I'd Give Anything(3)

I said, “Look, can I get you a glass of water or something?”

Dirk squeezed his eyes shut, took the same hand that had been so gently touching the tomatillos, and used it to slap himself on the forehead, repeatedly.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.”

“Hey,” I said. “Stop that.”

He stopped and opened his blue eyes, and I waited to see what disconcerting thing Dirk Holofcener-Sharf would do next in the middle of Devonshire Market.

He sighed. “You don’t know. About Harris.”

“Oh, I’m sure I do,” I said, because if there was one thing I did know, it was everything about Harris.

“He was fired, Ginny,” said Dirk.

The statement was so obviously incorrect, so clearly a product of Dirk’s sudden cardiac event or bout of brain fever or whatever I’d just witnessed, that my heart didn’t so much as flutter.

“And I should not be the one to tell you this, but since I already blew that, I think you should know: there seems to be some kind of scandal happening.”

Scandal.

I smiled at Dirk. “You’re saying that my husband, Harris, was fired from his job because of a scandal?”

“Yes,” said Dirk, nodding. “I’m sorry you had to find out like this.”

I laughed. “Dirk, honey, have you met Harris?”

Dirk blinked. “Well, yeah. You know I have.”

“So you know that he is the embodiment of everything scandal is not. He’s the opposite of scandal. He is competence, reliability, upstandingness, if that’s a word.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“If it weren’t a word before, it just now needed to be invented to describe my husband. To be used in a description of my husband, I guess I mean, since upstandingness is a noun, not an adjective.”

I wasn’t babbling. On the contrary, my brain was in such a state of imperturbability that I could make fine grammatical distinctions without skipping a beat. Also, in the face of Dirk’s wildly inaccurate information and misplaced sympathy, which, kindred spiritedness notwithstanding, were starting to annoy me, I felt the need to be extra-correct, if correctness is something that can have degrees.

Dirk’s shoulders drooped. “Okay. I’m sorry I told you he got fired. I just found out and saw you and got flustered.”

Dirk doubling down on his misinformation doubled my annoyance.

“Listen. Whatever you think you found out? You didn’t,” I explained, slowly, patiently. “Because I have been married to Harris McCue for sixteen years, and Harris is the opposite of fired. Is, was, will always be.”

“Okay,” said Dirk, drooping. “Fine. You’re probably right. I’ll see you later.”

Just before he turned away, I said, “You know, Dirk, you might want to rethink the marketing basket.”

It was a cheap, mean-girl shot, but right then, my annoyance at Dirk was so great that not only did I shoot, but his subsequent wince and the hurt in his eyes rolled off me like water droplets off a lotus leaf.

But then, Dirk said, “Really? Is it weird? It just seemed—practical,” and his tone as he stared down at the basket was so doleful that I felt instantly terrible: cruel and petty and two inches high.

I sighed. “I’m sorry. It is practical and very environmentally friendly. I absolutely should not have said that.”

“No,” said Dirk, smiling a heartbreak of a smile at me. “I’m bad at knowing what’s weird. I have a broken weird meter, I think. So thanks.”

He left then, turned and shuffled out of Produce and toward the shining glass display cases of Cheese, dropping unhappy glances at his basket every few steps.

I watched until Dirk was out of sight, and only then did I look down and notice my hands. While the rest of me had been busy being cool and unruffled, my hands had been and were still undergoing what I can only describe as a miniature seismic event. I barely recognized them: racked with tremors, rigid as talons, gripping the tomatoes so hard that my nails dug in, and with wonder and horror, as I stared, I watched my right thumbnail pop clean through the fragile flesh, a puncture wound that bled a rivulet of pinkish juice down my hand to stain my new, cream-colored cuff.

Somehow, I pried my fingers from the bruised fruit, abandoning it and my shopping cart, got myself to my car, and called Harris.

He answered the phone like this: “Oh.”

“Oh?”

“I meant hi. Hi. Hello.”

I shut my eyes.

“I just had the oddest conversation with Elise’s husband at the market,” I said.

Nothing from Harris. Not even breathing. It was as if that one sentence had opened a sinkhole of silence between us, and as it yawned wider, I could almost see life as we knew it tumbling in. Our mailbox. Our flagstone retaining wall. Our rose plants and firepit. The whole set of jadeite dishes Harris’s mother had given us as a wedding gift—milky green plates Frisbeeing into the void. Our books opening, birdlike. Harris’s precious green ceramic egg-shaped grill plummeting like a bomb. And then Avery, Avery, Avery, swan-diving, toes pointed, chestnut ponytail flying.

Avery? No. Oh no. Hell, no. Never, ever, ever Avery. My hands stopped shaking at the thought. Whatever Harris had done, no matter how scandalous, it would not touch a hair on Avery’s head.