The Good Wife (30 page)

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Authors: Stewart O'Nan

BOOK: The Good Wife
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SUNDAY MORNING PATTY PUTTERS IN THE KITCHEN IN HER APRON and sweatpants and slippers, her hair tucked under a scarf. She’s finished with her shopping and is dedicating the whole day to cookies. So far her plan’s working perfectly. Her mother took off early for church; Tommy and Casey are outside, stringing lights. The sticks of butter she left out last night are just the right softness. She has the oven warming and the bags of flour and sugar ranked on the counter, the carton of eggs, the bowls of sprinkles. It’s so quiet that she feels funny talking herself through her recipes, as if someone’s listening.
Rinsing her hands at the sink, she looks out over the backyard, bare and brown. The sky’s white, solid clouds. They’re predicting a big storm for Christmas, just like in
Rudolph—a
nightmare for
scheduling shifts, but still, Patty’s excited. It’s been an early winter, cold, snow cover all month until last Friday, when the temperature shot up to fifty, melting everything. After weeks of pretty, drifted fields, the world seems drab.
While the first sheet of sand tarts is baking, she slips into the gray living room and secretly peeks through the window at Tommy and Casey, untangling the green strings on the porch. Traditionally it’s been Casey’s job, saved for him ever since she had her back problems. Tommy doesn’t see why they had to wait, he can climb a ladder just fine, but Patty wants Casey to be a part of this Christmas, not just a visitor. It takes two people anyway, one to go up the ladder, another to hold it.
The timer dings, reeling her in. She trades baking sheets, swapping new rows of raw diamonds for the done ones, then resetting the timer. Her mother’s stove is old and doesn’t keep the heat well. She has to overshoot with the dial and rely on a thermometer hooked to the rack. Since she’s baking all day, eventually the stove will catch up, so she has to keep an eye on it.
She lays a sheet of waxed paper under the cooling rack and sprinkles the first batch of sand tarts with glassy cinnamon crystals, recycling the ones that fall through. Over the years, she’s gathered a fair-sized collection of Christmas cookie tins in addition to her mother’s. Some are ugly, or rusted along the seams, but she never gets rid of any. She lines a small one with waxed paper and piles the sand tarts in. By the end of the day, all the tins will be filled. She’ll have enough to take a big assorted tin to work tomorrow and another for her mother to take to church Christmas Eve. It’s just the beginning, but with each sheet that comes out of the oven, she feels like she’s getting something done.
The front door opens. It’s Casey, letting in a chill. Maybe it’s her imagination, but he seems thinner this year, fitter. He says he’s
been walking a lot—doctor’s orders. Now he’s sweating in his jacket, his bangs matted.
“How’s it going?” she asks. “Is your father helping you?”
“Oh yeah,” he says, a joke, and rumbles down the basement stairs. A minute later he comes up with an orange extension cord.
He’s made it clear in their phone calls that he thinks she shouldn’t have let Tommy quit his job. Patty doesn’t expect Casey to understand. She’s told him flat out that she’s not his father’s keeper, and that her mother wasted a lot of good years trying to make her feel the same way.
They all need to find a new way to be with each other. This Christmas is their first try, and she doesn’t know what to expect. She knows the temptation is to make up for all the Christmases they’ve missed, a kind of super holiday FRP. Though she hates to admit it, it would have been a hell of a lot easier if Tommy could have just waited one more week to quit.
She does the snickerdoodles next, hoping the cream of tartar from last year is still good. She doesn’t even like them; they’re Eileen’s favorite. Patty will make a little tin just for her and take it by after work tomorrow.
The door opens and shuts and Tommy comes in with his Bills hat on. They have to beat Green Bay today or they’re eliminated, and they’re playing at Lambeau.
“Think you’ll be done by gametime?” she asks.
“I’m hoping,” he says, and goes downstairs, returning with a pair of needlenose pliers.
Patty lets the door close behind him before creeping into the living room.
While Casey holds the string for him, Tommy uses the pliers to unscrew the base of a bulb that’s broken off in the socket. Tommy sets the jagged neck on the porch rail and waits for Casey to find
the next one. Their mouths move, steam leaking out. Patty wishes she could hear what they’re saying. She watches them do two more that way before the timer calls her.
Is it a good sign that Casey’s letting him take the lead, or is he just putting up with him, the way he’s always put up with things? He can be so distant, as if he still has that passive teenager hiding inside him. Considering how long they’ve been apart, she has to laugh at what she’s hoping for: she doesn’t expect them to suddenly become close, just to love each other.
