The Far End of Happy (8 page)

Since Ronnie didn’t get the boys home until four in the morning after Jeff’s commitment, she let them sleep in. She rose with the sun, reached under the guest room bed to pull out her journal, and opened to a fresh page. Too tired to write out a narrative of last night’s suicide scare, she resorted to a list of bullets.

• I feel as powerless divorcing Jeff as I did in my marriage.

• I do not want to watch what’s happening to him.

• I don’t think it helps that I’ve been picking up Jeff’s slack.

• But I do not want to become a nag.

• I do not want to let Jeff manipulate me into staying married.

• I don’t want to manipulate Jeff either. But.

• I worry for the boys.

Ronnie shoved the journal under the bed, woke the boys, and drove them to school late.

She then went on a mission to rid the farm of booze.

When she and Jeff started dating, they were both working in restaurants, and drinking after work was typical. It was the single life. Ronnie left that behind once they started a family, but Jeff never did. He drank habitually, even during one intestinal flu. When Ronnie questioned this behavior, he’d countered with a smile and a quip: “The alcohol kills the germs.” And he’d kicked the bug, so Ronnie wasn’t overly concerned. It wasn’t like he ever got drunk. While she was growing up, her mother was also a fan of happy hour, sipping a cocktail as she made dinner, and often kissed Ronnie good night with the same sweet vermouth on her lips. To Ronnie, it was the taste of love.

Plus, Ronnie understood that Jeff wanted a variety of bottles on hand for entertaining. Only now did she realize how long it had been since they’d entertained. Or since she’d had any of the scotch from the bottle Jeff kept on hand just for her.

Four at a time, Ronnie took more than a dozen liquor bottles off the kitchen counter and poured the contents down the drain, following suit with the Courvoisier, Amaretto, Bénédictine, and other after-dinner drinks Jeff kept in a living room cabinet. It dawned on her that this might not be the healthiest thing for their cesspool. As it leached into the soil, would the alcohol kill the grass, just as it was killing Jeff?

The worst part was that this was not all the booze.

She grabbed the barn keys from one of the hooks on the antique rack and went out to where Jeff kept the rest of his stash.

Jeff had explained that when people contracted with the hotel for a wedding, they were charged for complete bottles of opened liquor; anything remaining in those bottles could not be resold at the front bar. Until the booze was claimed, the opened bottles were held in a special closet.

Since few newlyweds had returned for it over the years, Jeff had helped himself to that alcohol. Ronnie knew they had a couple boxes of clear booze in half-gallon containers that Jeff had marked with a
V
for vodka or
G
for gin. They’d tapped the supply before, for summer picnics. In an attempt to be thorough, Ronnie headed up to the barn to see if any remained.

Poking around in the clean storage room as well as two dirtier grain rooms she didn’t frequent, she couldn’t believe how much booze Jeff had amassed. She found box after box full of intact bottles and dozens of half-gallon containers.

No way could Ronnie imagine putting all of that down the drain. Why try? Even if she did get rid of it all, Jeff could easily replace it.

Yet she had the need to make a statement, and the warm September day inspired an idea. She loaded boxes of bottles into her garden cart, wheeled it out to the driveway, and dribbled the booze over the warm gravel to evaporate.

By the time she was done, Ronnie was sticky from the booze, coated with dust from the boxes, and dizzy from the scent of a six-hundred-square-foot evaporating cocktail. She imagined desperate, addicted souls from miles around clawing their way up the drive to lick its stones.

Her hands were jittery; she desperately needed sleep. But the boys would be home in ninety minutes, and she still had one more change she was determined to enact. One that made her feel like a thief.

Ronnie searched the farm for Jeff’s guns.

She started in the attic crawl space, where she knew Jeff stowed his handguns. For a dozen years, those guns had created a knot of tension in her home. Yes, they were in a locked gun cabinet; yes, the ammunition was stored separately; and yes, they were hard to see or reach, tucked as they were behind Christmas wrapping paper and luggage. But if Jeff didn’t ever plan to use the guns, why did he own them? Andrew and Will slept in the attic, separated from the weapons’ violent potential by only a sheet of drywall and a transparent acrylic pane that could be unlocked with a key the size of Ronnie’s thumbnail.

