reunion, just capital-R Reunions.) It was clear that the book had touched a nerve, that while working for a family-owned meat company sufficed in Maronee, at least on good days, Charlie questioned how impressive it sounded in a more national context. Though I tried to be sympathetic to his insecurities, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was, on balance, a rather fortunate problem to have.
In recent weeks, he had been coming home from work later and later and rarely calling to say where he was. Sometimes, it would turn out, he’d been at the country club, sometimes he’d stopped at a bar for a drink (this bothered me most, because it seemed seedy—in Riley, husbands and fathers frequented bars, but they didn’t in Maronee), and sometimes he’d driven directly from the office to a Brewers game. The Blackwells had four season tickets, formerly Harold’s, which were shared among Charlie and his brothers but often went unused. On these nights, when I asked whom he’d gone with, once it was Cliff Hicken (he and Kathleen, the friends who’d held the backyard cookout where Charlie and I had met, had moved from Madison to Milwaukee three years after we had, when Cliff had taken a job as vice president of a financial advising company), and once Charlie had gone to a game with a younger fellow from work, but several times, it sounded like Charlie had gone alone. He’d arrive home as I was going to bed, and I’d feel simultaneously angry, distressed, and too tired for a confrontation. I’d postpone a real conversation until morning, by which point I didn’t have the heart to begin today with what was worst from yesterday. In any case, though he never said as much, I had the sense that on many of these mornings, Charlie was too hungover to do more than force himself out of bed and into the shower.
It had occurred to me that he could be having an affair, but I didn’t think he was. We still had sex regularly, if not with the frequency we’d enjoyed early on, and he was, in smaller ways, as affectionate as he’d ever been. In the middle of the night, he’d take my hand and hold it while we slept; the previous week, I’d awakened around three to find him rubbing his feet against mine. When we got up, I’d asked, “Were you playing footsie with me last night?” and he’d said, “Lindy, don’t pretend that footsie isn’t your favorite game.” His ongoing bad mood had not obliterated his usual personality; it was more that it accompanied it, like a sidecar on a motorcycle. And as for the possibility of him having an affair, really, he seemed more preoccupied than secretive.
AT THE END
of intermission, I rejoined Miss Ruby in the theater and said, “What do you think?” and she said in a guarded way, “It’s interesting.” When the play was over and the lights went on, I was approached by several people Charlie and I knew, and when I introduced Miss Ruby to them (instead of calling her Miss Ruby, which felt peculiar in this context, I said, “This is Ruby Sutton”), I could tell some of them wondered who she was; the only person who seemed to recognize her was an older woman named Tottie Gagneaux, who squinted and said, “Aren’t you Priscilla’s helper?”
Quickly, I said, “Did you know they’ll be in town this weekend? They’re coming from Arizona, if I’m not mistaken, although it’s hard to keep track with how much they travel these days . . . ”
It was raining lightly as we left the theater, and Miss Ruby gave me directions to her house. She lived in Harambee, it turned out, in a modest one-story shingle house on a hill, with a steep concrete staircase leading to the door. As I let her out, I could see, at the edges of the curtain in the front window, the flickering blue light of a TV. A figure carrying a baby—Yvonne, obviously—lifted the curtain from one side and peered out the window at my car. “Thanks so much for keeping me company tonight,” I said, and Miss Ruby said, “Yes, ma’am.” Before she shut the car door, she added, “Good night, Alice.” I was nearly certain that in the eleven years since I had met her, it was the first time she’d ever used my name.
DRIVING HOME, I
felt an odd, happy lightness. The evening had gone in a different direction than I’d expected, but it seemed like it had been a good direction—while Charlie would have been bored by
I sensed that Miss Ruby had enjoyed it. When I pulled into our driveway, though, I felt a flicker of doubt. Shannon’s car was gone, and after I’d pressed the garage-door opener, I saw Charlie’s Jeep Cherokee. Had the baseball game been rained out?
I unlocked the front door, and as soon as I stepped inside, I heard the approach of heavy footsteps. Charlie met me in the hall. “I hope that was a damn good play.”
“Is Ella all right?”
“She’s fine. I sent Shannon home at nine, and I’ve been waiting for you ever since.”
“I called here and spoke to her at intermission, so you must have gotten in right after that.”
“Intermission, huh?” He folded his arms. Whenever he left for work in the morning, and whenever he came home at night, we always hugged and kissed, sometimes repeatedly. So far, we had done neither. In a sarcastic voice, he said, “You get your daily dose of the fine arts?”
I said nothing.
“You didn’t maybe wonder where I was?” he added. “Just for a minute or two, while you watched the actors recite their lines?”
“I assumed you were at the ball game. Charlie, I called the country club, I called Arthur and Jadey, I drove over to your parents’, and I’m sorry, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been left in the dark on your whereabouts.”
“So it didn’t cross your mind for even half a second that something might be wrong?”
“
something wrong?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
his expression said,
Simultaneously, I felt a sincere fear, a bone-deep apprehension, and I felt a surge of resentment. If something
