The Wife's Tale (22 page)

“Welcome to Willow Highlands,” Big Avi said.

Set high on the crest of rolling hills, featuring even larger houses, with wide, paved streets and so much free parking that
those drivers in Toronto and New York would seethe with envy, Willow Highlands looked to Mary like a movie’s painted backdrop,
as if a shift in perspective or the touch of a finger might destroy the illusion of paradise. It was mid-afternoon and the
suburbanites were presumably at work or school, but she nonetheless felt the souls lingering within their homes, living their
American dream.

The few toiling humans she could see as the car rolled past were diminutive brown people. “Are all these people Mexican?”
she asked.

Avi checked the mirror again, uncertain of her humor; then, deciding she wasn’t joking, he answered, “Everybody has help.
The gardener. The housekeeper. The nanny.”

“Are they illegal? Even in Canada you hear so much about the illegal Mexicans down here.”

He shrugged. “Some. Everybody has opinions on immigration. Me, I do my immigration legal. It was hard. Cost so much money
I can’t tell you. But I see these people come for a better life. I have sympathy. They want to work.”

Mary watched one of the Mexican men wearing an enormous contraption on his back, wielding a fat hose like a submachine gun
to blow debris from the white sidewalk. “The leaves fall here too,” she remarked.

“Some. Yes. Of course. There is seasons. In winter it’s not cold, but at night you bring a sweater.”

“In Canada they say we have two seasons—winter and construction,” she said, but when he glanced in his mirror she saw that
he was confused. “Because summer’s the only time the construction crews can work on the roads.”

“Ah, a joke.” He smiled and turned down another street. “Two more streets is Willow. What number please?”

“Twenty-four.” Mary swallowed. Looking out the window, she was surprised to see that the limousine had left the cluster of
sprawling homes and found a much less affluent neighborhood at the base of the hills, which she reasoned must be Willow
Lowlands
. Smaller stucco homes with less adorned lawns alternated with rows of two-story townhouses. As her in-laws had significant
wealth, she suddenly panicked that she had the wrong address. Or even the wrong town.

“I have to go quickly,” Big Avi said, glancing at his watch. “My little Avi has soccer.” He pulled to the curb in front of
a modest white home with a high arched entrance, outside of which a few neglected plants in clay pots lined a short, cracked
walk. “Twenty-four,” he announced.

There were two vehicles in the leaf-strewn driveway—a battered red Camry that Mary guessed to be a late-nineties model, and
a newer white Prius, the hybrid car Gooch had admired but dismissed as too small for a big man to drive comfortably.

“Someone is there. Yes?” Avi asked, swiping her credit card through his machine.

“I can’t imagine that this is the right house,” Mary said, hesitating. “My in-laws are quite rich.”

“Wealthy is different in California,” he cautioned. “This house cost nearly one million dollars.”

“No!”

“It’s true!” He climbed out of the front seat to help her out of the back. After squeezing her hands and looking into her
eyes, he whispered, “Go talk to your husband.”

Mary smiled and nodded, waving as the car pulled away.
God,
she prayed,
please help me find the words
. Her heart fluttered, and she cursed herself for not remembering to eat more from the wicker basket. Turning to the little
stucco house, she hoped she might sense, the way she did God, the presence of Jimmy Gooch.

But it appeared increasingly likely that she did have the wrong house, considering the no-smoking sign plastered to the glass
on the front door. She’d never seen Jack, in person or photographs, without a Marlboro wagging in his yip.

Approaching the door, she strained to listen over the black crows cawing from a nearby tree, but there was no sound within.
The wrong house. There must be another 24 Willow Drive in another Golden Hills, California. She remembered that her in-laws’
previous dwelling had had a lap pool and tennis courts. Eden had sent a photograph of herself and Jack, in matching designer
track suits, leaning against their silver Acura in the driveway of the enormous manse, and Mary recalled Gooch’s comment:
“Why would they need seven bedrooms?”

The wrong house. What now?

The front door opened and a small woman with pretty black eyes and dark hair twisted into a bun stepped onto the porch, regarding
her suspiciously. “
Hola
,” the woman said.

“Mary,” Mary corrected her.

“
Hola?
” the woman tried again.

