Red Clocks(41)

“Morning.”

Goody Hallett’s is gone, Snippity Doo Dah is new, but otherwise the shops and pub and library and church have sat here, in the salt wind, for decades.

Is the wife going to die in Newville?

As they cross Lupatia, a bicycle whips past so close her arm hairs crackle.

“Watch the fuck out!” yells the rider, slowing and turning to look at the wife. “It’s bad enough you chose to procreate on a dying planet.”

“Dick,” she calls after him.

Admittedly she was not in the crosswalk.

Admittedly she has added more people to this steaming pile.

Warm, silky new smell of Bex’s neck.

Her rapturous mouth on the wife’s nipple to bring down the milk tingling in the ducts.

How John slept on her chest with measureless trust.

This planet may be choking to death, bleeding from every hole, but still she would choose them, every time.

“Momplee, is there school tomorrow?”

“Yes, sweetpea.” She signals, brakes, turns off the paved road.

“Why?”

“Because tomorrow’s Monday.”

Up the hill beneath a waving roof of red alder and madrone.

You and I should have coffee sometime.

They could meet in Wenport. For coffee.

She used to pass through Wenport on those endless drives to get Bex to nap—infant Bex who never wanted to close her eyes—when Didier was teaching and the wife didn’t know how to make her baby fall asleep.

The air in Wenport stinks like eggs, from the pulp mill.

She and Bryan could have sex in the backseat of this car.

Maybe not in the backseat; Bryan’s too big.

A motel. Pay in cash.

The trees give way to an open slope, patchy with salt grass and lavender. The dirt driveway. The house.

“We’re home, baby bones!” Bex tells John, who will be scarred for life because the wife told him to shut the fuck up. John, whom she’d give her own life not to scar.

Unbuckle, untangle, lift, set down.

She drops the car keys on the hall table. Her husband is prostrate on the living-room couch.

“Your shift now,” she says. “I’m going for a walk.”

“What about lunch?”

“I ate with the kids in town.”

“But I haven’t eaten.”

“So—eat.”

“I was waiting for you,” he says. “There’s nothing in the house.”

“Untrue.”

“What am I supposed to have, then?”

The wife starts for the kitchen, then stops. “Actually, it’s not my job to figure out what you’re having for lunch.”

“Could you at least make a suggestion? There’s like absolutely rien in the fridge.”

“I suggest you put the kids back in the car, drive somewhere, and buy something.”

“I’m exhausted,” he says.

The wife kicks off her flats and puts on sneakers, yanks the laces. The clock has started on her alone time.

“Daddy, I’ll cook you a cake if you want.”

“I’d love a space cake.”

“What are the ingredients of that?” says Bex.

Didier throws the wife the look, polished by years of use, that casts her as a prudish shrew and him as a guilty but unrepentant fourteen-year-old. “On second thought, Bex, would you fix me a sammie? Butter and brown sugar?”

“One sammie, upcoming!” The girl hops away.

“See you in an hour and fifty-seven minutes,” says the wife.

Walks down the hill into the hushed green gloom.

Warmer in the woods than in the house. If Didier made more money, they could afford to renovate the drafty mess, but he never will, so they won’t.

Why don’t you make some money, then? screams Ro.

Why don’t you go back to law school? screams the wife’s younger self.

She shouldn’t have dropped out.

Of course she should have.

What if she hadn’t?

Her program wasn’t top tier, but it was respectable. Two years in, she went drinking with a friend from her cohort. At last call the friend said she knew an all-night doughnut shop.

If the friend had not known the doughnut shop, or if the friend had been tired, or if the friend had never existed, the wife would have finished the program and sat for the bar and been hired by a firm and maybe, yes, still have had time to make children.

But maybe not. And anyway, those children, if she’d had time to make them, would not be Bex and John.

This fact outlasts all other facts.

The wife steps on a hand, soft and rubbery.

A dead hand on the floor of the woods.

A hand torn from its owner, left loose.

A dead hand is also a mushroom.

A black plastic bag is also an animal.

You can’t believe your eyes.

She convinced herself at the time it was a bag because she didn’t want it to be a writhing animal.

I wanted to help it, but it was already dead.

How do you help a cinder, half-alive?

Run over it fast to stop the burning.

She could stop being married to Didier.

Put John in daycare and finish the law degree.

With what money?

Put John in daycare and get a job at Cone Wolf.