Valentine(50)

They don’t fuck for months—months!—and it is Potter’s fault. He has let himself go, in her opinion. After the baby came, Corrine must have walked five hundred miles to get her figure back. Living on iceberg lettuce and apples when what she really wanted was a steak and a baked potato with all the fixins. Smoking a cigarette when she might have preferred a candy bar. But Potter is a different story. He put on a few pounds during the pregnancy—thirty, to be exact—from all those nights lying in bed, sharing a dish of Blue Bell ice cream while Alice tried to punch her way through Corrine’s belly. He still enjoys a bowl every evening, brings it right into their bedroom and climbs into bed with it.

And she blames the baby. Corrine loves Alice with a ferocity that shook her to the core in the days and weeks after the nurses allowed them to bring her home. That anybody would let them leave the hospital with something as fragile and important as a baby—this alone had seemed both miraculous and deeply reckless to Corrine and Potter—but as far as Corrine is concerned, there is an unbroken line of cause and effect between her daughter’s birth and the fact that she can’t get laid. She misses Potter holding her by the hips and looking up at her, misses his finger running along the spot of red that appears on her neck when she comes, the way it deepens and grows and covers her chin and her cheeks.

The baby is in bed and they are sitting in their chairs, listening to Bob Wills on the radio. Corrine is trying to read a book, but she is always listening for the baby. That’s something I used to do, she thinks, read books. I used to memorize poems and bring myself to tears when I recited them. I used to walk out the door and go for a long drive anytime I wanted. I used to bring home my own paycheck.

Potter is working a crossword. He sets down the pencil and watches his wife for a few minutes. Hey, he says softly, can I ask you something, Corie?

Hmm. Maybe.

What do you need?

What do I need?

Yeah. What do you need, Corrine, to be happy with me and Alice?

She doesn’t hesitate. I need to go back to work, Potter.

Honey, you work, taking care of Alice and me.

Yes, I do. I’d prefer to teach English to a classroom full of hormonal rednecks.

I’m afraid teaching will be too much for you.

The second the words are out of his mouth, Potter wishes he could have them back. And sure enough, Corrine comes out with her guns a’blazing. Potter, are you shitting me? Are you shitting me right about now? I’ll tell you what I need, Potter. I need for people to stop talking to me like I’ve become a bona fide idiot since I had a baby. I need for the good ladies of Odessa to stop advising me that what I really ought to do is get cracking on another baby. Ha! She slams her book closed and holds it over her head, and it occurs to Potter that she is going to lean over and hit him with it.

I need to go back to teaching, Corrine says, because I happen to like holding a room full of teenagers hostage while I read Miss Willa Cather’s My Antonia out loud to them. Let somebody else come over here and make goo-goo eyes at Alice for eight hours every day—every day, Potter, and why don’t you think about that for a minute, if you never once left work, what that might be like?

You were a great teacher, he says, but who is going to watch Alice?

I am a great teacher.

They sit and listen to the clock tick. A neighbor’s dog barks. In the kitchen, their new icebox switches on, a steady hum that reaches every corner of the house. He will wish until the day he dies that he hadn’t said it, but Potter has the best of intentions when he sets his crossword on the end table and walks over to sit on the carpet next to his wife’s chair, when he wonders aloud, How soon is too soon to start thinking about another baby?

*

Alice is her first thought in the morning, her last before she falls asleep for a few hours at night, and all the hours in between. She is a flash of lightning and its aftermath, a fire bearing down on a copse of juniper and mesquite. She is love, and Corrine is completely unprepared for it. Here is a person who is, and must always be, what the whole world was made for, and without whom that same world becomes unimaginable. If something happens to Alice, if she gets sick, if there is an accident, if a rattlesnake crawls into the backyard while Alice is out there on her blanket—it is enough to drive a woman straight into the arms of the nearest church or, in Corrine’s case, the bookmobile that somebody parked last week on the empty lot less than a block from their new house.

*

It is also Jon’s job to drive over to the shipping operator’s house in the middle of the night and knock on the front door and stand on the porch until the man’s wife comes to the door. She didn’t want to wake up the kids, he tells Corrine, so he sat with her on the couch while they waited for her sister to arrive. He kept his hands folded in his lap and his fingernails hidden. Back at the plant, he had showered and put on the clean shirt he keeps in his locker. But blood is pernicious and when he sat down on the man’s couch, he could see it under his fingernails and in the wrinkles of his knuckles. The man’s wife asked some questions and he told some lies—it was over quickly, he didn’t suffer, he never knew what happened. Jon watched the man’s wife cross her hands one over the other and push them hard against her mouth. Here’s one true thing he could tell her: He wasn’t alone when it happened, and he wasn’t alone when he died. Jon was there, pressing his hands against the man’s face, telling him that everything was going to be okay.