The Far End of Happy (4 page)

Ronnie followed the policeman’s gaze to the door behind her and then rushed to greet her mother-in-law. Janet and her mother were so different: Janet short and unadorned, her thick gray bob like a cap on her head; Beverly taller than Ronnie with every facial feature artfully enhanced no matter the time of day.

“Janet,” Ronnie said, stopping a few feet short of an embrace. “I was hoping you’d see that we should be together.”

Confusion creased Janet’s brow. “I tried to stop by your store to get my broccoli—”

The policeman called Ronnie back to the table. She looked to him, then back to her mother-in-law. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to deal with this.”

Beverly put her arm around Janet and said, “Come sit with me and I’ll tell you what we know.”

Her mother led her mother-in-law past the bar, a slab of lacquered oak wrapped around the front left corner of the room. On Friday nights, this was the slick stage on which alcohol could ply its magic, stimulating appetites and loosening inhibitions as social members unwound from their workweek. Today its spirits were secreted behind locked cabinets. The hall was set up for Monday night bingo, with a dozen or more rectangular tables in rows three across, surrounded by chairs awaiting their winners. Before she had kids, Ronnie had come along to play a time or two as a guest, the room so crowded that she and her mother had rushed to nab the last open seats. Even though their footsteps now echoed across its uncluttered floor, the space still felt aflutter with nervous anticipation as if these were the final tense seconds before some lucky stiff shouted “Bingo!”

Beverly and Janet sat together at a table on the far side of the room. The boys, separated at different tables and each sitting with a uniformed officer, waved to their Grandma Jan. If she saw them, nothing registered on Janet’s face.

Ronnie returned to the table some thirty feet from the entrance door where she’d been sitting with a police officer.

“The officers at the farm reported in,” he said. “One found a spent casing up near a big patch of low-growing plants.”

“The strawberry field.” She and Jeff had put it in that spring. Their last big project together. Ronnie felt the blood drain from her head. “Was Jeff—did they—”

“They’re still searching for your husband. And there wasn’t any blood. I only told you because that could explain the shot you heard earlier.”

“What do you think it means, that he shot the gun out there?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, ma’am.”

Ronnie already wanted to rewrite this story. To edit the cop’s words. To distance herself, change “husband” to “the man.” The man now staggering around the property with a gun; the man who may already have taken a shot; the man whose angst was seeping into her own nerves. Her husband—the gentle soul she’d married—would never have acted like the man she’d engaged with earlier today.

“Call him Jeff, please,” she said quietly.

“I’m going to need you to recount all that transpired this morning with your—” He caught himself. “With Jeff. Leave nothing out. You never know what will be important.”

The recitation she gave was devoid of animation. She felt empty and prickly, like an October cornfield in need of nutrients and a long, restorative winter. An evacuation from her home, beneath the cover of a helicopter dispatched from the state capitol, to protect her from her own husband? Ronnie felt as if her family had suddenly been thrust into an unwanted audition for a high-stakes reality show. Every few moments, as she delivered facts, she looked over at her mother, who was speaking quietly to Janet. She wondered if Beverly’s version differed. If her mother, or Jeff’s, blamed her. Because to them, and the rest of the world, it must look as if Jeff had been knocked off balance because Ronnie had decided to leave him.

It even looked that way to her.

The officer told Ronnie their primary goal was to locate Jeff, since he was armed and dangerous.

“Please don’t say that in front of his mother,” she said. “Or the boys. Jeff isn’t a dangerous person. He’s sweet. Everyone would tell you how nice he is. Very laid back.”
Too
laid
back. He never cared enough.
“It’s just that we’re getting a divorce, and today was the day he promised to move out. He’s…”
Drunk
off
his
ass.
“Agitated.”

Ronnie rubbed her arms—the room suddenly chilled her. She hadn’t thought to grab a jacket. The room’s narrow, high-set windows, made of glass bricks, were meant to obscure natural light. This was a room designed to allow sparkles from a mirror ball, gropes in the shadows.

And so what? She was cold. She felt selfish thinking about it, with Jeff frozen all the way to the center of his soul.