On her hands and knees, she pulled luggage and wrapping paper and old college textbooks out of the crawl space, went into its farthest reaches, and inched the gun case toward her. She returned the other items to where she found them and opened the little drawer in the bottom of the case where Jeff kept the key.

Empty.

Maybe she remembered wrong. She went down to the first floor, dragged a kitchen chair over to the coat closet, and felt around on the highest shelf, where Jeff stored the ammunition. She pulled down box after box, looking inside, but found nothing but bullets and shotgun shells of various sizes.

Where would he have put that key?

Then again, the last one to use it may have been Ronnie.

Back before the boys were born, Ronnie had found one of her hens ambling around the chicken pen with her innards dragging along the droppings-encrusted floor.

While she and Jeff loved to say they lived on a farm, neither of them had the fortitude required of livestock farmers. They were “farm pet owners”; not one of their chickens was headed to the stew pot. After Ronnie’s attempts to wash and reinsert the oviduct per Internet instructions resulted in no permanent resolution, the hen was facing an almost hopeless situation inviting infection and a painful death.

Ronnie was practical enough to know you don’t take a chicken to the vet and pay to have it euthanized. She tried to imagine Miss Scarlett’s silky neck feathers beneath her fingertips—the twist and the snap—and could not. When it came to animals, Jeff was neither the doctoring nor the killing sort. He would be no help.

As suitable options dwindled, Ronnie remembered the gun Jeff had insisted on loading to protect them from a dangerous and presumably armed prisoner who had escaped from Graterford Prison, the maximum-security facility some twenty miles away. Jeff had showed Ronnie how to load and shoot a small .22-caliber revolver, about the size of a starter pistol, to keep by their bed.

Because Ronnie would not use a gun in a way that might result in a man’s death, after a long tug of wills, he agreed to load it with something other than bullets.

He used bird shot.

She didn’t want her farm associated in any way with what she was about to do, so she tucked Miss Scarlett under her arm and carried her onto Janet’s land, through the woods to a small clearing. Ronnie set her down and put a hand on her back to calm her—to calm herself—and slipped the loaded gun from her jacket pocket.

It couldn’t have weighed more than a can of chick peas, yet she felt its emotional heft.

Then she took her place in a long line of cowards who put a gun between them and the act they were about to perpetrate: she stood up, stepped back one pace, and fired.

And fired, and fired. Bird shot did not quickly kill a bird the size of Miss Scarlett, who was hysterical with pain and fear. She flopped around like the heart in Ronnie’s chest. Batting her wings until they were wet with blood, she spun around, seeking her attacker. With two more shots, she finally lay still. Ronnie stood until her breathing calmed and her ears once again adjusted to the rustle of the grasses surrounding them. She sank to the ground beside the still hen and cried for the horror of it all. Later, while burying her, Ronnie thought that euthanizing seemed so much more virtuous when a gun wasn’t involved.

That afternoon, she got another red hen from a friend down the street and never told Jeff what she had done.

She did, however, remove the remaining cartridges and put the gun back into storage. And…what had she done with the key?

Maybe she was missing the obvious place. She checked the key rack. It held several rings with all manner of odd keys that probably no longer had a use. She ran back up to the attic with several of the smaller keys.

Not a single one fit, and she was running out of time. With no other choice, she lugged the entire gun case down to her Suburban. But there were long guns as well. Before they’d had kids, Jeff had kept them on the landing by the basement stairs. She narrowed her search to every locked outbuilding that had a clean storage area. She knew Jeff was particular about the guns, because although she’d never seen him clean one, she knew he kept a pair of white cotton gloves in his dresser for this purpose.

She gathered all of the guns she could find and laid them out in the back of her Suburban. There were nine in all, pistols and revolvers and longer guns she did not know how to distinguish.

