Just After Sunset

of hands between his thighs. Finally he burst out, “He was a deaf-mute, don’t you see? I could say anything and not have to listen to him make an analysis, give an opinion, or offer me sage advice. He was deaf, he was mute, hell, I thought he was probably asleep, and I could say any fucking thing I wanted to!”

In the booth with the file card pinned to the wall, Monette winced.

“Sorry, Father.”

“What exactly did you say about her?” the priest asked.

“I told him she was fifty-four,” Monette said. “That was how I started. Because that was the part…you know, that was the part I just couldn’t swallow.”

4

After the Gardiner tolls, the Maine Turnpike becomes a free road again, running through three hundred miles of fuck-all: woods, fields, the occasional house trailer with a satellite dish on the roof and a truck on blocks in the side yard. Except in the summer, it is sparsely traveled. Each car becomes its own little world. It occurred to Monette even then (perhaps it was the St. Christopher’s medal swinging from the rearview, a gift from Barb in better, saner days) that it was like being in a rolling confessional. Still, he started slowly, as so many confessors do.

“I’m married,” he said. “I’m fifty-five and my wife is fifty-four.”

He considered this while the windshield wipers ticked back and forth.

“Fifty-four, Barbara’s fifty-four. We’ve been married twenty-six years. One kid. A daughter. A lovely daughter. Kelsie Ann. She goes to school in Cleveland, and I don’t know how I’m going to keep her there, because two weeks ago, with no warning, my wife turned into Mount St. Helens. Turns out she’s got a boyfriend. Has had a boyfriend for almost two years. He’s a teacher-well, of course he is, what else would he be?-but she calls him Cowboy Bob. Turns out a lot of those nights I thought she was at Cooperative Extension or Book Circle, she was drinking tequila shooters and line dancing with Cowboy Fucking Bob.”

It was funny. Anyone could see that. It was sitcom shit if there had ever been sitcom shit. But his eyes-although tearless-were stinging as if they were full of poison ivy. He glanced to his right, but the hitchhiker was still mostly turned away, and now his forehead was leaning against the glass of the passenger window. Sleeping for sure.

Almost for sure.

Monette hadn’t spoken of her betrayal aloud. Kelsie still didn’t know, although the bubble of her ignorance would pop soon. The straws were flying in the wind-he’d hung up on three different reporters before leaving on this trip-but there was nothing they could print or broadcast yet. That would change soon, but Monette would go on getting by with No comment for as long as possible, mostly to spare himself embarrassment. In the meantime, though, he was commenting plenty, and doing so brought a great, angry relief. In a way it was like singing in the shower. Or vomiting there.

“She’s fifty-four,” he said. “That’s what I can’t get over. It means she started up with this guy, whose real name is Robert Yandowsky-how’s that for a cowboy name-when she was fifty-two. Fifty-two! Would you say that’s old enough to know better, my friend? Old enough to have sowed your wild oats, then ripped them up again and planted a more useful crop? My God, she wears bifocals! She’s had her gallbladder out! And she’s boffing this guy! In the Grove Motel, where the two of them have set up housekeeping! I gave her a nice house in Buxton, a two-car garage, she’s got an Audi on long lease, and she threw it all away to get drunk on Thursday nights in Range Riders, then shag this guy until the dawn’s early light-or however long they can manage-and she’s fifty-four! Not to mention Cowboy Bob, who is fucking sixty!”

He heard himself ranting, told himself to stop, saw the hitchhiker hadn’t moved (unless he’d sunk a little deeper into the collar of his duffle coat-that might have happened), and realized he didn’t have to stop. He was in a car. He was on I-95, somewhere east of the sun and west of Augusta. His passenger was a deaf-mute. He could rant if he wanted to rant.

He ranted.

“Barb spilled everything. She wasn’t defiant about it, and she wasn’t ashamed. She seemed…serene. Shell-shocked, maybe. Or still living in a fantasy world.”

And she’d said it was partly his fault.

“I’m on the road a lot, that much is true. Over three hundred days last year. She was on her own-we only had the one chick, you know, and that one finished with high school and flown the coop. So it was my fault. Cowboy Bob and all the rest of it.”