“Could you give me a physical description of your husband so we can identify him by sight?”

All that she and Jeff had meant to each other, all the intricacies of their marriage, boiled down to the same physical attributes that had first attracted her to him. “Five foot ten. Dark brown hair, thick, trimmed over ears some might call large.”
Soft
ears
that
lay
flat
against
his
head
beneath
her
kisses.
“Blue eyes.”
Eyes
that
used
to
pierce
her
through
with
their
naked
honesty.
“Broad hands.”
Strong
hands
that
always
needed
a
project, now wrapped around a gun.
“Forty-seven. His birthday is in eleven days—Halloween.” She told the officer that last year she and the boys had written and illustrated a book for Jeff, as a birthday present, about a cat named Trouble.

“I’m sorry. That last part might not be relevant. But he’s a huge animal lover. Oh, and he”—she ran her finger down the line between her front teeth but could barely say the words—“has a gap.”

“Do you recall what he’s wearing?”

“A flannel shirt.” Jeff had lost weight and felt cold lately. “A denim jacket. It has tan corduroy here.” She touched the collar of her own shirt. “And jeans.”
In
his
pocket, a money clip engraved: “Your love is my treasure.”

After an officer came over to take down what little Beverly had observed that morning and Janet had excused herself to use the restroom, Beverly pulled her chair around to the end of the table and leaned in toward the officer. She didn’t want her inquiry to echo across the room.

“Listen,” she began. She looked over at Ronnie, and for a brief moment, their eyes met. The intensity of Ronnie’s gaze made Beverly look away. “My daughter doesn’t know this, but I was close to someone who committed suicide. So what are the chances I’ll know someone else? Slim, right?”

“You looking for comfort, or statistics?”

“I want comfort
from
statistics.”

“I’m no specialist. But I do know that someone kills himself every fourteen minutes in this country.”

“‘Himself.’ So these are men?”

“Most of the people who attempt suicide are women, but most of those who succeed are men.”

“Why’s that?”

“More men use guns.”

Beverly clutched her hand to her heart.

The officer gathered up his papers, gave her a pitying look, and left her to her stunned silence.

She felt awful for Ronnie, and for the boys. She’d been young herself, only seventeen, when she’d suffered her horrific loss. She’d given Dominic her virgin heart and all the faith and hope that clung to it—and he’d taken it right to the grave. His death had affected every decision she’d made since.

Beverly knew Ronnie thought she was a lightweight. A flirt. But truth was, she had always hoped she’d find a true, deep love like what she’d witnessed between Ronnie and Jeff in their early years together. Lord knows she tried. With Tony. With Daryl. With Jim. But Beverly just couldn’t make love stick. Her love life was like a game of pinball: thrust forward by a lusty pull on a spring launcher, kept aloft by the flipper of determination, and then hitting a variety of bumpers on the way down the drain.

Dominic’s beach house had finally lost its allure, and she’d quit going along with Ronnie, Jeff, and the boys. She understood why Ronnie wanted to go; that’s where she dreamed of her father. But that’s where Beverly had fallen in love with him, and each year it had gotten harder to experience the house exactly as it had stood without being able to conjure his spirit. It wasn’t that her wounds still bled; she just no longer saw the point in revisiting her scars.

Beverly hadn’t dealt with Dom’s loss well at all, but at least she’d had a lifetime to try to get over it.

As would Ronnie, if she lost Jeff today. That loss would hit her harder than Ronnie could ever imagine, but she was young and had presumably started to envision her life without him.

But Janet would feel as if she herself had been shot if Jeff pulled the trigger today. And she’d carry a raw, gaping wound for the rest of her life.

A couple of tables away, Ronnie heard an officer ask Will, “So what’s your dad like?”

Will shrugged. Until today, Ronnie had still thought of her youngest as only a wisp of a boy, but there was hidden strength in his spine. How quickly he had rushed to his father’s side; how bravely he had fought for those keys. Just eight years old and he knew what he was about. The pages of Ronnie’s journals were her search for that kind of instinctual knowing and illustrated all too well the dangers of bending around others too long. It broke her to watch him arrange his face into a mask of indifference, like a man with secrets to keep. His swinging feet just grazed the floor. “He’s nice.”

