“Yes, I was standing in the driveway, crying. Like an idiot. M.’s father got out of his car. He watched K.’s car until it drove out of sight. Then he looked back at me. His eyes were red and squinty. He smelled like he’d been drinking at the Crystal, not like he’d been shopping at the Big M. ‘Why aren’t you grocery shopping?’ I asked him.
“‘The store was closed,’ he said.
“‘The grocery store was closed?’ I said. ‘At three in the afternoon?’
“‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I never made it to the store. I was out drinking at the Crystal. Now why don’t you tell me why K. was here and why you’re crying?’”
“And then you told him the truth?” I ask, and she nods. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I just wanted it to be over,” she says. “Our marriage had been over for so long anyway. I didn’t want to pretend that it wasn’t anymore.”
“And this happened on Friday, the twentieth of March, 200–?” When I say that, C. starts to cry finally, so loudly that the falling snow and the empty, snow-covered Square can’t muffle it. “You sound like M.,” she says.
“Who sounds like M.’s dad,” I say. Which reminds me of the last thing I need to know. “Why did M.’s dad let him think K. was his student?”
“Because,” C. says, “he didn’t want M. to think his mother was a whore.”
“Don’t say that,” I say.
“M.’s father turned me into a shrew,” C. says. “And K. turned me into a whore.”
“Don’t say shit like that,” I say.
“The question is, what are you going to turn me into?”
I’m going to turn you into my very own, I think. I’m going to take you to the NCMHP meeting tomorrow and we’re going to forget all this. We’re going to act like this never happened and doesn’t matter. But that’s impossible — impossible, not because I don’t want anything to do with C. now that I know her secret, but because she only wanted something to do with me because I was a man who didn’t know she had a secret. I know that now, just as I know it’s impossible to turn C. back into K.’s lover or T.’s wife or anything else. Except, possibly, M.’s mother.
“I think M. is actually telling the truth this time,” I say. “I think his dad really is in the VA hospital.”
M.’s mother nods like she’s hearing some expected piece of news. “So you’re going to turn me into a fool,” she says. “Just like M.”
“No, no,” I say. “M. says he suffered a head injury in Iraq. A really bad one.”
“You know, you’ve been a big help with M.,” M.’s mother says. “You’ve been a huge help. Massive. But I think I’ll take it from here.”
“I think these letters really are from M.’s dad,” I say, waving the manila envelope at her. “I know you think M. wrote them and paid someone to send them to you from an army post office. But I don’t think he did. I think his dad did. I think his dad really did send these from Iraq.”
“How did you get your hands on that anyway?” she asks. She sticks out a gloved hand and I put the envelope in it.
“I stole it off your dresser,” I admit. “The night you took M. out to the Crystal. The same night I read M.’s journal.” I see the look on her face, and I clarify. “No, no. His real journal. It’s in the window seat. It’s different from the diary you read. It tells the truth, somewhat.”
“You broke into my house?”
I consider defending myself by saying that I didn’t actually break in, that the door was unlocked. But I don’t say that. Instead I say, “Please don’t tear up those letters. M. hasn’t read them yet. He still thinks his dad stopped writing him four months ago and he can’t figure out why. It’s killing him. Please don’t tear up those letters.”
M.’s mother stares at me for a moment, like I must be kidding; I stare back in a way that must suggest I’m not. But she doesn’t tear up the letters, at least. She puts the manila envelope in her coat pocket, turns, and begins walking to the only car parked on our side of the Square.
“If you’d just go down to the VA hospital,” I say. “M. says they called you two weeks ago.”
“M. says,” she says as she unlocks and opens her car door. “You and I both know whoever called me was someone M. convinced to call me and pretend to be from the VA hospital. You know it wasn’t really the hospital calling, and you know M.’s father isn’t a patient there, just like you know M.’s father didn’t really write those letters from Iraq. You know it’s just like M. to mess with me like this. You know all that.”
“Listen,” I say, “I’ve seen the guy in the VA hospital.”
“You saw T.?” she asks. M.’s mother cocks her head, and her eyes get wide. For the first time, it seems possible that she might be able to believe that I could be telling the truth about M.’s dad. “You’re sure it was T.?”
“Well, I didn’t actually get to read his ID bracelet before the guards kicked me out of his room,” I admit. “But it certainly might have been M.’s father.” M.’s mother closes her eyes and shakes her head, and then when she opens her eyes they are small and black, and once again she looks like a woman who doesn’t believe anyone is capable of telling her the truth about anything. “If M.’s dad isn’t in the VA hospital,” I say, “then where is he?”
“Who knows?” M.’s mother says. “He’s probably in another town, in another bar, watching another football game.” Before I can say anything to that, M.’s mother says, “Good-bye,” then throws her briefcase onto the front passenger seat of her car.
“What can I do to make you believe me?” I ask.
M.’s mother turns to answer. Her face is blank, impassive; she looks like someone who doesn’t care, or like someone who very much doesn’t want to care, or like someone who very much wants you to believe she doesn’t care. In any case, M.’s mother looks at me the way you look at someone when you don’t intend to see him again; she looks at me, I’m certain, the way she looked at her husband ______ months ago, when he said he maybe should go to Iraq, too. She looks at me in a way that people probably looked at Exley right before he got drunk so he could forget the way that people looked at him, or the way they looked at him right after he got drunk so he could forget that people looked at him that way.
“Nothing,” she says, and then gets into her car and heads toward home. I watch as her car turns onto Washington Street. The moment it is out of sight, I feel drunk — too drunk, considering that I haven’t had any vodka in ______ hours, but not nearly drunk enough, considering how drunk I need to be.
Yardley
It was seven thirty. I was sitting in the kitchen when Harold knocked on the door. I let him in. He was holding a library book; I could see the tag on its spine. The book went bang when he dropped it on the counter. I picked it up and read the title on the cover: Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley. I knew it was something I wasn’t going to want to read. Harold knew it, too. That’s why he wasn’t talking: he was going to let the book do all the talking for him.
“Shut up, Harold,” I said. And then he hit me! Harold actually hit me; he reached over the counter and punched me right in the mouth, with his fist! I couldn’t believe it! I tasted blood, and so I put my hand over my mouth and spat and then took my hand away and saw that I’d spat out a tooth. I ran my tongue around and found a space where my left front tooth used to be. The space felt fleshy and weird against my tongue; it felt like I was putting my tongue someplace where it wasn’t supposed to be. I couldn’t believe I’d finally lost my tooth. I’d waited so long to lose one. Even before I’d been promoted to seventh grade, I’d been the only one in my class not to have lost a tooth. Now I didn’t see what the big deal was. The tooth was so small, too small even to be gross. It didn’t look like anything anyone would give you money for. It made me sad to look at it. So I tossed it in the garbage. Then I looked up at Harold. But he was gone. That made me much sadder than the tooth. I had other teeth. But Harold had been my only friend for so long, and I knew now he wasn’t anymore.