His temples were throbbing, and his nose was almost shut. He sniffed back hard enough to make black dots fly before his eyes and got no relief. Not in his nose, anyway. In his head he finally felt bet ter. He was very glad he’d picked the hitchhiker up. He could have spoken these things aloud in the empty car, but-

5

“But it wouldn’t have been the same,” he told the shape on the other side of the confessional wall. He looked straight ahead as he said it, right at FOR ALL HAVE SINNED AND FALLEN SHORT OF GOD’S GLORY. “Do you understand that, Father?”

“Of course I do,” the priest replied-and rather cheerfully. “Even though you’ve clearly fallen away from Mother Church-except for a few superstitious remnants like your St. Christopher’s medal-you shouldn’t even have to ask. Confession is good for the soul. We’ve known that for two thousand years.”

Monette had taken to wearing the St. Christopher’s medal that had once upon a time swung from his rearview mirror. Perhaps it was just superstition, but he had driven millions of miles in all kinds of shit weather with that medal for company and had never so much as dented a fender.

“Son, what else did she do, your wife? Besides sinning with Cowboy Bob?”

Monette surprised himself by laughing. And on the other side of the screen, the priest laughed, too. The difference was the quality of the laughter. The priest saw the funny side. Monette supposed he was still trying to ward off insanity.

“Well, there was the underwear,” he said.

6

“She bought underwear,” he told the hitchhiker, who still sat slumped and mostly turned away, with his forehead against the window and his breath fogging the glass. Pack between his feet, sign resting on top with the side reading I AM MUTE! facing up. “She showed me. It was in the guest room closet. It damn near filled the guest room closet. Bustiers and camisoles and bras and silk stockings still in their packages, dozens of pairs. What looked like about a thousand garter belts. But mostly there were panties, panties, panties. She said Cowboy Bob was ‘a real panty man.’ I think she would have gone on, told me just how that worked, but I got the picture. I got it a lot better than I wanted to. I said, ‘Of course he’s a panty man, he grew up jerking off to PLAYBOY, he’s fucking sixty.’”

They were passing the Fairfield sign now. Green and smeary through the windshield, with a wet crow hunched on top.

“It was the good stuff, too,” Monette said. “A lot was Victoria’s Secret from the mall, but there was also stuff from a high-priced underwear boutique called Sweets. In Boston. I didn’t even know there were underwear boutiques, but I have since been educated. Had to’ve been thousands of dollars’ worth piled up in that closet. Also shoes. High heels, for the most part. You know, stilettos. She had that hot-babe thing down pat. Although I imagine she took off her bifocals when she put on her latest Wonderbra and tap pants. But-”

A semi droned by. Monette had his headlights on and automatically flicked his high beams for a moment when the rig was past. The driver flicked a thank- you with his taillights. Sign language of the road.

“But a lot of it hadn’t even been worn. That was the thing. It was just…just pack-ratted away. I asked her why she’d bought so goddam much, and she either didn’t know or couldn’t explain. ‘We just got into the habit,’ she said. ‘It was like foreplay, I guess.’ Not ashamed. Not defiant. Like she was thinking, This is all a dream I’ll wake up from soon. The two of us standing there are looking at that rummage sale of slips and skivvies and shoes and God knows what else piled in the back. Then I asked her where she got the money-I mean, I see the credit-card slips at the end of each month, and there weren’t any from Sweets of Boston-and we got to the real problem. Which was embezzlement.”

7

“Embezzlement,” the priest said. Monette wondered if the word had ever been spoken in this confessional before and decided it probably had been. Theft for sure.

“She worked for MSAD 19,” Monette said. “MSAD stands for Maine School Administrative District. It’s one of the big ones, just south of Portland. Based in Dowrie, as a matter of fact, home of both Range Riders-the line-dancing joint-and the historic Grove Motel, just down the road from there. Convenient. Get your dancing and your fuh…your lovemaking all in the same area. Why, you wouldn’t even have to drive your car if you happened to have a snootful. Which on most evenings they did have. Tequila shooters for her, whiskey for him. Jack, naturally. She told me. She told me everything.”

“Was she a teacher?”

“Oh no-teachers don’t have access to that kind of money; she never could have embezzled over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars if she’d been a