Sketched on the Wrong Page
On Saturday, Cora found Anson standing in the butcher shop and tracing one finger back and forth across the glass above the steaks. When she walked in and said good morning, Anson’s brown eyes widened as if he were a prisoner granted a sudden reprieve, as if he was rediscovering a world long thought lost. His fingers, gaunt and grease-stained from years at the plant, pulled back from their relentless march across the glass and folded into one another, mashing and reforming in a chaotic, anxious pattern.
“Planning to grill tonight?” Cora gestured at the steak display. “The smell over the fence always drives Ben wild.”
Anson shook his head. “Not tonight. Not for a while.” He looked down at his fingers and seemed unable to stop their gesticulation.
Cora knew she ought to say something, perhaps apologize, but she had never been any good at broaching difficult subjects. Instead, she held motionless, her basket frozen in front of her, as if her stillness might quiet his stammering hands. At last, Anson looked up.
“I haven’t told Liz yet. I don’t know how I will. Is Ben–?” He trailed off, unable to finish the question, then jammed his hands into his pockets.
The butcher emerged, carrying the roast Cora had ordered wrapped in brown paper. Its extravagance answered Anson’s unfinished question: Ben was shipping out to the new plant. The company could replace grease-stained mechanics overseas easier than they could smooth-talking managers. Cora hadn’t been the one who relocated the plant, hadn’t been the one who laid everyone off, and yet she felt as if the bills she handed the butcher came from thirty pieces of silver.
“Anson, I’m so sorry.”
“You're sorry. Ben's sorry. The company is sorry.” Anson returned his fingers to the glass between him and the steaks. “I feel like everyone's sorry except me.”
###
When Cora got home, she found her husband working on the lawn mower. Ben never could find enough machines to fix, she thought, not since he’d transitioned off the floor at the plant. He slaked his thirst by taking apart things that had been working fine and Cora could never tell whether or not his attention had improved them. He looked up from a disassembled motor as she walked by.
“Cormac ran off with his friends.” Ben didn’t move from the garage, didn’t rush to kiss her like he once had. “He promised to be back by dinner. Gwen is in her room.”
Cora thanked him, even if she wanted to tell him keeping track of his own children was no great accomplishment, and he returned to his tinkering. No asking after her morning, no acknowledgement of his upcoming move, no professment of love, no anything. She went to prepare the roast alone by the kitchen window. From there, Cora watched their neighbor’s laundry swaying on the line, Anson’s work clothes strung out for the next week, those five shirts blissfully unaware that her husband had shipped the job away.
###
Sunday’s temperature crept up to triple digits so Ben packed the kids off to the pool. Cora stayed home to clean and, as she took a trash bag to the bin, she noticed Anson sitting on the porch steps, a beer held between his knees, staring at an oil stain on the cracked cement. Cora watched him for more than a minute. He didn’t bring the bottle up to his lips. She left the bag on the porch and retrieved a beer from her fridge. Anson didn’t react when she sat next to him on the steps.
“I thought you might like a cold one.” Cora offered him the new bottle.
“Mine’s full.” Anson shook his bottle, which sloshed full of liquid. “If I were drunk I could live with myself, but I’m stone sober.” Anson took a sip, grimaced, then dropped the beer on the ground and leaned forward, staring at it. “Liz took the kids to her mother’s house.”
“I’m sorry.” Cora knew again, like she had at the butcher’s, that it was the wrong thing to say. How could she be sorry when his misfortune paid for her family’s private school and an electric dishwasher?
“This isn’t how a man’s supposed to act.” Anson buried his head between his grease-stained hands. “He’s supposed to be strong. He’s supposed to know what to do. He certainly isn’t supposed to cry in front of his wife, in front of his kids.”
Anson was crying now. Cora couldn’t express her sympathy again, not when he knew as well as she did it could never be truly sincere.
“Ben’s lucky, you know?” He lifted his head, showing the tracks where big tears had rolled into his unshaven stubble. “Not because he’s getting shipped out to the new plant. Because he has you. Someone who won’t laugh even when a man acts like this.”
“There are ways a woman is supposed to act, too.” Cora took a deep drink from the bottle she’d brought. The silence after was unbearable, so she stumbled out more words, more than she had ever dared to let someone hear. “She’s supposed to be loving, even when she isn’t loved. She’s supposed to believe, even when she’s lied to. She’s supposed to support her husband, even when he’s a horse’s ass.”
As she spoke, Cora found herself drawn toward Anson’s face. His big brown eyes, wet along the edges, blinked once, twice, while his jaw worked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t quite work out what it was. Cora didn’t know what to say either, but expressing herself had felt good, as if she were now free of all the lies, and so, at a loss for words, she kissed him. She brought her hand up to caress the bristles on his cheek, felt his fingers brush against her knee, closed her eyes as they hung in a liminal space, their lips trembling against each other, neither commiting nor rejecting, for what seemed an eternity but must have been only a few seconds. Then Anson pulled back and Cora opened her eyes and the moment passed.
“I–I’m sorry.” It was his turn to say it.
Cora didn’t wait to hear which part he regretted. She fled across the baking hot lawn, past the open windows of their other neighbors, who until now hadn’t crossed her mind, and into the house a scab had built.
###
Cormac and Gwen refused to go to bed that night, like they knew their mother had momentous and terrible news and hoped to delay her. Cormac sat in the bath long after the pool’s chlorine rinsed off, his already pink and pruned skin contorting into a peach seed, and Gwen insisted on story after story, always about a heroic knight rescuing a distressed damsel. They were an hour past their bedtime when Cora finally closed their bedroom door.
She had hoped Ben might be asleep when she walked in. It would be easier to justify delay, another day, another week, another year, but he was awake in bed. He looked at her over the top of his Mandarin-English dictionary and, for a moment, he looked like he had when they met all those years ago.
He had been so easy to love then, a smile and a promise and a twirl on the dance floor, back when they had no children and the future stretched before them, a vast and unknowable notebook waiting to be sketched with their happy memories. Cora made herself remember how he instead filled their story with broken friendships, with ambition and professional cruelty, with columns of numbers rather than people. Every coworker they’d hosted, every wife she’d befriended, they were expendable stepping stones for him, and, other than Anson, no one from those days still talked to her.
She couldn’t look at Ben, not in this instant, so she stared out the window and across the lawn, to where she saw one light turned on in the next-door house, one window open, one silhouette leaning against the frame. She might have ruined that friendship on her own, but that it was even there for her to ruin proved there was still loyalty in the world even if she had become so far removed that she couldn’t remember how it felt.
“This isn’t working. We’re not working.”
Ben reached for a bookmark, which had been precisely stationed on the nightstand, and folded the dictionary in his lap. He took off his glasses and set them on top. A frown formed and he nodded slowly, as if she had said everything he was thinking.
“I know.”
She hugged him and he patted her on the back. It wasn’t the hug of a husband and wife, they both knew that, not anymore, but it comforted her nonetheless; a final admission, the conclusion of one chapter and, at last, they could head out in their different ways, two ships on divergent courses, and write another.
The End
