The Far End of Happy (9 page)

One thing Janet loved about Ronnie: she was never too busy to entertain her with stories about the boys. Each one added more personality and humor to an ever-burbling spring that bathed Janet’s heart with its only source of joy. That made a particular call from Ronnie, received the second Saturday in September, one that Janet would never forget.

“Jeff’s in the hospital,” Ronnie said. “I’m sorry to tell you this by phone, but I didn’t have time to come over.”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“I guess there’s no easy way to say this. Jeff threatened to kill himself. He’s in the psychiatric unit at Reading Hospital.”

Janet braced herself against her kitchen counter.

“He wants visitors. You need to see him.”

“I can’t, Ronnie.”

“I’ll go, because he’s asked for me, but I’m the one divorcing him. He needs support from someone else. Visiting hours start at two. I’ll pick you up at one fifteen.”

The locked unit. The buzzing in. Ronnie wringing her hands and pacing. Janet’s heart flopping around in her chest so wildly she thought she might not live to see her son join them in the lounge. She almost didn’t recognize him, looking so thin. When had he lost weight? Jerry had kept his athletic physique until his final illness; Jeff looked sunken with his beltless pants slipping down on his hips. Even in this state, though, he hardly registered Janet’s presence. His eyes, as always, were just for Ronnie.

Ronnie quickly claimed the only single chair; Janet sat next to Jeff on the couch.

“Thanks for coming,” he said, giving Ronnie such a sweet smile that Janet had to focus on the cover of a magazine lying on the nearby coffee table to control her tears.

“How are you feeling?” Janet said, her voice tight.

“Better. Getting plenty of rest. Here. You can give these to the boys.”

He reached past Janet with two small wooden animals, a turtle and an owl. Ronnie took them. “We have to do crafts. I painted them.”

Their splotchy imperfection invoked the little Jeff who used to run to Janet with his art projects after school. She’d beg him to tell her the story of each painting to hide the fact that she hadn’t a clue to its subject. It wasn’t until shop class, in junior high, that his artistry began to shine.

Ronnie put the animals in her pocket.

“So,” he said.

“Yes?” Ronnie said.

If this were earlier in the marriage, Janet thought, even a few years ago, they’d be touching by now. It had always both humiliated and thrilled Janet to see that her son had the comfort of the physical intimacy that had been missing in her own marriage. Ronnie’s reticence now stirred Janet to reach over and put her hand on his. Jeff looked at her as if wondering what she was up to before moving his hand and turning back to Ronnie.

“I wanted to tell you, face-to-face, that pressuring you to change your mind about the divorce was a stupid stunt. It won’t work. I get that now. I apologize.”

“Okay.” Ronnie shifted in her chair and recrossed her legs with the elegance of someone wearing a pencil skirt, not jeans smudged at the knee. “Thank you.”

Janet waited, but this seemed to be the end of what they had to say to each other. “Is the food okay here?” she said. A stupid question. Almost any food was better than what she could make. She didn’t have a knack for anything beyond her Campbell soup cookbook. That one fact could account for why Jeff worked in a facility with a restaurant.

He looked at Janet. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

But he did scare her and was scaring her now. The hills of Bartlesville were full of strange characters, but she knew nothing about the kind of mental illness that landed someone in a locked psychiatric unit. He seemed so calm—more peaceful than normal, in fact—that she still wondered how much of his presence here was due to Ronnie’s overreaction.

She really wished Ronnie would say something, but her lips pressed together in silence.

“Jeff, I don’t understand why you’re here,” Janet said. If the divorce had him feeling blue, he should pull himself together and fight for his marriage. Just last week, when she’d given him the money, he’d seemed so relieved. Happier. “If you need more money, say so.”

Ronnie leaned forward and put her face in her hand. Jeff smiled and shook his head. “At least you’re predictable, Mother.”

Shouting came from down the hall, then a scream that had Janet looking for the exit signs. This unit, closed up so tight like the hospital’s shameful secret, did not have enough air for her. She needed to get out of this building and have a drink.

She stood and found the patience to say, “I hope you feel better soon, Jeff.”

It took Ronnie but a moment to follow suit. It broke Janet’s heart the way Jeff looked to his wife for some indication of love. But if she harbored any, it was locked away as tight as her son.

