The Lost Husband (22 page)

At the punch, I hit the brakes and pulled over. Abby had injured not only Tank, who was sobbing in shock over it, but also her own hand—so she was crying, too. I slid open the minivan’s
door and scolded and comforted them both at the same time. They unbuckled and both came in for a hug, grasping at me as they tried to push each other away.

“What were you thinking?” I demanded of Abby. “Why would you give him something he’s been begging for all night just to take it right back?”

“He was being a brat,” Abby insisted.

“I’m not a rat,” Tank said. “You’re the rat.”

“Not ‘rat,’ you idiot! ‘Brat’!”

“Enough!” I heard myself shout. Then, “No name-calling! Not another word! We are driving home and going to bed if it kills me.”

Back on the road, after a few minutes of silence, I heard Abby still crying. I let out a sigh as I tried to shift from the mad person who had just yelled at her to the mother who could offer comfort.

“Babe,” I said, careful with my voice, “I just can’t have you calling your brother an idiot. That’s not how we talk. And I can’t have you punching him, either. We don’t hit people. Especially not once we’ve had ninja training.”

Then the real problem came tumbling out. Abby sobbed so loudly as she explained it to me that I could barely understand her. But I got the gist before long: Jimmy Gaveski had been picking on her again at school.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“He said if I told anybody, he’d steal my dessert at lunchtime.”

“He threatened you?”

“Well,” Abby said, a little calmer now, “he threatened my dessert.”

I squeezed all the details I could get from her and pieced together that he’d been taunting her in gym class for the past several
days, making up chants and trying to get the other kids to join in.

“Do they?” I asked.

“Not really,” Abby said. “His chants aren’t very good. They don’t rhyme. And when they do rhyme, they don’t make any sense.”

“Sounds like he’s really not a very good bully,” I said.

“No,” Abby agreed. “But he tries hard.”

“You know,” I said then, in an effort to sound wise, “people who try to make others unhappy are usually pretty unhappy themselves.” Something was eating at that kid. I couldn’t help but wonder what it might be. Maybe he had parents who shamed him, or ignored him, or—God forbid—hurt him. I didn’t know, and I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t even fix things for the two children that belonged to me.

“I feel sorry for him, in a way,” I said.

“Do you?” Abby asked.

“I don’t!” Tank shouted. “Not at all.”

Abby looked over at Tank like he was her favorite person in the world. “Thanks, T.,” she said.

Back home, I rolled them into bed without even doing a bath or brushing teeth. It was too late to stay up and hash it all out. I sat beside Abby for a minute before turning out the light, and I stroked her hair. Tank had given her his lovie, a blue dog named Blue Dog, and she had tucked it between the two of them.

“You
have
to tell me if that boy teases you again, babe,” I insisted, resting my gaze on her splotchy face.

“What about my dessert?” Abby said. Her nose was still stuffy, too.

“If he steals your dessert, I’ll get you a better dessert,” I said. “I’ll take you for ice cream after school. Or doughnuts.”

“Doughnuts!” Tank cheered.

“I’ll tell him that,” Abby said, looking pleased with the idea.

“No,” I said. “Don’t tell him. Okay? Just hold it in your heart and know it for yourself.” I leaned in and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Trust me on this, sweet child. There is nothing that boy can take from you—absolutely nothing—that the two of us can’t replace a thousand times over.”

Now here it was, midnight, and I couldn’t shake the adrenaline. I did feel sorry for PeePants Gaveski, if I thought about it from his side. He was just a kid, after all. But I also felt the urge to go strangle him in his pajamas. Finally I got up and tiptoed to check on the kids and straighten their blanket. At the bed, I saw that Tank was sleeping with his arm across Abby. It made me wonder if it was what he’d needed all along. Just someone real to hold on to.

Halfway out, at the doorway, I paused to glance back. You can never appreciate your children so fully as when they are asleep, when you’re just a bystander. Awake, they’re looking at you—for answers, for reactions—and being looked at can make it hard to see. When they’re asleep, though, it frees you to do some looking yourself.

I was fighting the urge to stand there and watch them until morning when I heard a voice from behind Jean’s closed door. There was a pair of bucks sitting outside in the hall. Russ’s bucks. And the voice, of course, was his, too.