She mixes the dough for the pinwheels and splits it between two bowls, stirring melted chocolate into one, then refrigerating them so they’ll roll without bleeding. She checks the list she put together at work. She still has lemon squares to make (Shannon’s specialty, if she were here), and candy cane cookies, and gingerbread snowmen. There are no bourbon or rum balls this year, and she’s only making a small batch of the date-nut bars, since no one eats them but her mother. And though there are no children to decorate them, she’ll make some plain bells and Christmas trees and whip up four bowls of powdered sugar icing using the food coloring that hasn’t been touched since Easter and gob it on thick.
The timer goes off, and the clock says it’s past noon, less than an hour till gametime. She goes out to check on their progress.
This time she doesn’t hide, but they don’t notice. They’re sitting on the top stair with their backs to her. On the porch floor behind them, as if cast off, lies a string that’s had all its bulbs plucked out.
They both look back when she opens the storm door. Between them they’ve got one of the other strings hooked to the extension cord. It should be on, but it’s not, and they’re going through the bulbs, replacing them one at a time from a box of extras.
“Case says we’ve had these for a while,” Tommy says. “How long would you say?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “A long time.”
“I think it might be time for some new ones.”
“They didn’t just go bad,” Patty reasons, because she’s attached to them (and because, through the years, she’s become cheap). They’re old, the outdoor-only kind, the bulbs bigger than the ones on the tree. Originally she had six strings and did the whole porch and the bushes and the dogwood. They used to blink.
“I had problems with them last year,” Casey says.
“Those two are okay,” Tommy says, “and I’m hoping we’ll get this one going, but that one’s shot.”
“Three strings aren’t enough to cover the front,” Casey points out.
How can Patty argue when they’re united against her? It’s almost worth it to send them off to Wal-Mart. Casey says he has money, which is ridiculous. Tommy tells him he can drive. Patty doesn’t remind him that the game’s starting, just watches them off in the rental car and goes back inside. The last batch of snicker-doodles is almost done.
As she spreads the gooey filling of the lemon squares over the dough, she times the drive to Vestal. Twenty minutes there, fifteen in the store, then twenty back. Nearly an hour. It’s probably the longest they’ve ever been alone together. Greedily, she wants to be there, hidden in the backseat, listening. She wants to see what the greeter at Wal-Mart sees coming through the doors—two big guys with stooped shoulders, obviously father and son.
For now, the house is hers, sweet with the smell of vanilla. The tins are filling. She’s made a decent dent in the list, and the Bills will be on soon. It’s supposed to snow for Christmas. In the quiet, she finds herself whistling “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” over and over, happy, as if she’s won something.
THIS TIME, WHEN THE TROOPS INVADE IRAQ, THE WEEK OF CASEY’S birthday, Patty has someone to complain to about the yellow ribbons. She flips the channel whenever she sees a story coming up about soldiers who’ve spent two weeks as POWs being called heroes. Tommy says it’s natural and that it doesn’t bother him.
He’s working at Best Buy, driving a forklift, thanks to the job bank at the parole office. He’s got a used Ford pickup, just like before, making the monthly payments to build his credit. With two checks coming in, they’ve been able to put some money away. He hasn’t bugged her about a house, but it’s the season. Once the weather turns, the realty signs will pop up like dandelions.
Winter lingers into April. It’s still cold Opening Day when they go out with Eileen and Cy. Though she drives over Owego Creek twice daily, it’s been years since Patty’s been down to the water, probably not since their father took them fishing. The flats below the Talcott Street bridge are packed, a gauntlet of rods. Cy has a pair of waders for her, but she begs off, sticking to the rocks like Eileen. Cy and Tommy slosh across and claim a sandbar, giving each other room to cast. Eileen has to show Patty what to do. When the fire siren sounds to officially start the season, she sends her line out over the water in a long arc that makes Tommy smile.
She doesn’t expect to catch anything, it’s more of a ceremony. The whole town’s out, and after the claustrophobia of watching
the war, it feels good to be doing something normal. Tommy and Cy are a good match, like her and Eileen.
They’re talking about her mother going down to visit Shannon for Easter when Patty’s line snags on something. The current’s taken it toward shore where there’s a snarl of black branches among the rocks. She tugs—it’s stuck. She moves a few steps downstream and tips her rod back, hoping to clear it, and with a high-pitched whizzing, line begins stripping off her reel.
Her first reaction is to grab the handle to keep it from spinning, but she can’t stop it cleanly.
“I’ve got something!” she calls.
