To no one in particular Wade said, “Good thing my kid went back down to Concord with her mother.”
Frankie nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “How’s that?”
“The snow and all.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Margie took a step back and looked into Wade’s eyes, and he instantly turned away. Nick Wickham, wiping his hands on a towel, had come out of the kitchen and moved swiftly to refill several mugs of coffee for the men at the counter.
“Gimme a big one to go!” Wade called. Too loudly, he knew. “Cream, no sugar!” Wade suddenly wished that he had not stopped at the restaurant, that he had gone on plowing the road, alone, cold and content inside his dreams. Margie’s concerned gaze and the slightly perplexed expression on Frankie’s face and Chick’s expectant look were all too uncomfortably familiar to him. Other people were in one world; he was in a second. And the distance between their worlds caused other people concern and perplexity and made them curious about him — for here he was alone in his world; and there they were gathered together in theirs.
He lit his cigarette and saw that his hands were trembling. Look at the bastards, shaking like little frozen dogs begging at the door to be let inside. Wade felt fragile, about to shatter. When he was sixteen he had felt this particular kind of fragility for the first time, and he had gone on rediscovering it, suddenly, with no apparent cause, ever since. One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else’s sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.
Margie said, “Jill went home with her mother? I thought she was up for the weekend.” Then she said, “Oh-h,” and her hand reached out and touched his forearm. She put her tray down on the floor, leaning it against the side of the booth, and reached toward Wade as if to embrace him.
He stepped back and stared at a spot on her shoulder, as if she were his girlfriend Lillian Pittman and he were sixteen again, stopping her with his movement and the sudden rigidity of his face. He had told her about his father’s beating him again, revealed it to her without planning or even wanting to, blurted out the information in the middle of a conversation about something else. “My father laid into me something wicked again last night,” he said, and Lillian, sweet innocent Lillian, made that same move toward him, just like Margie, hands reaching out, her long narrow lovely face swarming, it seemed to him, with pity and bewilderment, and with perversely detached curiosity as well, for she knew nothing of violence then, and it seemed both the most horrible and the most inexplicable thing she could imagine. Entranced as much as repelled by what he had told her of it, she nonetheless knew nothing of the light and heat he felt when his father beat him, nothing of the profound clarity of feeling that emerged from the center of his chest when it happened, nothing of the exquisite joining of all his various parts that he experienced when his father swung the boy’s lean body around and punched it and shoved it to the floor while his mother’s face howled in the distance. He could in no way tell her of these things; he could barely know of them himself. All he could know was that he had left out of his account something that was crucial and filled him with shame, which is why he simultaneously moved toward her for solace and pushed her away.
“Just forget I said it,” he murmured. “Just forget I said anything about it.”
Margie let her arms drop to her sides. “About what?”
“You know. Jill.”
She said, “C’mon, just a minute,” and moving swiftly, slipped her arm around Wade’s arm and turned him away from the booth toward the small pine-paneled back room where the video games and pinball machines were located, empty of players at this hour, shadowy and smelling of old cigarette smoke. Nick hollered, “Marge!” as she stepped through the door, and she shushed him with a wave.
Wade leaned against the Playboy machine, exhaled noisily and said, “Listen, Margie, I got to take care of business. Christ. I got to get…” He trailed off, and he spread his hands, as if in actuality he had nothing to do. Looming behind him was a brightly lit picture of Hugh Hefner in silk pajamas and bathrobe, pipe in smirking mouth, forelock dangling, and four naughtily unclad adolescent girls with provocative leers and outsized breasts like pink balloons slinging themselves around him. Wade shifted onto one elbow and seemed to study the picture. “Don’t you shut these things off at night? Wastes a lot of electricity.”
“Never mind that,” she said. “Chick and Frankie and those boys were playing already this morning. Anyhow, I don’t want to talk about that. And neither do you.” She paused and placed her large hands on both his shoulders, as if blessing him. “What happened to Jill?” she asked.
“I got sick of arguing with her. Sent her home.”
“Truth?”
“Yeah. Nothing happened. Nothing ’happened’ to her.” He suddenly pictured Jill crumpled on the highway, broken like a pumpkin under the flashing yellow light by the school, the car that hit her, a black BMW, racing away into darkness. “I’m … I’m going to start up one of those custody suits. I don’t fucking give a shit,” he said. “You know?” He was aware that his eyes were filling with tears, but he was not weeping: he was not sad.
“Don’t be a horse’s ass,” she said. “You don’t mean that.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do mean it.”
“No, you don’t. You’re pissed, Wade, that’s all. You ought to let yourself cool off from this one for a few days and then just sit down and for once have yourself a long talk with Lillian. Straight talk, I mean. You know? Work it out with her. Let her know honestly just how this kind of stuff makes you feel,” she said. Then she added weakly, “Lillian’s not out to get you, Wade. You know?”
“The hell she isn’t. Lillian’s been trying to nail me to a cross since the day I met her. Since fucking high school. No. I’m gonna hire me a fucking lawyer from Concord and get this thing, this divorce thing, rearranged. I am. I been thinking about it, a lot. I was too fucked up and all, when we got the divorce, so I just hid out and took whatever crumbs they were willing to toss me, her and that goddamned lawyer of hers.” He held his nose with thumb and forefinger and yanked. “I didn’t even have a regular divorce lawyer, that’s how dumb and fucked up I was. I’m embarrassed to say it, but it’s true. And now she can do any goddamned thing she wants, anything — move to Concord, get married. Move to fucking California, if she wants. Meanwhile, I still got to send her three hundred bucks a month child support or go directly to jail, do not pass go. Only, when it comes to actually being with my own kid, being a real father and all, I don’t have a single say-so,” he said. “It’s like she owns Jill or something and only loans her out to me or something, and then only when she feels like it. And when she wants her back, she comes and gets her. Like last night. That’s not right,” he pronounced. “People aren’t property. Nobody owns anybody, especially not kids. Right’s right.”
He stood up straight and drew Margie’s hands off his shoulders and smiled. “Look, I got to get out of here. I got to get my coffee and climb back onto that goddamned grader. Mr. Gordon LaRiviere’s going to be royally pissed at me. Nick the Wick’s probably pissed at you already.”
“Nick the Wick,” she said, smiling.
He looked directly into Margie’s face. “That goddamned woman,” he said. “Lillian thinks she and her goddamned husband can just drive up here and cart Jill off like that and leave me … leave me all alone like this. It’s more than pissed, Margie. I’m a whole lot more than pissed. No shit. I been that plenty, and I know the difference. This is different.” He spun around and headed for the door.