…”

His voice receded as he entered the house. Ronnie lingered outside the doorway until he poked his head back through. “That was an invitation to join me.”

The beach house felt at once welcoming and dangerous. As he threw some burgers on the grill, Ronnie sat on the leather couch, sank back into its bulk, imagined its arms around her. She knew so intimately this woven rug beneath her feet; she’d sponged from its surface many a sippy cup spill. She knew the dishes Kevin was setting out to serve this meal and that one of them had chipped when she overfilled the dishwasher so she and the boys could squeeze in a bike ride before sunset. She’d slept on his bed.

“Almost ready,” Kevin said.

Ronnie moved to the table, laced her fingers, and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to go home. Heaven help her, she wanted to stay right here.
Dad. If you could be here for me just this once. I need your strength.

She heard the plates as Kevin set them on the table.

“Saying grace?”

Ronnie tried to smile. “Something like that.”

“I’m Catholic. Got this covered.” He took her hands and offered the blessing.

His halting search for the words, his cheery domesticity, the surprise of his touch—it was all too much. Out poured the anxiety she’d been holding back for so many months: for the sake of her kids, and for the sake of the husband who’d promised to move out soon, and for the sake of those who cared for all of them, and for her own sake, because God knew she was scared shitless that she couldn’t handle supporting two boys on her own while caring for a farm and two businesses and dealing with an alcoholic ex.

She placed her forehead on their clasped hands as she sobbed. Kevin waited without moving until the storm had passed.

“Sorry,” she said at last.

“Hey.” He jiggled her hands and waited for their eyes to meet. “I’ve witnessed this reaction to my cooking before.”

Ronnie’s laugh was a gulp for air. “Guess I’m not used to saying grace. It kind of—I don’t know—cracked me open.”

“Grace will do that,” he said, grabbing a potato chip off his plate. “That’s kind of how I felt when I found my grandpa’s steering wheel. I just wanted to hug it and weep. Sometimes it seems like we expect the bad things to happen, but when something good happens, we fall to pieces.”

“Wisdom from the School of Hard Knocks?”

“Nah, a paragraph on page 139 of the self-help book I’m reading.”

Ronnie smiled and took a bite of her burger.

“So, is this about what’s going on with you and your husband?”

Ronnie snapped a large chip in two. “That obvious?”

“Even a casual observer can see you deserve more.”

She had to look away from the sincerity in his green eyes. The word
deserve
plucked at her taut nerves. What does anyone deserve? A chance at life, maybe, but the rest is navigation. She had some serious course-setting ahead, and she only hoped she could maneuver past whatever met her when she got home.

• • •

When the Suburban made it to the top of the drive, Will burst from the house to hug her. She wrapped her arms around him and lifted him into the air, spinning, awash in relief and joy. Of all the different Ronnies inside her, this one—the mother—was the one she had never, ever compromised on, and reconnecting to her made this dreaded return feel like a homecoming after all.

Jeff and Max weren’t far behind. Ronnie dealt with the wriggling pup first, letting him jump into her arms for a kiss, then turned to Jeff.

The sight of his widespread arms embarrassed her. “Come on, Jeff.”

“We’re so glad you’re back,” he said, voice trembling.

“Did you have a good time, Will?”

“Dad made up a soccer game with me, and we played in the side yard. It was great!”

“Good for you,” she said, looking at Will and then Jeff.

Ronnie found Andrew inside on the Xbox and kissed him hello. “I want to hear about New York, Mom, but not now. I’m not at a good save point.”

After the boys were in bed that night, Jeff asked if they could talk. On the porch, so he could have the comfort of his nicotine addiction. It didn’t take him long to get to the point.

“Did you sleep with him?”

“Who?”

“Kevin.”

“Jeff.” She stood to leave. “We are not having this conversation.”

“Please,” he said. “I want to talk.”

He’d stolen her line. She was the one who usually wanted to talk.

Ronnie heard her therapist:
Go
get
some
sleep.
Heard the hospital psychiatrist warn:
This
will
do
no
good.

She sighed. “Let me get a jacket.”

“I don’t understand how you could leave our home,” he said when she’d returned. “We’ve worked so hard.”

“This home is a thing, Jeff. Yes, we’ve made every single room exactly the way I wanted it, but in the end, it’s just a house.” A house that, so far, she hadn’t found an affordable way to leave. “It would be much easier if you would move, at least for the time being, since my move will be more complex.”

“Move?”

“Yes. I met with my lawyer again last week. These are the steps you take when you are getting a divorce.”

That last word nicked her on its way out. Jeff looked like she had stabbed him afresh.

“Why do you want me, Jeff? I know you’re sick of me judging you, and I don’t want to do it anymore. You have the right to happiness too. To spend time with someone who shares your values.”
And
she
wanted
that
for
herself.

“Don’t go yet,” Jeff said. “Give me some time. I’ll figure something out.”

“There’s only one solution at this point,” Ronnie said, standing. She opened the door to go back into the house.

“I read your journals while you were gone.”

Ronnie braced against fury that threatened to consume her. Now, after all this time, he would try to steal the intimacy he’d refused her?

It had humiliated her to stand in the cold for so many years, knocking at her husband’s door, begging his attention. That made her feel like more of a whore than fantasizing about someone new. A man who mirrored back her curiosity and passion for life and who had infiltrated her dreams; a man she’d written of in a place she deemed safe from the prying eyes of a husband who had only ever displayed indifference toward her journaling. By this time, she had filled half a dozen thick spiral notebooks. If he’d read them all in one weekend, he must have ignored their children.

When she was able to bring her breathing back to normal, Ronnie said, “And what did you find?”

“Hope.”