The Good Wife (20 page)

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Authors: Stewart O'Nan

BOOK: The Good Wife
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THEY DON’T GIVE GRADES IN KINDERGARTEN, JUST CHECK MARKS for behavior. Casey’s are all good or outstanding (better than Patty ever got, her mother notes). Beneath the filled-in grid, Mrs. Parrish has written:
Conscientious student. Could talk more
. Patty congratulates him, and they celebrate with his favorite dinner, fish sticks and french fries, but when she goes to open house and meets with his teacher, it’s the one negative she zeroes in on.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Mrs. Parrish says. “Some kids are naturally shy. Sometimes it has to do with the jump from preschool to kindergarten and takes care of itself after the first term. I just thought I should let you know.”
“Thank you.”
“Otherwise he’s a real pleasure to have in class. He’s one of our best readers.”
“He’s getting along with everyone?” Patty asks.
“I’d say so. He’s in a nice group of boys.”
Patty wants further proof, but that’s all the time they have. When she gets home, she tells Casey the good things Mrs. Parrish said and suggests it wouldn’t hurt to speak up more, but doesn’t push it. He’s always been quiet; even when he was a baby, he barely cried.
She should be happy he’s doing so well at his new school, but now she’s sensitive about how little he actually says. He’s polite, answering a direct question with a word or two, and occasionally he’ll ask her something simple, like what’s for dinner, but they go days without having a real conversation. He doesn’t tell jokes or stories for attention, and during their Wednesday night phone call she has to prompt him to speak with Tommy. Even when he’s watching cartoons, he doesn’t laugh out loud.
“You were quiet,” her mother reminds her.
Not like this, Patty thinks, but agrees with her. It’s easier, and since she’s never around now, there’s nothing she can do about it. She feels bad for working so much, missing weekends with him. He hasn’t seen Tommy since she started. It’s just till the Christmas rush is over; by then she should be back on some kind of normal schedule.
In the meantime, she pays Casey special attention, playing Chutes and Ladders with him, watching TV under the comforter. Part of it, she’s convinced, is that he’s an only child. He spends too much time alone. She tries not to be obvious, but she seizes every opportunity to be with him. At the dinner table, she asks him what was the best thing that happened to him today. And the worst? At bedtime she reads to him, and has him read to her. When they’re done, she runs through their plans for tomorrow, messing up on purpose to coax a reaction out of him.
“He’s so serious,” she tells her mother, the two of them going over their Christmas lists, ignoring the claymation special on TV
“Like someone else I know.”
“Even at his age?”
“Especially
at his age.”
At work she has imaginary conversations with him, tries out openings, dreams up topics they might discuss when she gets home.
He lies on the carpet, his stocking feet pointed toward the radiator, and draws pictures Patty wants to find meaning in—portholed planes flying over mountains, boxy cars driving down highways.
“How was school?” she asks.
“Okay,” he answers, without looking at her.
“Play with anyone special at recess?”
“Adam and John.”
He’s not interested, and she’s tired. She knows better than to make this into some big test.
As she reads the paper, the silence builds. Finally, dinner’s ready, and she sends him into the kitchen to help her mother set the table. Out of habit, she’s cruising the classifieds, stopping at jobs she’s qualified for but not really reading them. She’s concentrating on the soft racket coming from the kitchen, the hum of the overhead stove fan, the ding of a pot lid against the cutting board, the clash of the silverware drawer, listening for the sound of his voice. So why, when it comes—the run and rise of a question followed by her mother’s indulgent laugh—does she feel hurt?
MONKEY WARD IS BORING, CHASING THE SAME PRICE CHECKS EVERY shift. The only new skill she’s learned is how to refill the soap dispensers in the bathrooms. It’s past Valentine’s, and Jill’s still bugging her to work weekends. Patty hasn’t finished her ninety-day probation, so she can’t say no. She can’t explain that she needs to take her son to see his father in Auburn.
Tommy’s lying when he says it’s all right. It’s been so long that Casey asks when they’re going to see Daddy.
