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The sight of a crossword book on his knees glimpsed through the half-open bathroom door as he sat on the commode. The smell of cologne on his cheeks, which meant that the Suburban would be gone from the driveway for a day or two and his side of the bed would be empty for a night or two because he had to straighten out someone’s accounting in New Hampshire or Vermont (B, B amp; A now had clients in all the northern New England states). Sometimes the smell meant a trip to look at someone’s coin collection at an estate sale, because not all the numismatic buying and selling that went with their side-business could be accomplished by computer, they both understood that. The sight of his old black suitcase, the one he would never give up no matter how much she nagged, in the front hall. His slippers at the end of the bed, one always tucked into the other. The glass of water on his endtable, with the orange vitamin pill next to it, on that month’s issue of Coin amp; Currency Collecting. How he always said, “More room out than there is in” after belching and “Look out, gas attack!” after he farted. His coat on the first hook in the hall. The reflection of his toothbrush in the mirror (he would still be using the same one he’d had when they got married, Darcy believed, if she didn’t regularly replace it). The way he dabbed his lips with his napkin after every second or third bite of food. The careful arrangement of camping gear (always including an extra compass) before he and Stan set out with yet another bunch of nine-year-olds on the hike up Dead Man’s Trail-a dangerous and terrifying trek that took them through the woods behind the Golden Grove Mall and came out at Weinberg’s Used Car City. The look of his nails, always short and clean. The taste of Dentyne on his breath when they kissed. These things and ten thousand others comprised the secret history of the marriage.
She knew he must have his own history of her, everything from the ci
Now it was twenty-seven years, or-she had amused herself figuring this one day using the calculator function on her computer-nine thousand eight hundred and fifty-five days. Almost a quarter of a million hours and over fourteen million minutes. Of course some of that time he’d been gone on business, and she’d taken a few trips herself (the saddest to be with her parents in Mi
Did she know everything about him? Of course not. No more than he knew everything about her-how she sometimes (mostly on rainy days or on those nights when the insomnia was on her) gobbled Butterfingers or Baby Ruths, for instance, eating the candybars even after she no longer wanted them, even after she felt sick to her stomach. Or how she thought the new mailman was sort of cute. There was no knowing everything, but she felt that after twenty-seven years, they knew all the important things. It was a good marriage, one of the fifty percent or so that kept working over the long haul. She believed that in the same unquestioning way she believed that gravity would hold her to the earth when she walked down the sidewalk.
Until that night in the garage. – 2 -
The TV controller stopped working, and there were no double-A batteries in the kitchen cabinet to the left of the sink. There were D-cells and C-cells, even an unopened pack of the teeny tiny triple-As, but no goddarn frigging double-As. So she went out to the garage because she knew Bob kept a stash of Duracells there, and that was all it took to change her life. It was as if everyone was in the air, high in the air. One lousy little step in the wrong direction and you were falling.
The kitchen and the garage were co
She fumbled for the trio of switches beside the door and shoved them up with the heel of her hand. The overhead fluorescents buzzed on. The garage was spacious and neat, the tools hung on the pegboards and Bob’s workbench in good order. The floor was a concrete slab painted battleship gray. There were no oilstains; Bob said that oilstains on a garage floor either meant the people who owned the garage were ru
“It’s just as easy to pull it in,” he had said on more than one occasion (when you were married for twenty-seven years, original comments tended to be thin on the ground). “Just use the door opener on the visor.”
“I like it where I can see it,” she always replied, although the real reason was her fear of clipping the garage bay door while backing out. She hated backing. And she supposed he knew it… just as she knew that he had a peculiar fetish about keeping the paper money in his wallet heads-side up and would never leave a book facedown and open when he paused in his reading-because, he said, it broke the spines.
At least the garage was warm; big silver pipes (probably you called them ducts, but Darcy wasn’t quite sure) crisscrossed the ceiling. She walked to the bench, where several square tins were lined up, each neatly labeled: BOLTS, SCREWS, HINGES HASPS amp; L-CLAMPS, PLUMBING, and-she found this rather endearing-ODDS amp; ENDS. There was a calendar on the wall featuring a Sports Illustrated swimsuit girl who looked depressingly young and sexy; to the left of the calendar two photos had been tacked up. One was an old snap of Do
The cabinet with the batteries bore a Dymo tape label reading ELECTRICAL STUFF and was mounted to the left of the photos. Darcy moved in that direction without looking where she was going-trusting to Bob’s just-short-of-maniacal neatness-and stumbled over a cardboard box that hadn’t been entirely pushed under the workbench. She tottered, then grabbed the workbench at the last possible second. She broke off a fingernail-painful and a
She could simply have pushed the box back under with the side of her foot-later she would realize this and ponder it carefully, like a mathematician going over an abstruse and complicated equation. She was in a hurry, after all. But she saw a Patternworks knitting catalogue on top of the box, and knelt down to grab it and take it in with the batteries. And when she lifted it out, there was a Brookstone catalogue she had misplaced just underneath. And beneath that Paula Young… Talbots… Forzieri… Bloomingdale’s…