Now loaded symbols of her husband’s instability, Ronnie had hated to touch the guns, let alone drive anywhere with them. A Suburban was nothing but windows, she now realized—windows that would let anyone see these guns. What if she had to stop to get around an accident, or if she was pulled over for the burned-out turn signal she hadn’t gotten around to replacing? For all she knew, the cargo could be illicit. She didn’t know if Jeff had licenses for all of these guns or if he was even required to have them. She didn’t know how to check for ammunition without shooting off a toe or how to arrange the gun so it wouldn’t go off when the car hit a bump and blow a hole through the gas tank.

In the end, the enclosed trunk of Jeff’s Altima seemed a better choice. Ronnie hoisted the locked handgun case into it, shoving it toward the front of the car as if it were a suitcase, then piled the long guns behind it.

Exhausted as she was, she was in no danger of falling asleep. Her fingers clenched the wheel; her shoulders braced.

Reminding herself to breathe, she drove well under the speed limit the entire ten miles to her mother’s house.

Beverly had been watering the tomato plant on her balcony when Ronnie pulled in the parking lot to her apartment.

“Glad I caught you home,” Ronnie said when Beverly met her at the security door. Following along like bait on a hook, Beverly listened to her reel out the story of Jeff’s commitment as she took trip after trip to the car for the unthinkable purpose of unloading guns into Beverly’s house. Ronnie was on a mission at this point and hadn’t noticed Beverly’s neighbor come out with his trash. She grabbed Ronnie’s wrist to stop her so the guy could wheel his can to the curb without fearing for his life.

“Mom, can you take one end?”

All that was left in the trunk was a display case with clear acrylic sliding doors on the front. Full of handguns. Beverly’s feet froze to the macadam.

“It’s not all that heavy, just ungainly.”

And
dangerous. And scary. And deadly.
The case was lined with bloodred velvet. “What if they all go off at once?”

Ronnie gave the case a heave—she was so strong, Beverly thought, so much stronger than Beverly would ever be—and headed to the house again. “Hasn’t happened yet, so I’m hoping it won’t now.” Ronnie climbed the steps and said over her shoulder, “Since you’re still standing there, could you at least close the trunk?”

Inside, Beverly looked at all the firepower laid out on her kitchen table, now set as if they’d been preparing for some sort of crime family rehearsal dinner. She was glad Janet didn’t have to witness this. Ronnie said, “Do you have someplace safe we can store these for a while?”

When Beverly had downsized into this apartment after her last divorce, that was a question she had never thought to ask herself.

“Mom, I’ve got to get home to the boys.”

Beverly’s vision blurred as if her eyes had focused in slightly different directions. “The coat closet, I guess.” Ronnie dove in, pushing jackets and umbrellas aside. At one point, Beverly’s faux fur lined her daughter’s back like the hide of a bear.

“I’ll do this,” Beverly muttered. “I’ll do this for Jeff.”

Janet knew all about Jeff’s guns.

Not a quarter mile from where she sat in the firehouse stood the Bartlesville Rod and Gun Club, where Jeff first attended a shooting demonstration with his father. It was the spring of Jeff’s sophomore year, and after a second try had not gained him a spot on the basketball team, Jerry decided to encourage Jeff’s interest in the gun club with an air rifle and a three-dollar junior membership. A shooting education class was just forming, so Jerry signed him up.

Jeff took to it immediately. Being such a huge animal lover, Jeff had no interest in hunting, so he soon dropped the gun club membership with its antler- and jerky-crazed members. He was interested in marksmanship. Jerry helped him set up a course on their property that met NRA guidelines, and over the years, Jeff started to amass his Distinguished Expert qualifications.

Jerry continued to inflame Jeff’s newfound interest, picking up secondhand long guns at local shows and estate sales that he thought Jeff might be interested in, adding some pistols once Jeff turned twenty-one.

But it was for his eighteenth birthday that Jerry had bought Jeff a shotgun—the one her son was holding now—and Janet wanted to damn him to hell for it.

And, of course, she knew all about the booze too. She’d been helping herself to it for years.