All Ronnie said was, “Good luck, Jeff.”

Early Sunday morning, the third day Jeff was in the hospital, the boys came down to join Ronnie in the guest room bed. She’d been up and down the stairs with them all night. First Will had random leg pains, which eventually woke Andrew, who then heard scratching that he feared was a bat. Ronnie turned on the lights in the crawl space to show it was nothing, only to find a dried-up bat on the floor, so the first good sleep any of them had gotten was when they had all piled in together.

When Ronnie finally climbed out of bed for good on Sunday morning, she stood and stretched—and her legs crumpled beneath her as the world went black.

Ronnie heard Will’s cries as if from afar. “Mom! Andrew, wake up! Mom fell down!”

Soon both her sons were by her side.

“I’m okay.”

Andrew pulled her to a sitting position, and Will tried to brace her with his shoulder. “Let me sit here a sec.” She sat with her head dropped forward between her legs.

“Did you hit your head?” Andrew said.

“I’m not hurt. Um, my blood pressure may be low.” Ronnie rolled to her hands and knees and slowly stood. Her boys needed to believe that someone in this house could hold it together.

“Thanks for your help, guys. Go on down and get some breakfast. And can you let Max out, Andrew, and feed him? I’m just going to rest here a bit longer.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Andrew said.

Ronnie climbed back onto her bed. She didn’t know a goddamn thing. “Yep. Now scoot.”

As soon as their feet hit the stairs, Ronnie reached beneath her bed for her journal. She turned to a fresh page and dated it.

I blacked out again today. This time, I scared the boys.

She flipped back through her recent entries. Last week, she’d blacked out while hitching the trailer to the tractor so she could muck out the horse stalls and came to with her rear end planted in the dirty straw. The week before that, she’d woken up at the kitchen table at one p.m., her sandwich in her hand.

Back on today’s page, she wrote:

I’m losing it. Maybe I should reserve a room at the loony bin for me.

When Ronnie had started journaling three years earlier, loath to leave the warmth of her husband’s side, she’d wait until daylight and bring her journal into bed with them. It only took a few instances of Jeff pushing it to the floor and saying, “Come on, baby, you don’t need that while you have me,” to realize the opposite was true. Soon she was leaping from the bed at five thirty and snuggling with Max on the guest room bed to invest in this relationship with the page before the kids or Jeff awoke. Who cared if that meant she got only four or five hours of sleep? At long last, someone was paying careful attention to her ideas and feelings. If Jeff felt threatened by that, what could she do? He had relinquished his role.

And once she had entered a relationship in which she was being heard, she was powerless to leave it. That was the great tragedy of her marriage.

She remembered that first day of journaling and how her words flooded the page like an advancing tide that could no longer be sandbagged. She wrote for three hours, and the page listened attentively.

And Ronnie realized: that’s what Janet always used to do.

While her own mother flitted off to tend to this or that, Janet was the one Ronnie would turn to when she needed an ear. Janet would sit forward in her chair, her eyebrows raised, her slight smile begging for a story. When they were together, Janet made Ronnie feel like she was the only being in the world worthy of her attention.

And when she and Jeff had first gotten together, Jeff had offered that same focused delight. But when Jeff became the source of the drama instead of the healing and Ronnie reached out to Janet once more, her mother-in-law was no longer as attentive. Her eyes, so like Jeff’s, were not as bright. Ronnie worried she might be ill, but when she suggested that Janet get a checkup, her words bounced off her as they had Jeff, making Ronnie feel double the loss.

Ronnie heard a knock on the guest room door. “Yes?”

“Did you sleep enough?”

Ronnie smiled. “Yes, Will.”

Andrew opened the door, and Will carried in a breakfast tray. Ronnie set her journal aside so he could put it on her lap.

“There’s toast, cereal, orange juice, and an egg.”

The toast was perfect, the Rice Krispies milk bloated, and the egg still in the shell. Ronnie held it up.

“I told you it was dumb,” Andrew said.

“I didn’t know how to fix it, or I would have.”

The egg already had her tearing up. She could only point to the glass that held a bunch of purple asters and one saucer-size Queen Anne’s lace. Her favorites. Her sons knew her so much better than Jeff did. Her soon-to-be ex had plunged them fifty dollars more into debt for a dozen long-stemmed roses for her birthday last week, leaving her angry and bewildered.

