A Simple Plan

hospital where Sarah's mother died, slowly, of leukemia. That's where she'd met Sarah's father. She was originally from West Virginia and, even after a full decade in Miami, had a slight southern accent, which Sarah picked up from her whenever they talked.

Their calls were long collective monologues -- Millie drawled on about the mundane activities of her small coterie of friends, bemoaned the increasing decrepitude of Miami in general and her apartment complex in particular, and ended with an irrelevant anecdote or two from Sarah's father's life. Sarah talked about her pregnancy, about me and the cold weather we'd been having, about things she'd read recently in the paper or seen on TV. They never asked each other questions; there was very little interaction between them at all. They talked at each other for twenty minutes, and then, as if they'd agreed beforehand upon a mutually acceptable time limit, said good-bye and hung up.

Tonight Millie called just as we were getting into bed. When I realized who it was, I whispered to Sarah that I was going downstairs to get a snack. I didn't like being in the room with her when she talked on the phone; it made me feel like I was eavesdropping.

In the kitchen, I poured myself some milk and made a cheese sandwich. I ate standing up at the counter, in the dark. Through the side window, ten yards away across a thin strip of lawn, was my next-door neighbor's house, a mirror image of my own -- everything exactly the same, but reversed. A TV was on in the master bedroom; I could see its bluish flickering through the upstairs window, like light reflected off a pool.

I stood there in the darkness for several minutes, finishing my sandwich, while I reviewed my earlier conversation with Sarah. I was relieved by the calmness of her reaction to my confession, immeasurably so. I'd been worried that what I'd done would frighten her, that she'd treat me suddenly as some sort of psychopathic monster, but nothing of the sort had happened. There was no reason for it to have, I saw now -- just as I still looked upon myself as a good man despite my crime, Sarah did too. We had our entire past together to weigh against this one anomaly. There'd been that initial shock, of course -- I'd seen it -- that flash of fear and repulsion, but in a matter of seconds she'd filed it away somewhere, pragmatic as always, and resigned herself to what had happened. It's done, she'd said and then moved forward, focusing on the future rather than the past. Her concerns were simply practical -- whether or not Jacob knew of the crime and what effect this would have on our relations with him and Lou. She was imperturbable, a rock. If all else failed, I realized, standing there in the kitchen, she'd be the one who'd carry us through.

Next door, the television flicked off, and the house went dark. I set my empty glass in the sink.

On my way upstairs I noticed that the dining-room door was partway open. I flipped on the light, peeked inside. There were papers scattered across the wooden table, magazines and brochures.

Upstairs I could hear Sarah's voice, talking on the phone. It sounded soft, muffled, as if she were speaking to herself. I slid the dining-room door open all the way and stepped inside.

I approached the table hesitantly, as if I were afraid Sarah might hear me, though that wasn't a conscious thought. I scanned its surface. There were all sorts of brochures, at least thirty, probably more, travel brochures with pictures of tanned women in brightly colored bikinis, of families skiing and riding horses, of men on tennis courts and golf courses, of tables laden with exotic food. 'Welcome to Belize!' they read, 'Paris in the Spring!' 'Crete, Island of the Gods!' 'Come Sail the Pacific with Us!' 'Nepal, the Land Time Forgot!' Everything was shiny, slick looking; everyone was smiling; all the sentences ended in exclamation points. The magazines -- Conde Nast Traveler, Islands, The Caribbean, The Globetrotter's Companion -- were exactly the same only larger.

There was a notebook off to the side, folded open, with Sarah's handwriting in it. At the top of the page was written 'Travel.' Below it were listed the names of cities and countries around the globe, each one numbered, apparently in order of preference. The first one was Rome, the second Australia. On the facing page was another list, this one headed 'Things to Learn.' Below it were listed such things as sailing, skiing, scuba diving, horseback riding. It was a very long list, reaching to just above the bottom of the page.

