What You Don't Know(11)
GLORIA
March 17, 2009
On Tuesdays she goes to the grocery store, stocks up her fridge with plastic totes of salad greens and skim milk and ground coffee. She still hasn’t gotten used to shopping for one—it’s strange, not to buy all the things Jacky used to eat, the potatoes and cheeses and gallons of rocky-road ice cream. And all the red meat. She hardly ever eats meat now. There are even times she forgets to eat altogether, when she’ll come into the kitchen in the morning for a cup of hot tea and find it completely untouched, and she’ll realize that she didn’t eat at all the day before. This never fails to surprise her, because it doesn’t seem like eating is something a person could forget. She doesn’t buy much at the grocery for that reason, and even so it sometimes goes to waste, the lettuce leaves melting into black goo at the bottom of the produce drawer, the quarts of milk separated and sour.
It’s Tuesday, but she’s not going to buy food. Instead she’s going home, to the big house on the northeast corner of Sycamore Street, the brick place on a quarter-acre lot with the thirty-foot evergreen planted right outside the front door. That tree cost a small fortune to plant, and the roots would break into the foundation and the sewage lines at some point, but she’d once told Jacky that she wanted to live in a house with a big tree right outside the front door, and he’d stored that information away, kept it for later. Jacky always had a good memory for those kinds of things, and he loved surprises, and she was surprised when he bought the house, even more surprised when she woke up to the sound of men planting the tree in the yard a week after they moved in. Jacky liked to make her happy, he said that was a husband’s main job. To make his wife smile.
“I’m sorry for all the times I’ve made you cry,” he had said, a week before he was arrested. She was packing, carefully laying out outfits and rolling up socks to tuck into the shoes already in her open suitcase. They’d done a lot of traveling over the years of their marriage, and she’d become an expert at packing. Toiletries in gallon freezer bags, in case they exploded, which they were so apt to do when flying into Denver. A pillbox to keep her jewelry in, the compartments keeping the necklaces from getting tangled. Socks tucked into shoes to save space.
“What was that?” She’d been busy with her packing, trying to keep all the last-minute details straight. She was going on a trip with her mother, to see the arch in St. Louis, or farther on, to Chicago. The trip had been Jacky’s idea, and later, she realized that he’d been so adamant about her going because he knew what was going to happen and he didn’t want her around to see him arrested. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
“I’m sorry for the times I made you cry,” Jacky had repeated, slowly. He was sitting in the armchair by the window, looking out on their quiet street. There was a car parked at the corner, the same place it’d been every day for the last few weeks, and she could see the shoulder of the man sitting behind the wheel, his fingers drumming on the dash. She hadn’t said anything to Jacky about the car and the men who were always around, but she knew he already knew, and that they were cops. She knew that by the clothes they wore, the way they wouldn’t meet her eyes when she drove by. They’d been married for almost thirty years but Jacky still thought she was oblivious, that she didn’t notice the little things. It was the running joke between them, and she’d always gone along with it, but she’d noticed the cops, their shifty eyes and their suit jackets that were cut too loose around the waists to hide their weapons, and she’d known something was going on.
“What’re you talking about?” she’d asked, but he hadn’t answered her, that’s the way Jacky was sometimes, he’d move from one thing to another before she had time to catch up. He’d ignored her question and helped her pack, and she didn’t remember that he’d said it until he called her from jail. She had spent a lot of time crying in the early years of their marriage, but after Jacky was arrested, she didn’t cry at all.
But the house. Her house. Jacky had bought it because the restaurants were doing well. He said it was an investment in the future, that living in a rental was like flushing money down the toilet. It wasn’t a nice house to begin with—the carpets were filthy, the walls were covered in tacky wallpaper, and there were spiders living in the highest corners—but Jacky said that was her job, to spruce up the house, to call in the contractors and the cleaners, to shop for furniture and curtains and knickknacks. Fluffing their nest, that’s what Jacky called it. She’d thought they’d spend the rest of their lives in that house, they’d finally have kids and grow old and complain about having a second floor because of their stiff knees and they’d talk about selling, that’s all it would be—talk. But none of it happened. There was never a baby, no matter how hard they tried or how many doctors they visited, and here she is now, forty-nine years old, living in a dumpy furnished apartment while her husband sits in prison and her beautiful house is empty. It wasn’t the life she’d imagined for herself, but it’s what she has, and nothing is going to change it.
She’ll never live in her house again, the police say. She’d spent so many years planning, so much time bringing home paint samples and walking slowly through furniture showrooms. It hurts her to think that she’ll never have a home that works so well at Christmas, when the dining room would be crammed with friends and family, the fifteen-foot tree glittering in the front window. Or those times during the summer, when they’d barbecue out back and neighborhood kids would be tearing around the yard, catching frogs in the pond and jumping off the dock Jacky had built, their tongues stained red from Popsicles. Her pastor always said that a person should let good memories of better times help them get through the bad, but that was before Jacky was arrested, before Pastor Ed had taken her aside and quietly suggested that it might be best for her to worship at home, that He would always listen to her, no matter where she was. Turn the other cheek, that’s what she’d always been taught, so she didn’t go back to church again; she stayed at home and watched televised sermons on Sunday mornings and prayed quietly before every meal and bed, but she would’ve liked nothing better than to see them all dead, to see Him smite them all for turning their backs during her time of need. But she waited, bided her time, because He repays. Sooner or later, everyone gets what they deserve.