“There were still a few left at the side of the driveway,” Andrew said. He gave her such a sweet smile. “We love you.”

“Come here.” She gave them each a big hug and told them she’d be down shortly.

“That reminds me,” Andrew said. “We were out of milk so I had to use hazelnut creamer.”

Ronnie smiled. “Guess we’d better squeeze in some grocery shopping later.” She ate the toast, drank the juice, and flushed the cereal.

At the store that afternoon, Will picked up a dozen Hostess doughnuts.

“Now, Will, we don’t need to be spending money on doughnuts. Check on the side. Pretty sure it says, ‘Nutritional value: zero.’”

Will gave her a stern look and put them into the cart. “You’ve got to eat some fattening stuff, Mom. You’re collapsing.”

“Better get ice cream too. It’s full of calcium,” said Andrew, her ice-cream lover, label reader, and eternal opportunist. “I finished the chocolate so we’ll need more.”

Ronnie tried to enjoy this special attention from her sons, but it only reminded her of a darkness she could not hold at bay. If Jeff did not repeat the threat of suicide in the hospital, his involuntary commitment would come to its legal, five-day end the day after tomorrow. Ronnie would have to bring back into her home the shadow of the man who had been the love of her life, the man she was planning to leave, and the man who had threatened gun violence in that same home while their children slept—and she didn’t think she had the strength to do it.

The image of him being taken away in handcuffs, which had disconcerted and then comforted Ronnie, was starting to fade.

On Monday, before going to meet with Jeff and the hospital psychiatrist, Ronnie sat in Jeff’s Altima in the driveway at the farm. She’d take his car to pick him up. She’d already wasted too much gas going back and forth to the hospital in her oversize Suburban.

She put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it. It occurred to her that beside her, in the center compartment, she might find Jeff’s wallet. He never carried it with him, since it was a huge fistful of a thing.

If she took a look at it, this would be the third time she spied on her husband. The first two times had ended in damning revelations. Her fingers drummed on the center compartment. Did she really want to know what secrets it contained?

More than two years ago, during the first week of April, Ronnie needed to get a form for her taxes to prepare for the next week’s appointment with the accountant. Jeff had said he’d fish the form out for her that morning but then picked up an additional day shift before the banquet he was working at the hotel that night. So while Jeff was at work, Ronnie went out to the shop, and the corner of it he used as an office, to look for her form. From the moment she opened the door, Ronnie felt like she was trespassing.

Why?
she wondered. This was her property too. It was their joint tax return, her own 1099 she sought. Yet the woodworking shop was Jeff’s domain. She tiptoed across the concrete floor, past the table saw and vise, and touched as little as possible on her way toward the records her husband kept private.

Receipts and papers stuck out from overstuffed desk drawers. This wasn’t like him. Had he never gotten organized after moving the records out here? Hoping the filing cabinet was in better shape, Ronnie slid a drawer open as soundlessly as possible and lifted out an accordion file that suggested an orderly place to start her search. Inside were preprinted pockets labeled January through December. She reached into February, when her 1099 would have arrived. But she only found receipts, all charged to Diner’s Club. She glanced toward the door before flipping to the slot for April—maybe he’d filed it there because of their tax appointment—and found dozens more receipts, all charged to American Express.

A different card’s receipts occupied each slot. How many credit cards did they have?

Her senses on high alert, Ronnie flipped through the pockets, adding numbers from the most recent statements. She heard an exasperated blowing of lips. She looked up, hand clutched to her heart, but no one was there. She heard it again. It was one of the horses in the turn-in shed next door. Scanning quickly, she figured she and Jeff must owe some $50,000 in credit card debt.

Ronnie packed everything away the way she had found it, blew the sawdust from her 1099, which had been sitting on a haphazard pile of papers on top of the desk, and left the shop. After she put the boys to bed that night, she hunkered down in the living room until Jeff got home.

“Hey.” Jeff jiggled her shoulder. “What are you doing in here?”

Ronnie pushed herself up from the couch cushion and squinted up at him. “I was waiting for you. What time is it?”

“Two,” he said. He sat on the couch beside her and slipped his arm around her. His breath smelled like cigarettes and coffee. “It’s been a long time since you waited up for me.”

