Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

would break down in his presence. She didn’t need a Dr. Bonner to tell her that love and hate existed on the same plane. She didn’t need him to tell her that her bond with Richard Connor was at once the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

So it was that the day she drove to the prison, not the day that she was diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, was the worst day of June Connor’s life. Her hands shook. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Standing outside the door to the visitors’ area, she let the fear take hold and imagined all the horrible things that could make her weak before him.

The feel of his lips when he kissed her neck. The times she had come home from school, exhausted and angry, and he had cupped her chin with his hand or pressed his lips to her forehead and made everything better. The passionate nights, when he would lie behind her, his hand working her into a frenzy. Even after decades of living apart, after loving him and hating him in equal measure, she found the thought of his body beside her still brought an unwelcome lust.

He never closed drawers or cabinet doors all the way. He never put his keys in the same place when he got home from work, so every morning he was late for school because he couldn’t find them. He belched and farted and occasionally spat on the side-walk. He took his socks off by the bed every night and left them there for June to pick up. There was not an item of laundry he knew how to fold. He had a sort of domestic blindness that prevented him from seeing the furniture that needed to be dusted, the carpets that needed to be vacuumed, the dishes that needed to be washed.

He had betrayed her. He had betrayed everything in their lives.

This latter bit was the only reason June was able to walk through the visitors’ door, force herself through the pat-down and metal detector, the intrusive rifling of her purse. The smell of prison was a slap in the face, as was the realization that five thousand grown men were living, shitting, breathing the same air in this miserable place.

What was she worried about — her nose wrinkling, her hand going to her mouth — that she’d get lung cancer?

And then Richard had shown up, a shuffling old man, but still much the same. Stooped shoulders, because he was tall but never proud of it. Gray hair. Gray skin. He’d cut himself shaving that morning. Toilet tissue was stuck to the side of his neck. His thick, black-framed glasses reminded her of the ones he’d worn when they’d first met outside the school library, all those years ago. He was in two of her classes. He was from a small town. He wanted to teach English. He wanted to make kids feel excited about learning. He wanted to take June to the movies that night and talk about it some more. He wanted to hold her hand and tell her about the future they would have together.

There was nothing of that excited eagerness in the old man who’d sat across from her at a metal table.

“I am dying,” she’d said.

And he had only nodded, his lips pursed in that self-satisfied way that said he knew everything about June before she even said it.

June had bristled, but inside, she understood that Richard had always known everything about her. Perhaps not the dropped chicken or the ugly shirt she’d gladly sent to the town dump, but he could see into her soul. He knew that her biggest fear was dying alone. He knew what she needed to hear in order to make this transaction go smoothly. He knew, above all, how to turn these things around so that she believed his lies, no matter how paltry the proof, no matter how illogical the reasoning.

“I’m a good man,” he’d kept telling her. Before the trial. After the trial. In letters. On the telephone. “You know that, June. Despite it all, I am a good man.”

As if it mattered anymore. As if she had a choice.

The secret that horrified her most was that deep down, part of her wanted to believe that he was still good. That he cared about her, even though the hatred in his eyes was so clear that she often had to look away. She could snatch the truth from the jaws of a tenth-grader at twenty paces, but her own husband, the man with whom she’d shared a bed, created a child, built a life, remained an enigma.

June turned her head away now, stared out the window. The curtains needed to be washed. They slouched around the window like a sullen child. Her hands still remembered the feel of the stiff material as she had sewn the pleats, and her mind conjured the image of the fabric store where she had bought the damask. Grace had been eight or nine then. She was running around the store, in and out of the bolts, screaming, so June had finally given up, quickly buying a fabric she wasn’t particularly fond of just to get the annoying child out of the store.

And then came the horrible realization that the annoying child would be in the car with her, would come home with her and continue screaming the entire way. Outside the store, June had sat in the blazing-hot car and recalled stories of mothers who’d accidentally left their kids unattended in their cars. The children’s brains boiled. They died horrible, agonizing deaths.

June had closed her eyes in the car, summoned back the cool interior of the fabric store. She saw herself browsing slowly down the aisles, touching bolts of fabric, ignoring the prices as she selected yards of damask and silk. No child screaming. No clock ticking. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do but please herself.

And then her eyes popped open as Grace’s foot slammed into the back of the seat. June could barely get the key in the ignition. More shaking as she pressed the buttons on the console, sending cold air swirling into the car, her heart stopping midbeat as she realized with shame that it was not the idea of killing her child that brought her such horror, but the thought of the fallout. What the tragedy would leave behind. Grieving mother. Such a sad story. A cautionary tale. And then, whispered but still clear, How could she …

Every mother must have felt this way at one time or another. June was not alone in that moment of hatred, that sensation of longing for an unattached life that swept over her as Grace kicked the back of her seat all the way home.

I could just walk away, June had thought. Or had she said the actual words? Had she actually told Grace that she could happily live without her?

She might have said the words, but, as with Richard, those moments of sheer hatred came from longer, more intense moments of love. The first time June had held little Grace in her arms. The first time she’d shown her how to thread a needle, make cookies, decorate a cupcake. Grace’s first day of kindergarten. Her first gold star. Her first bad report card.

Grace.

June came back to herself in her dank bedroom, the sensation almost of falling back into her body. She felt a flutter in her chest, a tapping at her heart; the Grim Reaper’s bony knuckles knocking at the door. She looked past the dingy curtains. The windows were dirty. The outside world was tainted with grime. Maybe she should let Richard take her outside. She could sit in the garden. She could listen to the birds sing, the squirrels chatter. The last day. The last ray of sunlight on her face. The last sensation of the sheets brushing against her legs. The last comb through her hair. The last breath through her lungs. Her last glimpse of Richard, the house they had bought together, the place where they had raised and lost their child. The prison cell he had left her in as he went off to live in one of his own.

“ ‘A house on Taylor Drive was broken into late Thursday evening. The residents were not at home. Stolen were a gold necklace, a television set, and cash that was kept in the kitchen drawer …’”

She had loved sewing, and before her life had turned upside down the second time, before the detectives and lawyers intruded, before the jury handed down the judgment, June had thought of sewing as a metaphor for her existence. June was a wife, a mother. She stitched together the seam between her husband and child. She was the force that brought them together. The force that held them in place.

Or was she?

All these years, June had thought she was the needle, piercing two separate pieces, making disparate halves whole, but suddenly, on this last day of her life, she realized she was just the thread. Not even the good part of the thread, but the knot at the end — not leading the way, but anchoring, holding on, watching helplessly as someone else, something else, sewed together the patterns of their lives.

Why was she stuck with these thoughts? She wanted to remember the good times with Grace: vacations, school trips, book reports they had worked on together, talks they had had late at night. June had told Grace all the things mothers tell their daughters: Sit with your legs together. Always be aware of your surroundings. Sex should be saved for someone special. Don’t ever let a man make you think you are anything but good and true. There were so many mistakes that June’s own mother had made. June had parented against her mother, vowing not to make