“No, Mary,” Mary repeated, pointing to herself. “
Mary.
”

The woman said something in Spanish that Mary did not understand, and called quietly in the direction of a darkened room,
“Señora.”

“I seem to have the wrong house,” Mary apologized. Then she saw through the open door a frail, elderly woman limping down
the shadowed hall, and her heart began to race. Although she hadn’t seen Eden in nearly twenty years, she recognized her instantly
as she shuffled into the light, by her trademark black bob.

If her mother-in-law’s face had ever been lifted, the lower half had fallen again. Her rheumy blue eyes slanted catlike toward
her bangs, and her cheeks and jowls hung like laundry on the line. Her body was weathered and as fragile as wood left out
in the rain. Hands clawed by arthritis punctuated her spindly arms. Eden did not recognize Mary, or couldn’t see clearly.
“What is it, Chita?” she asked.

“Eden,” Mary breathed.

“Yes,” the old woman answered, squinting, piqued.

“Eden. It’s Mary.”

The dawning of familiarity rose in Eden’s fallen face. “Mary?”

“I’m sorry to just show up like this.”

“I wouldn’t have recognized you,” Eden said.

Mary touched her swingy red hair, and then realized that Eden was referring to her extreme weight, not her extreme makeover.
She stood on the porch, waiting to be invited into the house.

The sound of a beeping microwave drew the Mexican woman back inside as Eden leaned against the door frame, weary from the
walk, irritated by the intrusion. “He’s not here, Mary.”

“But Heather said—”

“Heather?” Eden said, lifting her brow. “Well, he was here, but he’s gone.”

Mary sniffed the air, hoping to catch his scent, as Eden opened the door and sighed, resigned, “I suppose you’d better come
in. But be
quiet
. Jack’s asleep.”

The fragrance of the house was faint but familiar—a whiff of urine, a hint of decay, like St. John’s in Leaford. Christopher
Klik’s house on the day of the funeral. Led into a small living room crammed with oversized furniture, Mary realized that
she was trembling. So close, she thought. She had missed Gooch by hours, days, she told herself, but she knew it was really
years
. She felt faint, and did not so much sit in one of the upholstered chairs as fall into it. “I hate to trouble you, Eden,
but I haven’t eaten much today. I’m afraid I might faint.”

Eden rolled her eyes, calling out in a hush toward the back of the house, “Bring in the prune Danish and some iced tea, Chita!”
Taking a place on the sofa across from Mary, she did not disguise her contempt. “You shouldn’t have come. And why on earth
are you wearing winter boots in California?”

“I had to come.”

“He’s a wreck. You know that. He’s just a wreck.”

In twenty-five years Mary had not heard her husband referred to in such sorry terms. It was she who’d always been the wreck,
or the wretch, or the mess. Not Gooch. Gooch lived the dream. Gooch triumphed. Gooch accepted his story as it unfolded, while
she propped her memoir on her rolling stomach, turning the pages at random, wishing the author had taken it a different way.

“Heather said he won money on the scratch-and-win.”

“I know.” Eden smiled for the first time, revealing a set of pearl-white teeth longer and squarer than her originals. “The
Lord heard my prayer.”

“When was he here?” she asked carefully, afraid that Eden might run away like a feral cat, or decide to play dumb like a child.

“Last week. Tuesday or Wednesday. I lose track of time.”

Had the circumstances been different, Mary might have offered her own understanding of the loss of time. Instead she said,
“I’ve been so worried.”

“He didn’t do this to hurt you, Mary.”

“We’ve been going through a rough patch,” Mary said quietly, taking the cold glass offered by the Mexican woman, who’d appeared
with iced tea and a tray of pastry.

“He blames himself.”

“He does?”

“But it takes two to tango, doesn’t it?” Eden asked. “And that’s what I told him. I said ‘Stop blaming yourself, Jimmy. Surely
Mary had
something
to do with it.’ He didn’t say a word against you. Not a word. He didn’t tell me how
big
you’d gotten.” Eden raised her high brows. “I hardly recognized you. You’re twice the size you were when I saw you last.”

Mary considered the pastry on the table but could not bring herself to reach for it; the thought of biting into the sweet,
doughy bread brought on another wave of nausea, and the forgotten pain between her eyes trumpeted reveille.