She felt certain Andrew was not giving a similar account on the other side of the room. Jeff had never understood Andrew. The family would be raking leaves onto tarps for compost, and Andrew, consumed by other thoughts, would inevitably slip into a daydream and then dance off to the house to draw, or organize his rock collection, or add another alien race to his science fiction screenplay. They’d find the rake abandoned somewhere between the road and the front door. Jeff thought of Andrew as a slacker. Ronnie knew that one day her older son would choose to leave the rural life of eastern Pennsylvania for a richer cultural landscape—and half of her would want to go with him.

Will was the one who wanted in on any project Jeff undertook. Jeff had given him a small tool belt, complete with junior-size tools. When Will donned his work goggles, he was a mini version of his dad.

“Did he ever hit you?” the policeman asked Will.

“Oh no, he’s a great dad,” Will said. “He’d make up soccer games with me in the side yard.” Tucked up against the ceiling, above his head, was an old mirror ball. So many ways of looking at any one thing. Will spun this singular moment of connection as if he and Jeff had played together all the time. She wasn’t sure if Jeff had ever done anything one-on-one with Andrew.

The admiration in Will’s voice clawed at Ronnie. Once—
once
—he had made up a soccer game with Will. Jeff should have spent much more time with his sons. He’d have to, once the divorce went through and he was granted visitation rights. That was one of the reasons why, six weeks ago, Ronnie had chanced leaving the boys alone with him one weekend. Jeff had to see that he’d need his own relationship with the boys; Ronnie fostering one on his behalf could no longer work.

She wanted Jeff to benefit from relationships with their children the same way she had. At least that’s what she told herself to try to ease her distress over the fact that she had left her precious children alone with a man who just weeks later would arm himself and stand off against local and state police. Thank god,
thank
god
they’d been all right when she got home.

And this morning she had almost sent her children out to him, again. What the hell had she been thinking?

When Ronnie sat back down, Mr. Eshbach, waddling with his bowlegged gait, wound his way between tables and chairs to join her. His compact stature had suited him well for tucking into the tight spaces required of a plumber. Although retired, he still dressed each day in the navy short-sleeved shirt and navy pants that he would have worn to work. His clothesline suggested he owned seven sets. Jeff’s closet was filled with the black pants and white short-sleeved shirts required of his work too. What clothes would fill his closet once the farm store took off and his life at the hotel ended?

If he lived beyond life at the hotel.

Mr. Eshbach pulled out a chair and sat with a long sigh, more emotional expression than she’d ever before heard from the man. Their interactions were mostly limited to waves from the car and incidental meetings at the mailbox, although now that they had the farm store, she did know he had a weakness for beets. His features seemed carved into stone, as if a smile would require heavy lifting.

“I gave my statement,” he said. “I could leave, but they won’t let me go back to my home just now, and I have nowhere else to go.”

“I am so sorry you got caught up in this.”

Mr. Eshbach let silence stretch between them. She’d heard he’d lost his wife years ago, before Ronnie moved in. She wondered what the two of them might have talked about.

“What can you do,” he concluded, as if they had worked something through. His voice dropped at the end, shutting out all possibility for companionable exchange.

His silence was an empty bowl Ronnie longed to fill. “We’re getting a divorce,” she blurted. He nodded. After a moment, she added, “The boys and I will be the ones moving out, as soon as we find a place, but for now it’ll be Jeff. So you’ll know. If you don’t see him.” He nodded. “Thing is, I love so many things about my life. It’s the drinking. If he’d just quit.” The words marched out of her mouth until their complete inappropriateness formed a clump in the air.

Ronnie would make a terrible secret agent. Even sixty seconds of silence was enough torture to get her to spill secrets.

