The Wife's Tale (23 page)

Reaching into her purse, Mary found a pen and scrap of paper. “I’ll write down my cellphone number, and you’ll call me, won’t
you? When you hear from him?”

Eden took the piece of paper and set it on the table. “I think it’s a mistake. I really do.”

The women rose, struggling with their broken bodies as they made their way to the door. Mary had almost reached the porch
when she remembered her purse and the plastic bag with her navy uniform. Stepping back into the house, she heard a sound coming
from a room at the end of the hallway. Gooch.

So Eden was lying, as Heather had lied, as all people lied for people they loved, or people they owed. He was there, about
to step out of the room, believing his wife was gone. “Gooch?” she blurted.

Jack Asquith—bleary and beaten, shrunken and shriveled, an oxygen mask suffocating his cured-leather face—emerged from the
room on a small motorized wheelchair. Here was death, hollow-eyed and terrified, approaching Mary at the door. “Jack,” she
breathed.

“Go get ready for prayer circle, Jack,” Eden instructed him. But Jack stayed his course, motoring over the terracotta floor,
regarding Mary with squinting mistrust, as if she’d been let backstage for a show without a special pass. He stopped at the
toe of her boots, pulled the mask away from his face and croaked, “Who?”

Eden waved him off. “Nobody, dear. Go get ready.” Dragging Mary out to the porch and closing the door behind them so he couldn’t
overhear, she begged, “Please don’t get him upset.”

“He looks terrible,” Mary cried. “Oh my
God
.”

“We do not use God to exclaim in this house.”

“I’m sorry, I just—”

“Well, you knew he had the emphysema.” Mary shook her head, speechless. “He’s been going down fast.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Imagine
me
having to ask my
son
for money.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Jack’s health insurance hasn’t covered half the expenses.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Of course you knew.”

“It’s been a long time since we’ve talked, Eden.”

“You knew we lost the business. You knew we lost the house.” Mary shook her head. “I lose track of time. Maybe I didn’t tell
you,” Eden said. “You stopped calling.”

It was true. Mary had stopped calling Eden on the last Sunday of every month. So often a message service had answered the
line and she had panicked about what to say, then realized that she had nothing to say to Eden nor Eden to her. Finally she
had dispensed with the sham of their relationship. As Gooch had done long ago. She wondered if, in his ritual of farewell
to his mother, he’d been seeking forgiveness. Or offering it.

“I have money, Eden. I could—”

“Jimmy gave me five thousand. And I’ve got a bond coming due next month, and that’ll see me for a time. The rest is in his
hands.”

“Gooch’s?”

“God’s. Besides, I wouldn’t take your share of that lottery money, Mary. You’ll need it yourself, to start over.”

A
fait accompli
—Mary remembered the phrase from French class at school. A thing finished. Done with. Over. Decided. Dead. That was how Eden
saw Mary’s marriage, but Mary had enough cash reserves to keep hope alive. Still, she was confused as to just how much money
Gooch had won, and how much of it was still in the account. She would need to find a bank, and she hoped the Canadian card
would work in American machines.

“There’s a Pleasant Inn down near the highway. I’m going to get a room there,” she said.

“And…?”

“Wait. I’m going to wait for Gooch.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t drive you there.”

“I’ll walk.”

“That’s more than a mile,” Eden laughed.

“I can walk,” Mary assured her. “You’ll call me?” she asked, insisting that Eden meet her eyes.

“I’ll call you,” Eden answered, and with that she closed the door, entombing herself and Jack and the black-eyed Mexican woman
inside the fetid house to await God’s mercy in their circle of prayer.

T
he sun inched higher as Mary paused on the sidewalk, waiting in case, like Heather, Eden had been lying and would race out
any moment, breathless and regretful, shouting, “You can find him at the such-and-such!” Or “He’s staying at a place over
in so-and-so!”

When the door didn’t open, she realized that she could not walk a full mile to the Pleasant Inn. Neither could she stand still
as the sun burned her fair skin and torched her red hair and seared her white scalp. She’d never used sunscreen, having never
sunbathed, and rarely allowed her flesh the attention of solar rays. A few more minutes on high and she’d be crisp around
the edges.