“That’s because we have two little people who’ll be getting up in five hours.” She scooted farther away and turned toward him. “I had to go out to the shop and get my 1099 from the magazine. I got quite an eyeful. All those receipts—I want to know exactly how much we owe, Jeff.”

“It’s not like we’re in trouble or anything.”

“We’re in a huge amount of debt.”

“Why do we need to get out of debt? I always pay more than the minimum—”

“What’s the total?”

A reckoning from her was apparently so unexpected that it rendered him speechless. “I don’t know off the top of my head. It’ll take a while to pull that information together. And I can’t do it now. I have to finish getting ready for our tax appointment in the morning.”

“The accumulating interest will destroy us. I want you to cut up the cards until we get these paid off.”

“It’s not so easy to get new cards these days. I’ll just stop charging.”

“Cut them up, Jeff.”

“I’ll keep a Visa and an American Express. We’ll need them to finish the renovation.”

“I’ll agree to keeping them for emergencies. As for the renovation, we may have to reassess.”

“Come on, Ronnie, look at this room.” The walls were covered in mint green sand paint; they’d all suffered abrasions from it. An old section of carpet covered a patch of the rough subfloor. The couches looked tired and threadbare. “We only have the basement and this living room left.”

“We can create a strategy once you tell me the full amount of the debt. If anything were to happen to you, I don’t want to be left holding a financial mess I didn’t know about.”

That year, Ronnie thought it best to go along to the tax appointment, where Jeff performed a financial sleight of hand Ronnie hadn’t known possible: he paid their income taxes with a credit card.

• • •

The second time she spied on Jeff was a year ago, and she was sitting right in this car, on this driveway.

She’d been walking past the Altima on her way to do barn chores one morning when something caught her eye—a bevy of Styrofoam cups littering the passenger side floor. Jeff poured himself a cup of coffee before leaving for work each night, to help keep him awake on the dark quiet roads, but he never tossed them on the floor like this.

The fact that she’d seen him flat-out drunk the night before—while celebrating Ronnie’s birthday at a classy restaurant, no less—set her senses on alert. When paying the bill, he couldn’t even target the line at the bottom and had scrawled his name across the entire ticket. Ronnie’s anger at having to drive him home had turned to concern when she found the vial of Jeff’s new arthritis medication by the sink, with its warning not to be taken with alcohol.

Finding him sprawled across the bed in his clothes, Ronnie made sure he was breathing before abandoning him for the guest room. But even in morning’s hopeful light, she could not shake the image of him spilling onto the driveway when she opened the door of the Suburban for him, and the way he’d crawled up to bed on his hands and feet.

Ronnie opened the door of his Altima to have a look.

As she peeled off the lids to stack the cups, she saw the expected brown residue—but when she lifted the stack to her nose, it wasn’t coffee she smelled. It was whiskey and sweet vermouth.

• • •

The accordion files, the Styrofoam cups—each discovery had snagged at the cloak of denial that protected her marriage until it had completely unraveled. Secrets always come out in the end, Ronnie knew, and they were at the end. Now, behind the wheel of Jeff’s car with no marriage left to protect, she opened the center compartment.

Jeff had promised her he’d whittled down his charging to two active cards. Despite the fact that he had closed her out of their financial life, shut down their romance, and scared her senseless with that suicide threat, she still wanted to believe him. What hope did they have for joint parenting after the divorce if she couldn’t trust him? Then again, what kind of wife snoops on her own husband? Before she could talk her fingers out of it, they had flipped open the wallet.

She found twelve credit cards.

Ronnie stormed back into the house with the wallet in hand, cut each credit card but the agreed upon American Express and the Visa into quarters, and stuffed the pieces back into the wallet’s slots haphazardly, like so many colorful pieces to a puzzle she couldn’t imagine ever solving. Rage shuddered through her. Even now he would lie.
Damn
him.

Only when she’d put the wallet back in the center compartment and put the car in drive could she start to get a grip on her emotions. Nothing new was happening, she told herself. The transgressions made with these cards were water under the bridge, and she could do nothing about them. But at least until he ordered replacements, Ronnie had erected a protective if flimsy barrier: Jeff could use the credit cards no more.