“You have to tell her,” Russ was saying. “She’d want to know.”

And then I heard Jean. “It’s too soon.”

I felt the panic of having trespassed on their conversation, but I was afraid to move and risk making the stairs squeak. I froze in
the hallway, eavesdropping wildly and wishing like anything I were somewhere else.

“Well,” Russ said, “it’s a fine line between too soon and too late.”

Jean gave a soft laugh. “But I’m the one who has to walk it.”

“People want you to be up front with them.”

“I know that,” she said. “But life is messy.”

Russ’s voice was extra gravelly. “I just don’t want to see you wait all this time to mess things up now.”

“Noted,” Jean said. There was a pause, and the next time Jean spoke, she sounded impatient. “Enough lecturing. Can we please go to bed?”

I wasn’t sure if “go to bed” meant “go to sleep” or “or go to
bed
,” but I wasn’t waiting to find out. I double-timed it down the stairs, squeaks and all, and was just about to zip back to my room when I noticed through the kitchen window that the lights were on in the milking barn. I was still awake—if anything, after catching that snippet of conversation, even more awake—and I decided to venture outside to turn it off.

I shook out a pair of Jean’s Wellingtons from the collection of boots and Crocs on the front porch and popped them on my bare feet. Then I stepped out across the farmyard and felt the thrill of being out after dark. My nightgown, that same tissue-thin little billowy number, was not nearly enough protection from the night air, and I crossed my arms around myself in response.

Inside, all the lights were on, and I cursed Sunshine for being the worst farm employee in the history of agriculture. I was sure I hadn’t left them on. Then again, it had been Shirtless Fence-Post-Mending Day on the farm that afternoon, and so I did allow for the possibility I might have been distracted.

I took a look around, and that’s when I noticed the door to the walk-in fridge pushed in all the way back and wide open—which was, of course, a little bit impossible, since it was a self-closing door, as I’d been reminded a hundred times by O’Connor. I’d seen enough horror movies in my life to want to back out on tiptoe at that moment. Instead I took a deep breath of courage and marched through that open door to investigate.

“Hey!” I said in a big, adult voice. “What the hell’s going on in here?”

It’s hard to remember the exact sequence of events now. One thing hit another and then another like dominos falling, and before I knew it, everything had gone down. The best I can reconstruct is this: I walked right into the open fridge, and as I did, my shin hit something wooden—hit it hard enough to send a shock of pain shooting both up and down my leg, and I doubled over to grab it with both hands. Next, from down low, I felt a breeze, then heard a noise, something going
chunk
. I stood up to see O’Connor standing with his mouth open and a screwdriver in one hand, looking from me to the door and back again.

“Tell me you didn’t just do that,” he said, a little breathless.

“I didn’t just do that,” I said. Then I looked around. “Do what?”

He walked right past me to the door and started working the handle. Which, we both knew, was broken. Even though the handle refused to turn, he kept jiggling it anyway, the way you do when things are really hopeless. As I watched him, I was slow to realize what I’d just done. But then it became clear. I’d kicked a two-by-four across the room. The one that had been propping open the fridge door.

“You were fixing the fridge door?”

O’Connor didn’t look up. “The part finally arrived.”

For proof, there was the new handle, unwrapped, lying on a box right near me.

“And you were working on it in the middle of the night because …?”

“Because I thought it would be safer.”

“Fewer people around.” I nodded. “Fewer people to—”

“Accidentally kick the door closed. Yes.” He gave me a look. “Plus,” he went on, “I had the night off tonight. And I felt …” He hesitated a half second. “Restless.”

When he finally gave up on the door handle, we both looked down at the two-by-four.

“Sorry,” I said.

O’Connor bent his head and rubbed his eyes.

“Well,” he said at last, “there’s good news as well as bad.”

“Okay,” I said.

“The good news,” he said, looking around the room, “is that I turned off the cooling system before I started working.”

“So we won’t get too cold?” I said, though I was cold already.

“We’ll still get cold,” he said. “But it’s not literally freezing in here anymore.”

“No,” I agreed. “More like just chilly.”

“So I don’t think we’ll die of hypothermia.”