Sharing the story of Jeff’s psych commitment with Corporal McNichol, her mother, and her mother-in-law had Ronnie all twisted up. It was hard enough to live through the first time. Her bones ached, her abdomen cramped, her head pounded—and all of this was made worse by having to sit on a metal folding chair for two hours. She needed relief. She stood to stretch out the fronts of her hips and realized she was still carrying several sets of car keys in her pockets. She pulled them out and laid them on the table. With Jeff secluded, she alone had the power to go somewhere, yet here she was, stuck.

“Mom, you have any painkillers?”

“I could use some too.” Beverly found ibuprofen in her purse, and on their way to the drinking fountain near the restrooms, she shook out two for each of them.

Ronnie could sense the pending relief. Was this why Jeff drank? Was accumulating emotion twisting his body as well, causing pain that only the drink could relieve? Ronnie filled her mouth with water, stood, and popped in two of the painkillers. Maybe she knew something about chronic intoxication. Intimately. Her drug of choice: Jeffrey Farnham.

The way Ronnie recalled it, they had only been home from their honeymoon a few minutes before she and Jeff changed into overalls and started steaming off wallpaper and hacking at loose plaster.

They soon sorted out their roles: Ronnie was the room designer, carpentry crew, and gofer, and Jeff was the mastermind whose carpentry expertise could bring the ideas to fruition.

Ronnie wanted to expose the original wood trim on the second floor. Eager to see what it would look like, they slathered paint remover onto baseboards, windowsills, door frames, and doors and scraped off numerous layers of paint. It was only when they butted up against the stubborn red, green, and brown layers beneath that they learned about milk paint, a turn-of-the-century product farmers would make from ingredients found right on the farm. The wood had absorbed the milk paint into its porous surface.

“We’re going to have to sand this off,” Jeff said.

“That’ll be a chore.”

“Yep.”

“It’ll take a long time.”

“Yep.” Jeff paused and raised an eyebrow. “But we’d be doing it together.”

Ronnie smiled. “I suppose we’re wasting time standing here talking about it then.”

Jeff unbuttoned her denim shirt, slipped his hands around her waist, and kissed her bare shoulder.

“How long do you think this renovation is going to take?”

He pulled her hips to his. “Mmm. Twenty years,” he mumbled, his mouth full of her. “At the very least.”

They heard a knock on the door downstairs. Jeff leaned his forehead against Ronnie’s. “That timing sucks.”

Ronnie giggled and buttoned up her shirt. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

It was the nurse from the life insurance company. Jeff had wanted to set up the policy right away, one of the many ways he was assuring Ronnie that he would care for her no matter what life threw their way. Jeff easily passed the physical. Yet after filling out the lifestyle survey, the nurse informed them that his premiums would be higher than most. Ronnie had expected the smoking might factor in, but there would be additional costs since both bartending and farming were occupations with elevated suicide risk.

Ronnie and Jeff had looked at each other and laughed. They didn’t need risk assessment to prove what they knew in their hearts: love would keep them alive.

The renovation work was rewarding and the twenty-year plan on track as they slowly but surely completed the rooms on the second floor. Ronnie struggled to reframe her career expectations. She did not earn a paycheck or time off, although Jeff effusively praised her efforts; they could only afford to do such an extensive renovation because of all the work she did for free. Each night she would wash a rainbow of dust particles from her skin and blow her nose until its contents ran clear. She worked for a demanding boss, but he adored her, believed in her, provided her with all the materials she needed to succeed, and then took her to bed every night. It was the house, the farm, Jeff, and Ronnie. Life was simple. They were happy.

But over time, the drilling and sanding and sawing drained her, as if it were dust from her own drying soul falling to the floor. Ronnie was learning new skills, but the fact that she was not using her formal education always bothered her. College had allowed her access to such an interesting variety of people who stimulated her socially and creatively and intellectually. Life had been more complex. She had been happier.