Laughter and tears, such as were promised by the novels in her heavy purse, fought in Mary’s throat as she started down the
sidewalk toward Willow Highlands. On the other side of the hill was the main road, where she remembered seeing a shopping
plaza. There was a bank there where she could check the balance on her funds before heading for the hotel. One half mile.
Over the hill.
Go.

The hill was less a slope than a vertical ascent and, climbing the white sidewalk, struggling for breath, her feet sweltering
in her winter boots, she wondered idly how children ever learned to ride bicycles in Golden Hills. Up ahead, she saw a middle-aged
Mexican man hefting a lawn mower from the back of a small red truck near an empty children’s play park. She waved to him,
ignoring his look of confusion, and called inanely over the clanking, “Hot, eh?”

The spare strength she possessed carried her halfway up the steep hill before she stopped to rest on the edge of a sparkling
rock fountain in the shade of a monster garage. Willow Highlands, she thought, catching her breath and looking around. The
splendid abundance to which the universe aspired. Ah, beauty. What would Gooch have made of this foreign landscape? Gooch
had once repeated to Mary a conversation he’d had with an immigrant from West Africa at a roadside diner on one of his deliveries
north of London. The man had told Gooch that it was his dream to raise his children in America, so they could grow up to take
things for granted.

Though Gooch coveted Corvettes and longed for Lincolns, he was not by nature—or perhaps it was because of circumstances—a
materialist. It was not new things but new experiences that he described craving, in candid moments, in those early years
when Mary still played along. “We should take a driving trip to British Columbia,” he’d say, or “Someday we should go up the
St. Lawrence to see the migrating whales.” And “I want to take you skating on the Rideau Canal.” He’d never mentioned the
redwoods or Big Sur as dream destinations, but they could have been. So could Washington, D.C. Or Yellowknife. Or New York.
Or Istanbul.
Come with me, Mary. Come with me.

Sitting on the fountain’s edge with a spray of water at her back, she took long, deep breaths, listening to the white noise
of lawn mowers and leaf blowers. There the workers, toiling for the wealthy. Somewhere Gooch, sipping from a canteen, the
wide blue ocean rolling out before him, searching for his own truth—or maybe it was God—at the end of all journeys of discovery.
What might he talk about with God? World politics. Classic films. Mary hoped God would make Gooch cinnamon toast and let him
sleep it off in the sanctity of her wilderness.

It was clear to Mary, when she tried to rise, that she could not continue her ascent. She felt her body’s quiet insistence
on sustenance. She had not eaten enough and it was retaliating, seizing and stopping and waiting, much the same way it had
belched and shat and cramped when she’d eaten too much.

She spotted the Mexican man she’d seen earlier coaxing his tired red truck up the hill, and realized she’d been resting there
for the length of time it took to trim the park’s lawn. “Wait,” she called, waving. “Please.” He pulled to a stop at the curb
as she wrenched her body from the fountain’s edge. She smiled. “Could you give me a ride to the bank, please?”

The man appeared not to understand, and was startled when Mary opened the passenger door and set her big purse on the seat,
saying, “I can pay you.” Drawing out her wad of cash, she took fifty dollars and pressed it into his green-stained palms.
He accepted the money, still not comprehending. “That’s Canadian,” she said. “But you can change it over at the bank.” She
hoisted herself into the front seat, gesturing. “You can take me to the bank?”

He shook his head, his eyes expressing regret that he could not understand, or maybe that he had stopped at all.

Recalling that beside the bank there was a fast-food restaurant, she ventured, “The crazy chicken? The Pollo?”

“
Pollo?
” he asked. “El Pollo Loco?” He nodded and put the car into gear. When she could not reach her purse on the floor, Mary shoved
her wad of cash into the pocket of her paisley ensemble.

She could not communicate with the driver, so watched the passing homes as they climbed and then descended the hill and the
dirty red truck made its way to the main road. Stopped at a light, she noticed writing on the back window of a Chevy Suburban
in front of them. She first took it for an advertising slogan, and was surprised to read:
Trent Bishop 1972 to 2002. Always in our hearts.
She’d never seen a memorial emblazoned on a vehicle, and was struck by the poignancy of the indefatigable mourning it represented—the
older brunette woman at the wheel reminding the world, with every trip to the grocery store and commute to work, that she
had lost a son named Trent but would carry him with her like a picture in a locket, that he would never be forgotten.

