American Wife

after that Cheers, which I had never let Ella watch, and Charlie still wasn’t home. How many nights would play out like this, how many nights would I let play out? When the phone rang yet again, I assumed once more it would be Charlie, and once more I was surprised. “Mrs. Blackwell?” said a female voice I knew but couldn’t place immediately. The voice was not only female but also young and tentative. “It’s Shannon.”

“Of course,” I said to our babysitter. “How are you?”

“Um, I’m sorry to bother you, but—”

“Is something wrong?” I asked, and Ella looked over from the bed. The phone was cordless, and I carried it into the hall.

“The reason I’m calling is, um, I just saw Mr. Blackwell.” A spiral of anxiety began to uncoil inside me; it was like a warm, thin piece of wire. I thought what Shannon would say next was with his car rammed into a telephone pole, and what she actually said was not much more reassuring. She said, “Um, we were at Herman’s?”

“What’s Herman’s?”

“It’s a bar.”

“And you ran into Mr. Blackwell there?”

“No, I, um, I went there with him. He called I guess a couple hours ago, and he said was I free, could he pick me up because he wanted to talk to me. I thought—I don’t know, I just, um, assumed it was about Ella. And when I was in the car, he said did I want to, um, have a drink.”

“Where is this Herman’s place?”

“It’s on Wells, near campus. I guess the reason I’m calling is, um, he had a few drinks, do you know what I mean?”

The wire spiral inside me exploded; little pieces raced in my bloodstream. So the rammed-into-a-telephone-pole possibility still existed; his date with the babysitter could be in addition to, not instead of, an accident. And campus—she meant Marquette, where she was a sophomore—was four miles from where we lived. I tried to sound calm as I said, “About how many drinks did he have?”

“Um—” She paused. “Um, five, maybe? Or six? We were only there for like an hour. Sorry, Mrs. Blackwell, but I just thought you should know.”

“No, I appreciate your calling. When he left the bar, did he say if he was coming home?”

“I don’t know, sorry. He said he bought the Brewers, so that’s cool, I guess.” She laughed in a small, awkward way.

“Did he—” I could hardly speak the words, but it would be unfair to make her speak them, even more unfair to force her to keep his secret. “Did he come on to you?” I asked, and my voice sounded strangled.

Quickly, she said, “No, no, he was just chatting. He was talking about baseball and stuff. He was in a good mood, and then he dropped me off back here.”

He’d had five or six drinks in an hour, then gotten behind the wheel with Ella’s babysitter beside him and driven her home?

“Shannon, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Mr. Blackwell acted very inappropriately, and you handled the situation exactly right.”

“I wasn’t, like, scared. I mean, I know Mr. Blackwell. I just hope he gets home okay.”

Even as she said it, I heard him in the driveway, the engine and then seven or eight honks in a row. He sometimes did this, an announcement of his arrival.

“I promise it won’t happen again,” I said.

WHEN I REPLACED the telephone receiver in its cradle, my heart was beating rapidly.

“Who was that?” Ella asked, and I said, “A friend of Mommy’s you don’t know.” A detergent commercial flashed on-screen, and downstairs, Charlie entered the house and then he was ascending the steps, singing. He was singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

“When Johnny comes marching home again

Hurrah! Hurrah!

We’ll give him a hearty welcome then

Hurrah! Hurrah!

The men will cheer and the boys will shout

The ladies they will all turn out

And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.”

He knew only the first verse, so he started it again as he entered the bedroom, leaning in to kiss me—my bitchiness had apparently been forgiven—and Ella leaped off the bed and proceeded to tackle him. He lifted her and turned her upside down, and when her dress fell over her head, he tickled her bare belly. She shrieked and writhed, clawing at him, and beneath the fabric, she, too, was attempting to sing: “ ‘The ladies they will all turn out . . . ’ ”

Charlie made the last line operatic, elongating it, and then he tossed Ella on the bed, and she scrambled around until her dress was righted and immediately attempted to climb back up him. When this didn’t work, she raised her arms, saying, “Lift me,” and Charlie said, “You’re breakin’ my back, Ellarina. What do you weigh now, a million pounds?” He pushed her onto the bed again, tickling her, saying, “Someone’s sure been eating a lot of hot-fudge sundaes! Someone’s been chowing down on extra-large pizzas!” She laughed so hard that tears streamed out of her eyes, laughed a gaspy, screaming, red-faced laughter that even as a child, I had never been seized by. Under my anger toward Charlie, I felt impressed in a distant way I’d felt many times before—it was undeniably a talent to be able to change a house from sparsely inhabited and sedate to loud and raucous just by entering it, to be your own