Sunburn: A Novel(40)

Did they? He feels his restlessness kicking in. The fall is when he usually travels. It wasn’t that long ago that he thought he might go to New Zealand this autumn, catch its spring. Or somewhere on the other side of the equator. Flip the seasons, flip your life.

Flip this burger, Adam. Don’t burn another one.

Now he can’t imagine going anywhere without her. Still, he has an itchy foot and she’s sitting on the bed, circling real estate ads.

“How are you going to afford to buy a house?” he asked her last night. “You don’t get the insurance on the building.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but it becomes a question, a plea for assurance. Please tell me that you don’t have insurance. On the apartment. On your belongings. On Cath. If what Irving said was true—but maybe nothing Irving said was true.

“I’m going to come into some money soon,” she says.

“From what?”

“It’s just a feeling I have. Don’t you ever have those? Like, a sixth sense about something that’s going to happen. It’s in my palm.”

Her landlord is paying for her to stay at the motel, but Adam never visits her room. She comes to him now. How he misses that apartment. Maybe more than she does, he thinks. Did she know all along that it wasn’t going to be her home? All summer, she had said she had to be moving on. But she loved those things, he knows it.

She also loves her freedom. She would not have risked that cavalierly.

*

About midnight she taps on his door. Their lovemaking has become more savage as of late, which surprises him. When a secret romance goes public, things usually get tamer. Even as she circles ads for homes, plots domestic life, she retains this innate wildness in bed. What is their future? He would be crazy to marry her, have children with her.

He will be crazy without her.

Finished, he stares at the ceiling, wills himself not to speak, waits for her to fall asleep.

Then, very nonchalantly: “Was it midnight when you came by?”

“Tonight?”

“Then.”

“Oh. I think so. Thereabouts. You know I don’t have a watch anymore. And it was humid before the rain started, so I was walking pretty slowly.”

Thunderclap, the rain coming down in sheets. He feels as if he heard the thunder first, then saw the lightning, but that’s not how it works. Could it have been the explosion that he heard? All he has to do is call the weather service, find out what time the storm started and he’ll know what time she was on his doorstep.

What does it matter? As she says, she no longer has a watch. In that conflagration, it melted as surely as that watch in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting.





23


Polly loves Thursdays, the day that the area weekly paper is published. She gets up at six and walks to the Royal Farms to buy a copy, then curls up on one of the benches near the window that gets strong morning light. She could take the paper back to her room, but she thinks of the Royal Farms as her “office,” a place to tend to business until she has her own place. Once a week, she buys cards, sends them to Jani and Joy, obviously no longer afraid for Gregg to know where she is.

*

She reads the real estate ads as if they were love poems.

Cozy cottage with fruit trees

3 beds, 2 baths, your dream house awaits

Two beds, one bath, needs TLC



She’s not naive. She can translate the optimistic real estate speak: Cramped shack with bug-infested trees; a waking nightmare yearns to scare you; house reviled for good reason. But she prefers a fixer-upper. She wants her next house to be hers, truly hers, tailored to her particular needs and specifications. Her dream house awaits.

When Gregg bought the house on Kentucky Avenue, she tried to believe it could be her dream house. It had small touches of what felt like grandeur to her—a built-in breakfront, a heavy swinging door between dining room and kitchen, a glass transom over the front door, the house number etched in gold. But it was just an ordinary 1940s house. The neighborhood, even in its glory days, had never been better than middle class. People had expected more, once upon a time. You didn’t have to be rich to have a breakfront.

Now, everywhere you look, it’s about size. Polly doesn’t want a big house, no more than three bedrooms, preferably a rancher. In the decor magazines, she has begun to study photos of places that were considered modern forty years ago. She is fond of uncluttered rooms, as few objects as possible. Smooth wood floors. Bedrooms with nothing but beds, nightstands, a single dresser. She will never buy another iron bed or metal-top table. She wouldn’t mind doing the whole house in IKEA furniture, although she would have to rent a big U-Haul to get it all over here from Baltimore.

She’s not in a hurry to realize this dream. Good thing, because she’s no longer sure how quickly the divorce will come through now that she’s decided not to go to Reno. But how much longer could it take, with things so cut and dried between Gregg and her? She’ll give him everything he wants. Which, she assumes, is everything. So, six months? Maybe a year? A year’s a long time, but she’s endured longer stretches of waiting, in and out of prison. Still, it’s worrisome. She had planned to be free of Gregg no later than November.

Maybe she and Adam should both leave Belleville and head to Nevada. No one’s forcing them to stay here. Cath Whitmire’s death has been ruled an accident. They found enough of her skull to rule the cause of death blunt force trauma, consistent with a gas explosion. The case is closed.