Thinking of the big Ford truck with the taped-over sunroof that she’d abandoned in Toronto, she wondered if she might feel
compelled to commemorate her marriage in such a way. Paint it on the back window.
James and Mary Gooch 1982–?

When she stepped out of the vehicle, Mary was glad that the Mexican man did not try to return the money she’d given him. Instead
he sped away, afraid she might change her clearly
loco
mind.

The instant cash machine was in view, but there was a drugstore the same distance away and Mary felt its call. A different
pitch than the Kenmore’s or the fast-food restaurants’, more a reminder bell than a luring siren. Food. Heading toward the
drugstore, she felt each step like a barefoot walk on hot coals, the sun daring her to stop, her spirit willing her exhausted
body forward. She had taken more steps since Gooch’s leaving than she had in the entire last year, not treading the same frictionless
path but finding each step a new one, uphill, over rock, and bearing the weight of not just herself but her heavy vinyl purse,
and the denser weight of her growing enlightenment.

The pharmacy, whose faint scent was as familiar as home, was busy with groups of mothers, and children who must have recently
flooded out of schools and into waiting cars, for she’d seen few of them on the short drive over. There were a couple of men
in suits with takeout coffees in their hands and telephones in their ears, and elderly women shuffling toward the back counter
to pick up their prescriptions. Mary kept her eyes up, aware that she wouldn’t find Gooch here—but then again, maybe she would.

Unlike the corn-fed people of Leaford or the mosaic of colors and shapes she’d seen on the streets of Toronto, the population
of Golden Hills appeared largely Caucasian, toned and primed for athletics, lifted and enhanced, sucked and implanted. And
so
tall
. Even though Mary had lived with one of the biggest men in Baldoon County for twenty-five years, she was still struck by
the height of these Golden Hillians, who seemed to aspire to the palms.

Finding the bank of refrigerators, she heaved open a door and took out four large bottles of water. Along with the weight
of her purse, they were too much for her torn muscles to handle. She found a shopping cart where she set the water and her
purse, and her plastic bag with her navy scrubs, and to which she added a dozen health bars whose packaging boasted energy,
nutrients and protein. Feeling the pain between her eyes, she found the pain remedy aisle and a bottle of maximum-strength
relief. Passing through the seasonal needs department, she added several large tubes of sunscreen to her cart.

After waiting in line at the cash register, she remembered the dollars in her pocket and peeled out the wad to pay. The cashier
shook her head, smiling politely. “We don’t take Canadian money,” she said. Mary wanted to shout, “But I worked in a drugstore
and we always took American money, and paid out the overage when the Yankee dollar was higher.” She returned the bills to
her pocket and withdrew her credit card from her purse.

The cashier passed the plastic bags to Mary, who heaved them into her shopping cart and started for the door. Her muscles
challenged beyond their limits, she was grateful to lean upon the cart and let it carry her parcels the distance across the
parking lot to the landscaped borders of the bank. From there she’d have to haul her sacks over the sidewalk, but she was
relieved to see a shaded bench that would offer a brief repose to eat and drink before she continued, to solve the mystery
of how much money was still in the account. With each step, each exhalation, she felt the
calories out
.

Before the Gooches had suffered the expense of the new silver broadloom, when Mary was still buying armfuls of magazines,
she’d read with mounting outrage an article by a nutritional expert (which Gooch had left open on the table on her side of
the bed) that outlined, with daring simplicity, the reasons why, even as the Third World was starving, the First World was
becoming alarmingly fat. With the equation
calories in
versus
calories out
anchoring the piece, the woman condensed the obvious:

We’re served too many restaurant meals in double the portions we need.
Calories in.
We let machines do our daily chores.
Calories out.
Restaurants don’t always list fat and nutritional information, denying consumers the opportunity to make better choices.
Calories in.
We drive when we could peddle or walk.
Calories out.
We communicate through computers. We watch too much TV. We put off until tomorrow what we could do today.