“Soon,” Patty promises, and makes good on it, but then the next weekend she ends up working, and the next. For the money she’s making, it’s just not worth it.
That Thursday, when Jill corners her in the break room and asks if she can come in on Saturday, Patty says she has a family commitment.
“1 really need someone,” Jill says.
Patty doesn’t remind her that she’s worked six of the last seven weekends. She just shrugs like it’s out of her hands. “I wish I could help.”
“What about Sunday?”
It’s this kind of crap, more than the boredom and the measly paycheck, that convinces Patty she has to quit. She wrestles with the idea all weekend, running it by Tommy, because she’s not sure. She thinks she should wait until she has something else lined up.
Tommy thinks she should go in and do as little as possible until they fire her. But it doesn’t matter if she’s fired or quits by herself, since she hasn’t worked there long enough to collect unemployment, and besides, she doesn’t want to be like that.
She keeps looking, keeps working. As the end of her probation nears, she thinks everything will change when she makes cashier; when it doesn’t, she decides to find out when she’ll become eligible for unemployment. She thinks of calling Russ and trying to get on a truck for the summer, then remembers how hot and dirty patching asphalt is. There just aren’t a lot of jobs out there. She could find something in Binghamton or Elmira, but she’s already doing a half-hour commute.
Being a cashier is strange, the way people look through her, like she’s a machine. And then there are the ones who want to be her friend. The weekends are the hardest, fighting a line all afternoon. By the end of the day all Patty wants to do is make a boxed dinner and watch TV with her eyes closed. And then she has to get up early and drive to Auburn.
She’s making enough to pay the bills, but it feels like she’s wasting her time. Eileen and Cy are trying to get pregnant and saving for their own place. Shannon’s teaching. Even her mother’s started volunteering at church. Though it’s only been five months, Patty feels like she’s going nowhere. She has to remind herself that she originally saw the job as temporary. She can give it up anytime she wants.
And she’s eligible for unemployment now. She could quit and take a paid vacation. If she waited till the summer, she could spend a whole month with Casey.
June comes, and the end of school. The days are easier, the store empty all week long. Even the weekends are dead, unless it rains. Patty doesn’t see how they stay in business.
She’s still weighing quitting when Jill gathers them at the end of another slow Friday and tells them she has some bad news. Headquarters has decided to close the store. If they want, they can have personnel forward their applications to the store in Johnson City, but she can’t guarantee there will be any openings.
The decision’s easy for Patty. It’s no decision, really. Right then and there, by doing nothing, she quits.
THAT JULY, ON THE DAY TOMMY’S BEEN IN AUBURN EXACTLY FIVE years, they sign up for the Family Reunion Program. They’ve waited so long that handing in the form feels like an accomplishment.
The coordinator who looks it over cautions Patty that there’s limited space; she won’t even estimate how long it will be before they’re contacted. In the meantime, she has a stapled handout of rules they need to familiarize themselves with. Patty reads them that night, as if they’ll be doing it this weekend. Already she’s putting together a menu, and a shopping list. She’s got to bring in everything, down to the salt and pepper. They’ll have pots and pans there, dishes and silverware (meaning she’ll have to wash them all twice—before and after). It doesn’t say anything about knives.
She’s enjoying not working, taking Casey for rambles over the old Indian trails in the woods beyond the end of the yard, cutting through jungly patches of ferns, lying down on the mossy bank of
the creek to show him water bugs and schools of minnows in the same sandy pools that fascinated her and Eileen when they were his age. She tells him about her father hunting wild turkey back here, how the big birds sleep in the trees. Every day they go farther in, exploring half-remembered spurs that wind up the hillside. They choose a rise that has a vantage of the main trail and build a lean-to, a secret hideout for Casey. She packs lunches so they can stay out all day and eat them sitting in his fort, watching the wandering flights of bugs. Back here where they can barely hear the road, the afternoons are endless and brilliant, made for daydreaming, but what she dreams of isn’t Tommy sitting in the sun with them, finally free, but their first real night as a family, locked inside a dark trailer behind razor wire.