“I can only imagine what it’s been like for him all these years. That boy had so many gifts. He should have been a writer,”
Eden said, and Gooch’s potential, along with his mother’s clear subtext, hung in the dank, pissy air.

It was true, Mary thought. Gooch should have been a writer. He should have been anything other than what he had become.

“Don’t you dare spill that tea,” Eden warned, as Mary listed in her seat. “That’s a two-thousand-dollar Ethan Allen!”

“Oh,” Mary said, sipping from the overfilled glass.

“How’s your mother?”

“The same.”

“I know you’ve had your share of disappointments, Mary.”

“Yes.”

“It’s no excuse, though.”

“Where did he go when he left here? Please tell me if you know, Eden. I’m his wife.” Mary pleaded. “I’m his wife.”

“He said something about seeing the redwoods. Big Sur. Hiking or some other. He had a guidebook. He said he didn’t have firm
plans, he just needed some time to think.”

Time to think. “He didn’t say for how long?”

“He didn’t say. And not that he asked for my opinion—not that he’s ever asked for my opinion—but I told him he should file
for divorce and put an end to it. You both need to get on with your lives. He’s still young. He could have thirty good years
with somebody else. Look at Jack and me.”

Mary cleared her throat. “You really don’t know where he went?”

“He was here for all of an hour before he and Jack got into it,” Eden sniffed. “That’s the price you pay. You put your husband
before everything. That’s what you do. That’s what
you
should have done.”

Mary didn’t ask her if losing her children had been too great a price to pay, for she could see in the woman’s righteous eyes
that she felt the loss was theirs.

“I want to
help
Gooch. I want to…” The addendum to her want was too complicated and intimate to express aloud.

“I’d ask you to stay, but we’ve got six coming for prayer circle in half an hour.”

If her head had not hurt, Mary might have hammered it with the heel of her palm and exclaimed,
What was I thinking?
How had she ever imagined that she might find Gooch taking his
time to think
in the toxic presence of Jack Asquith? “I’m sorry, Eden. I’m sorry he and Jack got into it. It must have been awful.”

Eden softened. “He said he’d come to see me again before he left the state. I told him I’d meet him out at the deli.”

“He’s coming back?”

“He promised he’d come to say goodbye.”

Goodbye. Gooch understood the ritual too. He needed to say goodbye to his mother because he felt her mortality. Or his own.
The lottery win had been the force disrupting his inertia. Mary imagined him sitting in his truck behind Chung’s, salivating
for his Combo Number 3. She could see his face as he scratched that ticket with a quarter from his pocket, and in those three
matching numbers found both the impetus and the means to leave his wife, to ponder his existence.
Free.

“I think I should wait for him,” she said.

“Well, not
here
,” Eden assured her. “Besides, we don’t know when he’s coming back.”

“Eventually he’ll run out of money.”

“I suppose.”

“And he’ll have to go back to work.”

“Eventually.”

“It’s not like he has a million dollars. Did he tell you how much he’d won?”

“Enough. He just said
enough
.”

Enough. That word. The suggestion of balance. Just the right amount. A lovely word—until someone yells it at you.
Enough!

Suspecting that Eden was lying, Mary said, “Well, if he promised he’d come back, he’ll come back. And I should be here when
he does.”

“Suit yourself, Mary, but I can’t offer you a room, and even the cheap motels down here are expensive. Besides, what if it’s
not a day or two days or a week? What if he’s gone off for a month? Or more?”

“He wouldn’t do that.” Drinking the iced tea, Mary calculated the cost of a month’s hotel lodging and incidentals.

“And what would you do, Mary? Sit in a hotel room watching television? Ordering in junk food? And if you plan to stay down
here at all, you’ll need a car the whole time. You can’t get anywhere without a car. What are you driving?”

“I got a ride.” Adding car rental fees, at which she could only guess, Mary began to fret. Stay in this foreign land to wait
for Gooch until her money ran out? Return to Leaford to get on with her life? But what life? Mr. Barkley gone. Orin gone.
Her mother a ghost. She didn’t even have a job to return to, a fact which she realized she would at some point need to address.
“I’m going to stay,” she decided aloud.

“Well, I’ve said my piece,” Eden declared, throwing up her hands.