It was the same way eight weeks ago, when years of questions, months of waffling, and weeks of hand-wringing resulted in Ronnie’s decision to file for divorce. She expected an emotional scene, and Jeff had provided one, pounding his fist against a front porch column, lips trembling, tears welling. And even though the dreaded words had scraped her throat like burnt toast, in the end, the emotional act of leaving Jeff had not required the Jaws of Life. It was more like separating two sticky notes. She had feared telling her children, though. Divorce would destroy their sense of family and home, even though they’d done nothing to cause it. Ronnie had lost enough fathers to know how that felt. But her sons had the right to prepare themselves as she had, so once she’d told Jeff, she hadn’t been able to sit with the knowledge for more than a day before she’d told them.

To make sure Jeff wouldn’t overhear, she’d taken Andrew and Will out to the side yard, beneath the broad canopy of the mimosa tree. Its hearty trunk and low branching offered accessible footholds for young climbers—and their mom and barn cats as well, as several of Jeff’s photos had proven. Swallowtail butterflies and hummingbirds flitted among its fragrant, silky flowers while its leaves, like collections of green feathers stitched into an array of headdresses, caught the breeze. An invader from the south, the mimosa was nothing more than another beautiful weed. Its lifespan in Pennsylvania was typically short. But this one had been here for as long as Jeff had been, he’d said, and when she left the farm, she would miss this idyllic spot. They’d wedged the hammock’s stand between the tree’s shallow roots, and in rare moments of repose, it was a favorite place to curl up with a book.

Ronnie sat the boys on the hammock before her. But that felt wrong. She needed to be talking with them, not at them. So she climbed into the hammock too, and each of them redistributed their weight to accommodate the new balance. The boys looked at her, the sun dappling their skin with gold expectation. In her rush to remove the barrier of hidden truth from between them, Ronnie had not thought ahead.

When at last the words formed, they came out in a tumble: “I am going to divorce your father.”

Ronnie braced for their shock. After all, she and Jeff rarely fought. To preserve the marriage this long, she had fluidly readjusted her expectations and diverted energy toward her and Jeff’s one great point of connection—the country lifestyle they shared. She looked around at pears hanging heavy on a nearby tree. Chickens clucked and scratched in the dirt, sun glinting off their iridescent neck feathers. The horses peeked out over their stall doors as if they too were listening to Ronnie’s news.

“I suppose you are pretty surprised by this,” Ronnie said. She certainly was. Divorce, while repeatedly embraced by her mother, went against Ronnie’s beliefs. She was determined to do it better than she had. Give her kids the stability she’d never enjoyed.

But there was no longer anything stable about Jeff.

Will, Daddy’s little helper, arranged a blank face. Andrew answered, “Not really.”

“Why not?”

“You and Dad don’t even act like you’re in love.”

Hmm. Ronnie had needed several sessions with a therapist to come to this awareness. She’d also plunked down twenty-four dollars for a book that told her that her marriage exemplified the predivorce state. She could have saved her money and asked her ten-year-old.

“Explain what you mean,” Ronnie said.

“You never spend time together.”

He was right on that point. Ronnie was usually on the run with the boys, and Jeff rarely attended Andrew’s Tae Kwon Do events or Will’s soccer games. She’d ask other couples at these events: Do you always come together? How do you work that out with your employers? Jeff was never able to clear his schedule. Ronnie joked that when it came to sports, she was a single mom. Over time, it felt like less and less of a joke.

“Plus,” Andrew had said, “you are way more creative than Dad is. He’ll never understand you the way I do.”

No, Ronnie couldn’t hold secrets. Not from Jeff, the boys, or, as her conversation with Mr. Eshbach in the fire hall had just shown, her next-door neighbors.

As if he’d needed the time to free each word from rusting vocal cords, Mr. Eshbach told her he knew all about Jeff’s problems with alcohol.

“You do?” Jeff had always enjoyed his cocktails, yes, but it had only been during this last year that Ronnie finally suspected his problem, and she lived with him. “How?”

“Oh, it was back before you got together. He’d had that other girl.”

“Fay.” Fay Sickler. They’d had to track down the divorce papers in order to apply for their marriage license. Jeff had bought the house from his mother for Fay, not Ronnie. She and Jeff had married the year before Ronnie and her mother moved back into the area, when Ronnie was entering high school. By the time Ronnie had graduated from college and moved back from New York City, Jeff’s marriage to Fay had ended. Crazy Fay stories had filled her and Jeff’s early years with laughter and, by comparison, made Jeff’s choice of Ronnie seem so sane.

