What You Don't Know(33)
“Yes,” Gloria says before she can think to deny. Jacky’s lawyer had suggested she change her name, but she’d never gone through with it, and after a while it had seemed silly.
“How could you do it?” the woman asks, and Gloria knows exactly what she means, right away, it was a question she’d heard before. So many times over the years.
“I never did anything,” she says quickly. It’s the same old response, the one she gives everyone. “I never knew what was going on.”
“You’re as guilty as he is,” the woman says, and her baby starts whimpering from its seat in the cart, glassy-eyed and flailing. “You should be right next to him when he gets the needle. That’s what you deserve.”
The baby cries out suddenly, and throws its bottle so it hits the floor and goes rolling away. Gloria goes after it, her face hot. This isn’t new, she’d been approached like this before, heard it all. But it isn’t something a person gets used to. Not in a million years.
“Here. Your baby dropped it,” she says, holding out the bottle, but the young woman shrinks away, her face horrified, as if Gloria had taken a shit in her hand and was offering it up like a gift.
The woman won’t take it but hurries away, and Gloria is left with the bottle in her hand, the milk in it still warm.
*
She grills a steak for dinner that night, even though she doesn’t like red meat all that much and she’ll spend the whole night suffering with heartburn. She drinks a beer with the steak, although she would’ve preferred wine, and has a bowl of ice cream for dessert. Because it’s what Jacky would’ve eaten. She still sleeps on the left side of the bed. She keeps three extra rolls of toilet paper beneath the sink in the bathroom, stacked in a small pyramid, because that’s how Jacky liked it. There is no part of her world that doesn’t revolve around him still. There must’ve been a period in her life when she was her own person, when her entire identity wasn’t wrapped up in being the wife of Jacky Seever, but she can’t remember that time. Not anymore. She doesn’t exist as her own person anymore. After Jacky’s arrest, people were always asking if she knew, how she couldn’t know what he was doing, and they treated her like she was guilty of a crime too, even if it was a crime of ignorance. Because that’s what marriage does. It locks two people together, forever and ever, until they’re dead, and even after.
SAMMIE
Lies Sammie regularly tells:
That she wants to have kids.
That she’s glad she doesn’t work at the paper anymore, that the stress was too much for her.
That she’s considering going back to school.
That she never eats dessert.
That she always takes her vitamins.
“Are you feeling okay?” one of the girls asks her. She should’ve had a coffee during her lunch break, something choked with caffeine, because this is an important question at this job. If you’re sick, you cover it up, make yourself radiant. You can’t sell makeup to anyone if you look like shit.
“I’m fine.” Lie.
“You sure?”
“I’m just tired.”
This is the truth, although she knows everyone will assume she has the beginnings of the flu, because it’s winter and it’s retail and no one uses enough hand sanitizer or sneezes into their elbows like they should. She’s tired, although she went to bed early and slept like the dead, and the truth doesn’t seem like a good enough excuse, but it’s all she’s got.
“You didn’t get enough sleep?”
“I don’t know.” Sammie looks at her hands. The nail on her thumb is cracked all the way down to the bed, sore and swollen, but she can’t stop fiddling with it. She wishes the girl would shut up because her thoughts are all a jumble, she can’t get them straight. She wishes she were at home, looking through her files on Seever, figuring out what to write about.
“Everything okay at home?”
“Yeah, everything’s good.” That’s the thing about working with all these women, she’s come to realize. They never shut up. They never stop asking questions. They want to know how you’re doing, if you’re angry, if they’ve done something wrong. And if there’s a juicy bit of gossip there, something they can use against you, they’ll do it. It’s like snake handling. You never know if the damn thing is going to turn on you, sink its fangs right into your hand, and watch you die.
“You’re not sick? I have vitamin C in my purse. The chewy kind.”
“No, I’m fine.”
She folds a stick of gum into her mouth and turns away, heads back onto the floor. It’s been busy in the store, even before opening there was a line outside, customers waiting to be let in. There’s nothing worse, she thinks, than eager retail shoppers, pounding on the glass and foaming at the mouth to get at the merchandise. There’s something so embarrassing about it, so tacky, and she can’t stand to look when they first come streaming in, giddy with excitement. There’s a bigger crowd than usual today, because there’s a new line of products being released—eye shadows and lipsticks and blushes, all limited edition, which will work the crowd into a frenzy, because everyone wants what they might not be able to have.
“I’d like to try that one,” one customer says, sitting down on Sammie’s stool. She’s wearing Crocs and pushing a stroller, and the baby inside is red and ugly and squalling. The woman’s pointing at a bright-blue eye shadow, one that she’ll probably buy and never wear again. “It’d be good for the office, don’t you think?”