These were Sarah's wish lists, I realized with a pang; this was what she dreamed of doing with the money. My eyes ran up and down the pages: Switzerland, Mexico, Antigua, Moscow, New York City, Chile, London, India, the Hebrides.... Tennis, French, windsurfing, waterskiing, German, art history, golf.... The lists went on and on, places I'd never heardher mention, ambitions I'd never dreamed she had.

Ever since I'd met her, I'd thought of Sarah as more confident and decisive than myself. She'd been the one to ask me out on our first date; she'd been the one to initiate our first sexual encounter; she'd been the one to suggest that we get engaged. She'd picked the wedding date (April 17), planned the honeymoon (a ten-day trip to Naples, Florida), and decided when we'd begin trying to have a baby. It seemed like she always managed to get what she wanted, but I realized now, standing there looking down at the magazines and brochures scattered across the table, that she hadn't really, that behind her facade of assertiveness and drive there must lay an enormous reservoir of disappointment.

Sarah had received a B.S. in petroleum engineering from the University of Toledo. When I first met her, she was planning on moving down to Texas and landing a high-paying job in the oil industry. She wanted to save up her money and buy a ranch someday, a 'spread' she called it, with horses and a herd of cattle and her own special brand, an S embedded within a heart. Instead, we got married. I was hired by the feedstore in Ashenville in the spring of my senior year, and suddenly, without really choosing it, she found herself in Delphia. There weren't many openings in northwestern Ohio for someone with an undergraduate degree in petroleum engineering, so she ended up working part-time at the local library. She was a trouper; she always made the best of things, yet there had to be some regret in all this; she had to look back every now and then and mourn the distance that separated her present existence from the one she'd dreamed of as a student. She'd sacrificed something of herself for our relationship, but she'd never attracted attention to it, and so it had seemed natural to me, even inevitable. It wasn't until tonight that I saw it for the tragedy it was.

Now the money had arrived, and she could begin to dream again. She could draw up her wish lists, page through her magazines, plan her new life. It was a nice way to envision her -- full of hope and yearning, making promises to herself that she felt certain she could fulfill -- but there was also something terribly sad about it. We were trapped, I realized; we'd crossed a boundary, and we couldn't go back. The money, by giving us the chance to dream, had also allowed us to begin despising our present lives. My job at the feedstore, our aluminum-siding house, the town around us -- we were already looking upon all that as part of our past. It was what we were before we became millionaires; it was stunted, gray, unlivable. And so if, somehow, we were forced to relinquish the money now, we wouldn't merely be returning to our old lives, starting back up as if nothing of import had happened; we'd be returning having seen them from a distance, having judged them and deemed them unworthy. The damage would be irreparable.

'Hank?' Sarah called from upstairs. 'Honey?' She was off the phone.

'Coming,' I yelled. Then I flicked off the light and quietly slid the door shut behind me.

SATURDAY afternoon, just as Sarah and I were finishing lunch, the doorbell rang. It was Jacob; I found him waiting on the front porch, dressed, to my surprise, in gray flannel slacks and a pair of leather shoes. It was the first time since our parents' funerals that I'd seen him in anything but jeans or khaki work pants, and it startled me a bit, set me off my guard, so that it took me another moment or so to notice the even more drastic change in his appearance -- his lack of hair. Jacob had gone to the barber and gotten a crew cut; his hair had been clipped back tight against his scalp, so that now his head seemed too large for his body, seemed to hover like an over-inflated balloon above his shoulders.

He stood there, watching me, waiting for my reaction. I smiled at him. Despite the obvious tightness of his pants, despite the way his brown shoes clashed with his blue socks, he seemed pleased with himself, pleased with how he looked, and that wasn't something that happened very often. It gave me a warm feeling toward him, made me want to compliment him.

'You got your hair cut,' I said.

He smiled shyly, touched his head with his hand. 'Just this morning.'

'I like it,' I said. 'It looks good.'

He continued to smile, glancing away now, embarrassed. Across the street one of the neighbor's kids was smacking a tennis ball against his garage door with a hockey stick. The ball was wet, and every time it hit the door, it left a mark. Mary Beth was watching him from the truck.