What You Don't Know(32)

She still wears her wedding band. Jacky can’t.

“Have you gone into any of the restaurants?” he asks. He asks this same thing every week, but she can understand. They were a big part of Jacky’s life for so long—owning and operating half a dozen successful restaurants was no small feat—so she usually tries to be gentle. She decides to ignore the question this time, acts like she hadn’t heard it at all. “Are they clean inside? Have the menus been changed?”

“Have you been painting?” she asks. Jacky blinks. He was always the talkative one in their relationship, the one who’d lead the conversation. Years before, they’d be out for dinner and they’d meet another couple, or some acquaintance, and Jacky would introduce his wife, and then Gloria would fade quietly into the background. But things have changed, and she’s the one steering the ship, jumping from one subject to another, asking questions, pushing Jacky to talk. He’s severely depressed, the prison doctor says. He has heart problems, weight problems. He’s on a cocktail of medications, they keep changing it up, and he’s sometimes blurry, faded. Confused. She has to take control during most visits, or he’d sit there like a lump, or end up repeating the same story. “Do they have a package for me at the front?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“How many did you do this week?”

“Four, I think.” Jacky pauses. “I need paint.”

“What colors?”

“Red, mostly.”

The artwork started as a kind of therapy, because Jacky needed something to do behind bars, and he wasn’t a reader, he’d never been much for exercise. So she’d brought charcoals and paper and paint and sponges—Jacky wasn’t allowed access to paintbrushes, they were too sharp and could be used as a weapon—and she’d thought it might be a complete failure but it was worth a shot, because Jacky wasn’t doing all that well, in fact, he wasn’t doing well at all. During his first six months at Sterling, Gloria had been in a terror that she’d get a call from the prison, telling her that Jacky had hanged himself, or that he’d managed to drown himself in the toilet. And maybe things would’ve been better that way, God knows there were plenty of people who would’ve danced in the streets and set off fireworks if Jacky Seever were dead, but he was her husband, and she loved him. She still worried about him, she still found herself in the men’s section at the department store, shopping for undershirts and socks, even though Jacky didn’t need them anymore, the prison supplied them. It was old habit, but that’s what every marriage is. Habit.

“Red? Black too?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Okay.”

The whole art thing was an idea, nothing more, but it’d worked, and Jacky turned out to be good, he had an eye for it. And there was a market for paintings made by men like Jacky, especially the nasty ones, and Gloria had found an art dealer up north who specialized in those sorts of things, although she’d sell him only one at a time, when she needed the money, because selling the paintings had been like admitting Jacky’s guilt, like flaunting to the world that it was all true, he’d killed and he’d loved it, he was reliving it through his art and she didn’t care. The paintings were awful but they were also a godsend, because she suddenly had money again, and there were no more long days of wondering how she’d be able to provide for herself once her inheritance ran out.

She kept selling to the art dealer until the rest of the paintings were stolen from her house, and he still occasionally calls and asks if she has anything new, but those calls are few and far between. People have lost interest in Jacky; they’ve moved on over the last seven years.

What we need is someone connected to your husband to get murdered, the art dealer had told her once, and she’d actually laughed at that, although the memory of that laugh kept her up for most of the next few nights. That would move his work, put some cash in our pockets.

It was terrible, but it was also true, like most terrible things are. People died every day, and if that person happened to be connected to Jacky, well … It was an awful thought. But it would sell paintings, even the ones of flowers and mountains and bowls of fruit and blocks of smeared color that were all Jacky seemed to make these days. So she still stops at the front desk every week when she leaves the prison, where the guard with the mouthful of big plastic teeth is always waiting with Jacky’s newest canvases, all bundled up, ready to load into her trunk, and she’s considered telling him to throw them away, that she doesn’t need more junk in her house, but she doesn’t. She takes them, every time. Another old habit that won’t die.

She goes straight home after visiting Jacky—she skips the squash at the grocery store, doesn’t feel up to it, her eyes hurt and her legs are tired—and opens the package of paintings. There are five canvas squares. More landscapes. Flat gray land and swirling skies, full of color. Oranges and reds, mostly, swirled together, so they look like madness. She thinks the paintings are probably the view out Jacky’s cell window, the thin slice of the real world he can still see.

The paintings end up stacked in her garage, where they stay, collecting dust.

*

“You’re that Seever woman.” It is the next morning, and Gloria is at the supermarket, although it’s not her regular grocery day, because what else does she have to do? She’s tapping the squash, picking it up and smelling it. She doesn’t know how to look for a ripe one, isn’t sure that it matters, and the woman who walks right up to her catches her by surprise. She is young and plain-looking—not at all pretty, not with the dark circles under her eyes and the spit-up stains on her shoulders. “Gloria, isn’t it?”