It will be months, at the most a year—at least that’s what she thinks, the closeness with Casey making her optimistic. He seems happier. He has a friend, Adam, who comes over to play. On hot days, Adam’s mother Beth drives them to the town pool and Patty lies out on a towel in the backyard like she’s at the beach, drinking a beer and listening to her father’s old leather-cased transistor. It’s like a vacation, except she doesn’t have a job to go back to. She tries not to let it ruin things. She’s fine as long as she’s getting paid. Eventually the checks have to stop, summer has to end. Patty doesn’t need her mother to tell her that.
One blinding afternoon she’s lying on the towel, sweat glazing her skin, when her mother comes running outside with the envelope with the Family Reunion Program logo in the corner. Her mother hands it to her and then stands there as Patty tears it open.
It’s just an acknowledgment, a carbon of their application. It takes her a few days but Patty comes to see it as a good sign. It’s the fastest the system’s ever gotten back to her.
She’s not surprised that she hears nothing for the rest of the
summer, or in September, when she starts at the Fotomat, or October, when she quits to fill in at the daycare run by Eileen’s friend Katie. She doesn’t freak out when Thanksgiving and then Christmas come, another solitary New Year’s. The hostages are released the day of Reagan’s inauguration, and while she’s annoyed at the yellow ribbons and tickertape parades, she can’t watch the reunion scenes without imagining Tommy in her arms, the promise of a new start. The anticipation actually makes time move faster, each passing day bringing her that much closer to him. She keeps the carbon of their application in a folder like a receipt, visiting it from time to time to prove to herself it’s real.
Katie doesn’t need her for the summer, so she takes a waitressing job—the first and last she’ll ever have—at the Ruby Tuesday’s in the mall. It’s like Monkey Ward, they’re always bugging her to fill in weekends. She resents the customers with their bags of expensive crap, how impatient they are, as if their time is worth more than hers. “Do you think we can get some ketchup?” they ask.
It’s been a year since they signed up for the program and they’re no closer than they were last August. Back then, she made a point of sitting down and bracing Casey, since he gets weird about visiting. Now when she reminds him, he mumbles and shrugs like he’s ducking an unpleasant chore. She doesn’t blame him for being afraid. At some point they’re going to shut the door and he’s going to be alone.
The thought gnaws at her as she serves the shoppers’ kids their buffalo wings and mozzarella sticks. When he’s with Adam or John, he seems like any other boy his age, silly and intent on whatever game they’re playing; it’s when he’s alone that he goes silent, closing himself off with the TV or a library book, retreating to his lean-to in the woods. She worries that he’s growing up too serious, and that the visit will only make things worse. She thinks of going without him the first time, just to check it out. Tommy will understand.
And still she catches herself falling into fantasies of how it will be: how he’ll play with Casey, how she’ll make his favorite dishes, how they’ll hold each other all night long. She knows it won’t be perfect—they’ll be in a trailer—but compared to the visiting room it’ll be heaven.
She begins to expect the letter. Every day the mail lets her down yet she comes back the next day just as hopeful, sustaining a kind of cheerful insanity, a manic belief she realizes she can’t afford to lose.
She faces Ruby Tuesday’s the same way, zipping her tips into a long wallet and ignoring the bullshit. She works when she wants to, and if they don’t like it they can let her go. She’ll be thirty-five next July. She’s had too many crappy jobs to sacrifice her real life for another one.
And so she works, she waits, leafing through the mail each day, watching Casey watch TV the same way her mother hovers over her later.
“It’s going to happen,” Patty tells her. “They don’t just let you sign up and then forget about you.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” her mother says.
“They don’t,” Patty says.
But as the days go by, she wavers. She comes to expect nothing, and proves it to herself by not rushing out to the mailbox when she hears the jeep. Instead she sends Casey, who dawdles up the drive, spilling flyers and magazines.
“Thank you,” she says, taking the pile from him with both hands, and one day late in August, as if to reward her, the letter is there. She doesn’t call for her mother, doesn’t stop Casey from wandering off. She’s hedging her bets, ready for bad news, or no news at all. In the kitchen, alone, she sits down to open it—slowly, as if it might change her life.

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