Such thoughts would sneak up on Ronnie in the early years of their marriage, and when they did, she would go out and sit on an old concrete slab attached to a mostly collapsed pig barn to entertain thoughts of becoming a journalist in private. She’d tried, once, to share her anxiety with Jeff: she wanted to fix up the farm to create a strong sense of home
and
have a career that allowed her to engage with the world. She’d said, “You make me feel so loved. But sometimes I feel like my mind is wilting, you know?” And he’d answered gently, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. But you’re great, Ronnie, and you’re beautiful, and our house will be so perfect. You’re going to be just fine.” He looked at her with those sparkly blue eyes and his warm smile and wrapped his big hand around hers—and Ronnie chose comfort over answers.

Yet the questions kept returning. Why couldn’t she be more like Jeff, satisfied with his day-to-day life? Why did she have to set her sights on some distant future and let its lack of definition devil her? Here on the farm, simplicity surrounded her. Apples and pears filled out until they pulled their branches toward the earth; whatever Jeff and Ronnie didn’t pick dropped to the ground for the bees and the groundhogs. The late-day sun caught the red in her horse’s mane as its teeth tore at the grass; when its lips reached out, it was for more of the same. Every day the chickens scratched at the ground and dusted their feathers in the dirt.

This pastoral setting was never calm, though. Not really. An ever-present breeze whistled through the outbuildings and stirred things up on this side of their lush hill—drifting snow in the winter, dispersing pollen in spring, spreading dandelions in summer, and scattering leaves in the fall. The wood beyond the property line would not be kept at bay, its vines and bramble and sumac snatching at the fence.

Their little farm represented more bounty than Ronnie had ever dreamed of having at this stage of her life. And it should have been enough. Yet her soul felt as rent as the concrete pad she sat upon, from whose deep fissures slithered the occasional snake.

To accommodate Jeff’s growing bevy of tools, they soon built a new structure on the site of that old pig barn. Ronnie lost her decrepit hideout; he gained a workshop. They overlaid rifts in the foundation with fresh concrete that buried her fears. They framed the building, sided it with wood, and lined it, Ronnie straining to hold unwieldy four-by-eight-foot sheets of particleboard over her head while Jeff screwed them into place. Jeff had never been happier than he was when designing this space, choosing with great care the locations of his radial arm saw and other large pieces. He outfitted the building with rolling cabinets to house innumerable hand tools and stocked shelving with boxes of screws and nails. He spent hours out there, organizing and labeling inventory as if it were his personal hardware store, although they would come to laugh at Murphy’s law of tool ownership: you always need the item you don’t own, requiring yet another run to the store.

“Do we really need a router?” Ronnie said. She hadn’t known what one was until theirs was delivered.

“You saw how much custom door trim costs. It’ll be cheaper to replace the rotting window trim if I make it myself.”

Later they’d buy a cement mixer because it was cheaper than renting one for the number of weeks they’d need to use it. Jeff used his own drill press to make Shaker-style peg racks for the bedrooms because the materials would cost less than purchasing that many prefabricated racks. They saved money on lumber by ripping their own scrap boards on his table saw and cutting them to length on his radial arm saw. They did almost all the work themselves and patted themselves on their stiff backs for their thriftiness.

Hand-fashioning this farm meant everything to Jeff. When a contractor Jeff had hired for the bathrooms suggested they were investing in the property beyond what it could ever pay back, Jeff said, “Why would we ever sell? We’re creating the home of our dreams.”

Ronnie quietly let go of her own dreams, only half formed, and latched on to the twenty-year plan. She was married now, and Jeff’s dreams were big enough for them both.

But at night, Ronnie was often troubled by a vivid nightmare in which her car would break down and she would ask for Jeff’s help. Auto mechanics was not one of his many areas of handy expertise, but in the dream he’d nonetheless look under the hood of her car. She’d ask, “What’s the problem?” and he’d look back at her with a look so disturbing she’d wake up with a cry. She’d struggle to reorient. Renovated room. Coordinated sheets. Gentle, loving husband. When her breathing calmed, she’d snuggle next to Jeff and allow his warmth to woo her back to sleep. The dream would not be quieted, though, and would recur to haunt her throughout their marriage. Although its other details might vary, the dream always ended the same way. Jeff would look up at her—and those blue eyes that by day always held such admiration and warmth had turned, in this dream, stone cold.