Red Clocks(20)

Does not like to stay at home, hidden from John, because she’s home all the bleeding time.

The nearest private school is an hour away and Catholic and, though less expensive than the average private, still too expensive for the Korsmos. The wife’s parents have nothing more to give them. Didier’s mother is a part-time bartender, and his father he hasn’t seen since he was fourteen.

She chooses the library. She was once a good researcher, at ease in the stacks, fetching, piling, skimming, choosing.

The rain is letting up.

The wife had her own carrel at the law library with its thirty-foot windows, black mirrors at night.

On a low stool by the newspaper rack is Temple Percival’s niece, stinking of onion, twigs in her hair. That stool is her favorite.

The wife smiles, as she always does.

Guilty for finding her repulsive.

But she is repulsive.

Temple Percival once gave the wife a tarot reading, at her store: “The castle will fall.”

At one of the two blond-wood tables, she spreads the paper before her.

“Excuse me, but are you done with the sports section?”

Armpits and aftershave. She turns. He teaches at the high school. What’s his— “Oh, hi,” he says. “You’re Didier’s wife, yeah?”

“Susan. I think we met at the summer picnic. How are you?” It hurts her neck to look up at him, he’s so long.

“Sweaty. I apologize.” He pulls out the chair beside her. “The kids are taking bubble tests so I’m free until soccer practice, and I ill-advisedly went for a run.”

“What do you teach?”

“English. For my sins.” He is big, everything about him big: neck, forearms, shoulders, head, damp shining sprouts of black hair. A dimple when he smiles.

“Sorry, but I forgot your—”

“Bryan Zakile.”

“Of course! My husband says you’re, um, a great teacher.”

“Didier’s a good guy—kids love him.”

“So he’s always telling me,” she says.

He fingers the corner of the newspaper. “I take it you’re not reading the sports?”

“Can’t say I’m a fan.”

“Frivolous shit, I agree. But it keeps men’s lizard cortexes occupied.” The wife watches Bryan Zakile not take his eyes off her. In a lower voice: “So what are you a fan of?”

“Um,” she says. “Various things.”

They go two doors down to Cone Wolf. Over single-scoop chocolates she learns a few facts about Bryan.

He played Division I college soccer and was invited to try out for the U.S. Olympic team, but a knee injury put paid to that.

He has traveled in South America.

He is starting his third year at the high school, where he got the job because the principal is married to his second cousin.

“Mrs. Fivey’s your cousin? How is she—?”

“Talking and moving around. Still in the hospital, but going home soon.”

“Oh, that’s good. Didier said they had to induce a coma?”

“She banged her head hella hard on those stairs. Got swelling on the brain. They couldn’t wake her up until the swelling went down.”

“How did she fall—do you know?”

Bryan shrugs. He licks his spoon, throws it on the counter, crosses his arms. “That was satisfying.”

The wife did not find her teensy little marble of a scoop satisfying. “Delectable,” she says, and blushes. The shop clock says 2:38. “I have to go pick up my daughter.”

“How old?”—the first question he has asked her since the library.

“Six. I also have a three-year-old son.”

“Wow, you’re a busy woman.”

The wife sees how he must see her. Shower-bunned blond hair. Drapey scarf to hide stomach. Black yoga pants. Mom clogs.

Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man’s genetic material?

When Bex climbs into the booster seat, she’s on a verge. The wife has come to fear this particular after-school look: reddened, scrunched. “Shell is so stupid.”

“What happened?”

“I hate her.”

“Seat belt, please. Did you and Shell fight?”

“I don’t fight, Momplee. It’s against the rules.”

“I mean argue?” The wife turns off the ignition. The cars behind them in the pickup line will just have to go around.

The girl takes a long, shuddering breath. “She said I stole her bag of pennies and I didn’t.”

“What bag of pennies?”

“She had pennies in a bag which she wasn’t supposed to because you can’t bring money to school but she did and she couldn’t find them and said I stole them. And I didn’t!”

“Of course you didn’t.”

She might have.

She is her father’s daughter.

The wife and Didier make fun of Ro’s sperm donors, but what about Didier’s genes, which may have deposited in Bex a puerile interest in drugs and a willingness to embezzle cash from a doughnut shop?

Two sets of instructions battle it out in the girl: well-shaped brown eyes vs. sunken blue-gray ones, orderly teeth vs. huge and crooked, solid SAT scores vs. never took the SAT.