Because Ronnie had never had to deal with Crazy Fay directly, it was easy for her to pretend Jeff’s life had started anew when they married. Ronnie had never stopped to think of what it must have looked like to someone like Mr. Eshbach, who would have watched from his house next door as Jeff swapped one woman for the next.

“He didn’t take it so well when she left,” Mr. Eshbach said. “One night while I was walking the dog, I bumped into him. He tripped right over the leash. He was so blind with drink, I wasn’t sure he’d live the night. Had no clue I was even there, I don’t suppose.”

Had despair been entrenched in Jeff’s life even before they’d gotten together? It couldn’t be. One of the things she’d loved about him was that, compared to the high seas of her emotional life, Jeff had always seemed so serene. He was her even keel, she always said. Had his contentment always been an illusion? Or was there some turning point to his decline that Ronnie missed? She couldn’t believe Mr. Eshbach had been sitting on the story all this time.

“I’ve wondered, through the years, what would have happened that night if I hadn’t found him and steered him home.” His voice softened. “So, however this turns out, well…”

Ronnie looked at him, eyebrows raised, fearing he had run through his quota of words and was done speaking. “Yes?”

“He seemed real content once you two wed. To my way of thinking, you may have given him an extra dozen years.”

Ronnie lowered her eyes. She’d blamed herself so much lately that this kindness threatened to undo her.

The officer returned to the room and headed to Ronnie’s table. Mr. Eshbach stood.

“I’m so sorry for all this…this…” Ronnie couldn’t find words.
Inconvenience
was an understatement.

The old man, who over the course of twelve years had never encouraged neighborly interaction, reached over and patted her on the hand with his stubby, callused fingers. “Been lonely since the wife passed. After your storm blows through, I won’t be a stranger.”

Her storm, whose winds were whipping at her neighbors. Like Heather Beam, the young woman who’d stopped in the farm store last week while Ronnie was typing up interview notes for her aquaponics article. Raised in a city on frozen vegetables, Heather had asked Ronnie for a full tour of New Hope Farms’s produce. She’d taken one of everything, it seemed, even handfuls of nuts and seeds and copies of Ronnie’s shelf tag recipes. Heather and her husband had just bought a place up the road. “I want to taste every new experience country life has to offer,” she had said.

Ronnie too had once felt that way. She had planned to meet Heather today so Ronnie could advise her on what she could do now to prepare soil for her own spring garden. The references Ronnie had assembled were sitting under the store’s front counter.

What a welcome Heather and her husband must be receiving today. She hoped it wouldn’t taint the fresh-faced enthusiasm that Ronnie had found so endearing.

The policeman filled the spot Mr. Eshbach had vacated. “They’ve tried the doors to all of the outbuildings on the property, but they’re locked.”

“I know. For the past few weeks, Jeff has been kind of paranoid. He added locks to buildings that have always stood open: corn cribs, the tractor shed, the barn, the tool shed.” Ronnie shook her head. “It’s weird. When I met him, he always left the house unlocked at night. He even left his keys in the car out in the driveway.”
Why
was
he
now
so
afraid?

“Do you have any idea where he might go?”

“You mean to hide from the police? How can you expect me to think like that?”

“Or where he’d go to hole up and consider taking…a final action. A place with a certain significance or meaning.”

His woodworking shop? Its hardware, tools, and machinery all poised to spring into service, awaiting only Jeff’s imagination and skilled hands to achieve their creative potential. He kept the outbuilding as organized as a small hardware store—except for the dark corner with the filing cabinets and his desk. Once the boys’ allergist had put an end to Jeff smoking in their home, Jeff had moved all of their financial records from the upstairs sitting room out to the desk in his shop so that, on his nights off, he could enjoy a cigarette and a cocktail while he paid bills. His record keeping had broken down until the mess artfully disguised its secrets. From Ronnie, and perhaps from Jeff as well.