I hadn’t realized dying of hypothermia was a possibility. “That
is
good news,” I said.

“The bad news,” O’Connor went on, “is that it’s still going to be pretty cold in here.” He was looking around the room now, eyeing the possibilities. “And I’m not sure we can get out before morning.”

“Before morning!” I said. I didn’t voice the million-plus reasons that spending the night in the walk-in fridge was not going
to work for me. Like my children. Or my terrible, ridiculous, tissue-thin cotton nightgown. I looked at the goose bumps on my arm. “Can’t you get us out?”

“I’m not MacGyver,” he said, his voice gruff. “It’s broken.”

“Can’t you replace the door handle now?”

“Not with the door jammed closed, I can’t.”

Man, he was irritated with me. Which didn’t exactly seem fair. How was I supposed to know what had been going on? Who mends a broken refrigerator at midnight? But I didn’t defend myself. I just stood very still, stared at the floor, and tried to be as dignified as possible.

O’Connor wasn’t noticing me, dignified or not. He was trying to pop the door off its hinges. He’d found a hammer and a chiselly-looking thing, and he banged at those rusty old hinges like crazy.

Nothing.

He tried other angles. Still nothing.

“Maybe they’ll hear you?” I suggested. “Russ and Jean are still awake.”

O’Connor shook his head. “Insulated,” he said, gesturing around.

He tried to pick the lock with a drill bit. No luck. He tried to bust the handle off with the hammer. No luck there, either. He paced the room like a wild animal, trying useless idea after useless idea, as I just stood there and shivered.

At last I said, “O’Connor?”

He turned around as if he’d forgotten I was there.

I pointed at the shelf with the folded woolen blankets. “Can I have one of those blankets?”

He looked at the blankets, then back at me, and seemed to realize for the first time that I had next to nothing on.

“Aw, man,” he said, grabbing both blankets. “You’re freezing.”

I was. Shivering, too. And with that, I guess, O’Connor decided I’d been punished enough, because his whole tone changed toward me. “Come here, come here,” he said, all tender. I stayed still, so he stepped over to me.

He started unsnapping his western shirt—the very same snaps that had brushed my elbow back at the party.

“Now you’ll be freezing,” I said.

Still, I let him put the shirt on me like a jacket, and I watched his fingers as he snapped me up. Then he wrapped one of the wool blankets around me and pulled the other over my head like a hood. Next, he put both arms around me and pulled me in tight.

As cold as I was, and as embarrassed as I felt to have caused all this trouble, and as much as my shin still hurt, I admit it was nice to be held. I tried to think back to the last time anybody had enveloped me in a hug like that. It would have been Danny, of course, but I couldn’t remember it. Of course, I gave hugs like this to the kids all the time. But it was a whole different thing to get one.

Without meaning to, I put my head against O’Connor’s shoulder. We just fit better that way. But almost as soon as I’d settled into the moment, it was over. Next thing I knew, he sat me down on a box. Then he started pulling boxes and supplies off the shelves and stacking them up on the floor.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m making us an igloo,” he said. “We need to trap our body heat.”

“I thought you said we weren’t going to freeze.”

“No,” he said. “But we’re going to get pretty damn cold.”

The fridge was so much larger than we needed for cheese that it also had begun serving as a storage room. The shelves held cardboard boxes with extra cooking utensils, as well as the tubs we packed the cheese in and extra buckets for collecting whey. O’Connor started pulling all the boxes down off the racks and building a little structure. One flattened box made the floor, and another became the roof. When it was about waist-high, he signaled me to step in, and I did. Then he did, too, and we wedged ourselves down among the boxes. At last he pulled the roof over our heads.

Inside, it was darker, and cramped. I sat cross-legged and faced O’Connor as he leaned back against the wall of boxes that was braced against a real wall. Conversation was sparse as we worked to accept our situation. At one point I said, “Maybe Russ will see the lights on when he leaves and come find us.”

“Maybe,” O’Connor said.

A little later, I said, “Maybe we should build a fire.”

“Nope,” O’Connor said.

I frowned. “Why not? That’s a pretty good idea.”

“This fridge is airtight,” O’Connor explained.