“Let him take the line if he wants,” Eileen says.
“How do I do that?”
“Just don’t let go.”
She wants Eileen to do it, but people are watching—Tommy and Cy laughing and hollering encouragement.
Eileen has her play the fish, reeling him in and then letting him run, like that might tire him. Somehow it does. Patty can see the sleek torpedo shape of him drifting in the shallows, powerless, as Eileen wades in with the net. They’ve gathered a crowd of little kids and their parents.
“Brown trout,” one of the men says before Eileen even lifts it out, curved in the web of the net.
“Wow,” a kid says.
“Oh, he’s pretty,” an older woman says. He’s as long as Eileen’s forearm, with muddy speckles and a yellow belly. His gills open and close.
“Want to keep him?” Eileen asks.
“No,” Patty says, “let’s let him go.” But before she does, she holds him up so Tommy and Cy can admire him.
They stay until Tommy gets his limit of five. Cy and Eileen
take four each. Patty had just the one, but they all agree, hers was the prize.
IT’S A HUMID NIGHT IN JULY. THE WAR’S OVER. THE BRIDGE IS FINISHED. It’s been a good day: work, an easy commute, then dinner, TV. Boring, normal life—exactly what she wanted for so long. They’ve switched off the news and gone to bed at the regular time. They’re both too tired to read so they turn the light out and have a last sip of water before settling in.
They’ve gotten past having to make love every night and gone back to their natural haphazard schedule. He starts out facing her, then rolls over. She rolls with him, spooned and then spooning, her knees tucked behind his, an arm flung over him so they can hold hands, and soon he’s gone, his breathing raspy and jagged. He sleeps so easily.
She’s awake, for no reason she can think of. The bed’s too hot, or maybe it’s the full moon, tracing the crosspiece of the window over the curtains, as if she’s left the spotlight on out back. In the woods, the peepers are calling. It reminds her of Auburn, the canal just beyond the wall. For years, lying here, she used to imagine herself there with Tommy, in the old trailers. She’d fly to him through the night like a witch, over the dark lakes and forests, the sleeping towns. Now all she has to do is reach for him.
She knows from experience that anything can happen, but he’s been so good. Even her mother’s impressed. Casey will take longer, and honestly, he may never understand.
Tommy shifts, and she rolls with him, takes his warm hand in hers and presses it to her chest. He’s asleep, she’s awake, yet they’re together here, and she dares to believe the long pause that’s kept them from their real life is finally behind them. It’s over. He’s home. They made it.
“A deceptively simple style, confessional almost. Indeed, the tone here is so personal, so intimate, we feel like voyeurs, as if we’re reading someone’s diary … . It is in these quotidian moments that the novel reaches its lyrical height.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“O’Nan displays his astonishing ability to get under his diverse characters’ skin and thereby draw us deeply into their lives.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times
“[O’Nan] depicts Patty’s working class—milieu with rare and cleareyed compassion.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“Wholly engrossing and flawlessly crafted … Masterful.”
—
Baltimore Sun
“Grabs the reader immediately and refuses to let go …
The Good Wife
is a celebration of the bravery it takes to get from day to day to day when there’s little to go on but hope.”
—
The Hartford Courant
“Forceful, oddly moving … O’Nan has completely captured Patty and her dogged determination to endure in this sad but strangely hopeful story.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“O’Nan shows singular restraint; there is no preaching in
The Good Wife
. Instead, there is just one woman’s story, quietly told … . Perfect.”
—
The Denver Post
“O’Nan has spun a taut, deeply affecting novel … . He has a pitchperfect ear for dialogue, and especially for interior conversations. Indeed, the novel owes much of its power to the author’s uncanny ability to inhabit Patty’s mind.”
—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“O’Nan is a writer worthy of serious attention.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“[An] engrossing and heartbreaking novel … O’Nan has been named one of the best young American novelists by
Granta,
and it’s evident here why.”
—
Library Journal
(starred review)
“The overriding reaction O’nan evokes for his heroine is awed sympathy.
The
Good
Wife
is a quietly devastating, thought-provoking examination of love and loyalty that can’t be locked away.”
—
Contra Costa Times
“Have you grown tired lately of high-concept novels, full of flash and action but signifying nothing so much as our modern conceits? A wonderful antidote can be found in
The Good Wife
, a richly observed, eloquently executed working-class pastoral on an underappreciated human quality: endurance.”
—
The News-Press
(Fort Myers, Florida)
“[O’Nan’s] touch is deft with his plotline, his characters subtle and lifelike.”
—
The Buffalo News

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