“I
Teddy dropped the butt of his cigarette to the stone walk and ground it out with his heel.
Dolores, he thought, I’ve got to tell him. I can’t do this alone.
If after all my sins—all my drinking, all the times I left you alone for too long, let you down, broke your heart—if I can ever make up for any of that, this might be the time, the last opportunity I’ll ever have.
I want to do right, honey. I want to atone. You, of all people, would understand that.
“Andrew Laeddis,” he said to Chuck, and the words clogged in his dry throat. He swallowed, got some moisture into his mouth, tried again…
“Andrew Laeddis,” he said, “was the maintenance man in the apartment building where my wife and I lived.”
“Okay.”
“He was also a firebug.”
Chuck took that in, studied Teddy’s face.
“So…”
“Andrew Laeddis,” Teddy said, “lit the match that caused the fire—”
“Holy fuck.”
“—that killed my wife.”
8
TEDDY WALKED OVER to the edge of the breezeway and stuck his head out from under the roof to douse his face and hair. He could see her in the drops. Dissolving on impact.
She hadn’t wanted him to go to work that morning. In that final year of her life, she’d grown inexplicably skittish, prone to insomnia that left her tremor-filled and addled. She’d tickled him after the alarm had gone off, then suggested they close the shutters and block out the day, never leave the bed. When she hugged him, she held on too tightly and for too long, and Teddy could feel the bones in her arms crush into his neck.
As he took his shower, she came to him, but he was too rushed, already late, and as had so often been the case in those days, hungover. His head simultaneously soggy and filled with spikes. Her body like sandpaper when she pressed it against his. The water from the shower as hard as BBs.
“Just stay,” she said. “One day. What difference will one day make?”
He tried to smile as he lifted her gently out of the way and reached for the soap. “Honey, I can’t.”
“Why not?” She ran her hand between his legs. “Here. Give me the soap. I’ll wash it for you.” Her palm sliding under his testicles, her teeth nipping his chest.
He tried not to push her. He gripped her shoulders as gently as he could and lifted her back a step or two. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve really got to go.”
She laughed some more, tried to nuzzle him again, but he could see her eyes growing hard with desperation. To be happy. To not be left alone. To have the old days back—before he worked too much, drank too much, before she woke up one morning and the world seemed too bright, too loud, too cold.
“Okay, okay.” She leaned back so he could see her face as the water bounced off his shoulders and misted her body. “I’ll make a deal with you. Not the whole day, baby. Not the whole day. Just an hour. Just be an hour late.”
“I’m already—”
“One hour,” she said, stroking him again, her hand soapy now. “One hour and then you can go. I want to feel you inside of me.” She raised herself up on her toes to kiss him.
He gave her a quick peck on the lips and said, “Honey, I can’t,” and turned his face to the shower spray.
“Will they call you back up?” she said.
“Huh?”
“To fight.”
“That piss-ant country? Honey, that war will be over before I could lace my boots.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know why we’re there. I mean—”
“Because the NKPA doesn’t get weaponry like that from nowhere, honey. They got it from Stalin. We have to prove that we learned from Munich, that we should have stopped Hitler then, so we’ll stop Stalin and Mao. Now. In Korea.”
“You’d go.”
“If they called me up? I’d have to. But they won’t, honey.”
“How do you know?”
He shampooed his hair.
“You ever wonder why they hate us so much? The Communists?” she said. “Why can’t they leave us alone? The world’s going to blow up and I don’t even know why.”
“It’s not going to blow up.”
“It is. You read the papers and—”
“Stop reading the papers, then.”
Teddy rinsed the shampoo from his hair and she pressed her face to his back and her hands snaked around his abdomen. “I remember the first time I saw you at the Grove. In your uniform.”
Teddy hated when she did this. Memory Lane. She couldn’t adapt to the present, to who they were now, warts and all, so she drove winding lanes into the past to warm herself.
“You were so handsome. And Linda Cox said, ‘I saw him first.’ But you know what I said?”
“I’m late, honey.”
“Why would I say
Teddy shut off the shower and turned, noticed that his wife had managed to get some of his soap on her. Smudges of lather splattered her flesh.
“You want me to turn it back on?”
She shook her head.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and shaved at the sink, and Dolores leaned against the wall as the soap dried white on her body and watched him.
“Why don’t you dry off?” Teddy said. “Put a robe on?”
“It’s gone now,” she said.
“It’s not gone. Looks like white leeches stuck all over you.”
“Not the soap,” she said.
“What, then?”
“The Cocoanut Grove. Burned to the ground while you were over there.”
“Yeah, honey, I heard that.”
“Over there,” she sang lightly, trying to lighten the mood. “Over there…”
She’d always had the prettiest voice. The night he’d returned from the war, they’d splurged on a room at the Parker House, and after they’d made love, he heard her sing for the first time from the bathroom as he lay in bed —'Buffalo Girls” with the steam creeping out from under the door.
“Hey,” she said.
“Yeah?” He caught the reflection of the left side of her body in the mirror. Most of the soap had dried on her skin and something about it annoyed him. It suggested violation in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.
“Do you have somebody else?”
“What?”
“Do you?”
“The fuck are you talking about? I
