“So that’s what you call looking for your cat?”
“I’ve been doing that too,” he replies.
“Are you sleeping with her?”
“That what George Ray told you?”
“George Ray?” She does her best to sound confused, glad for once of the darkness. “I was on the couch tonight and heard you going out.”
“So you followed me.”
She isn’t going to let him make her feel guilty. “How old is Lydia?” she asks. “Fifteen?”
“Sixteen. So yeah, screwing her would be legal up here, if that’s where your mind’s at. But we’ve just been hanging out.”
A thirty-year-old man hanging out with a teenage girl. He must think Maggie’s an idiot.
“What’s in that?” she asks, gesturing to the can he’s holding.
“Spray paint,” he replies, throwing it to her feet. “She brought it. I don’t know why.” Maggie waits, until he heaves a sigh and says, “The other night I made a joke about writing something on the wall. Maybe she thought I was serious.”
“Kids are impressionable,” she agrees.
“Oh, fuck off.”
Then Maggie remembers her conversation with Rhea in the bathroom and grows angrier. “I can’t believe you’re doing this under Rhea’s nose.”
“She isn’t wife of the year, you know.”
“And trying to get George Ray sent home. You’re such an asshole.”
“He did tell you, didn’t he?”
She doesn’t reply. Instead, she says, “If someone found out about the girl and you’re still seeing her, you’re certifiable.” Then, although it would probably be better not to, she adds, “Are you back to sticking needles in your arms too?”
“Rhea told you, huh?” There’s a wistfulness in his voice.
“She’s worried about you.”
“Sure she is.” Maggie tries to imagine what he and Rhea have been through for him to speak the words with such sadness and incredulity.
“Does Lydia know you’re married?” Maggie asks, and he gives a bark of laughter. “You doing drugs with her?”
“Nothing hard.” In a softer tone, he says, “Listen, if you’ve talked to Rhea, you know things have been tough for us.”
“So now you’re making things tougher?”
“I know I’m messing up.” There’s an ache in his voice. “Maggie, I’m hanging by a thread.”
“Okay,” she murmurs.
“Promise you won’t tell anybody about tonight,” he says, and she hesitates. George Ray made the same vow, and what good did that do?
“You’ll stop seeing the girl?” she asks. It doesn’t feel right to bargain over such things. But Dimitri promises, and all at once there seems nothing else to say.
They start back toward the house together. As they go, she has an urge to extract something more from him, a promise to stop arguing with Fletcher, to drop the complaining about George Ray. It would practically be blackmail. Is that what’s necessary to keep this place together?
They’re almost out of the orchard when Dimitri stops and grabs her arm. “You smell that?”
She inhales and gets a whiff of something awful. “Smells like shit,” she replies.
“Cat shit. John-John. That little bugger’s around here somewhere.” He peers into the branches overhead.
“How do you know it’s him?”
“Because he’s a vegetarian cat. Their shit smells different.”
“A vegetarian cat,” repeats Maggie with dismay.
“Yeah, I know. It was Rhea’s idea.”
“I’m starting to understand why he ran off.”
As Dimitri goes through the trees whispering John-John’s name, she can hear his hopefulness. She joins him in the search, but they find nothing. When they take up their route back to the farmhouse, it occurs to her that all those times he skipped out on work claiming to look for John-John, he was actually doing it. Probably it’s how he came to meet the girl. Maggie has this apprehension and doesn’t know whether to think more or less of him for it.
The next morning, she finds George Ray alone in the barracks and tells him she has taken care of things, then provides a cursory account of the night’s happenings. When she says she didn’t betray his confidence to Dimitri, he seems pleased. It’s only after she has returned to the house that she reflects on George Ray’s warm eyes, his grateful smile, and thinks again about the fact that he told her rather than Fletcher the story of his encounter. Probably it’s as simple as he said: he didn’t want Fletcher overreacting. Yes, that must be it. She barely lets herself consider that maybe she wasn’t the only one glad to share a secret between them.
5
When Maggie enters the grocery store in Virgil, the checkout girl asks if she has brought more film to be developed. Obligingly, Maggie hands over a paper bag, then gets herself a cart and pulls out her shopping list. She has gone some distance along the first aisle before she looks up to find the way forward impeded by Wale, slouching in a leather jacket. Beside him is the priest from the stone church. He has a golf cap perched on his high forehead, and his eyebrows look thick enough to be painted on with grease.
“Miss Dunne,” he says, sounding genial and cautious at once. “Is good to see you again.”
“You two know each other?” she asks.
Wale and the priest exchange a glance, as if to confer about a proper reply.
“We just met,” says Wale.
“This friend of yours, he is telling me about your father’s work in Laos,” says the priest. “Your father sounds like a remarkable man.” His eyes narrow when he sees Maggie’s irritation, but he presses on. “I wish you to understand, at church you are welcome. I am happy for you to be there—” He stumbles for the words. “—in different arrangement from past time.”
“I’m apostate,” she says.
“But already you go to church once,” he observes. “Something draws you, no?”
“The rain,” she replies, and he smiles as if accustomed to recalcitrance.
“Rain is good beginning.” Looking at his watch, he announces he must depart, then raises the wire basket he’s holding, with its still life of bundled carrots and a single lemon, as if to prove the matter’s urgency.
Once he has disappeared down the aisle, Maggie turns on Wale. “Why were you telling him about my father?”
“Just small talk,” he replies.
She doesn’t believe him. “So this is what you do now? You gossip about my family in grocery stores?”
“Father Josef’s not so bad. I think you should give him a chance. He could help you with your hang-ups around your dad.”
She doesn’t need Wale telling her what her hang-ups are. “My father and I got along fine until he found God. Then we—” Abruptly she stops. An old woman in horn-rimmed glasses is pushing an empty cart toward them. “Look,” says Maggie more quietly. “There was something I wanted to ask you.”
She tells him about her conversation with Gran and the news of her father’s missed call. As she speaks, Wale’s face seems to freeze.
“What day was your father supposed to call?”
When she tells him, he falls silent. Finally she slaps the handle of her cart so hard her shopping list goes curlicueing to the floor. “I only told you about this so you’d say everything was all right.”
“Sorry. Yeah, of course. It’s probably fine.” He doesn’t even try to sound convincing.
“His ride must have run out of gas, right? Or the phone lines went down.”
He studies her face. “You really haven’t heard from him? Nothing at all?”
“Like I said, not since May.” But that sounds worse than it is. “It’s only because I asked him not to write. He’s talked with my grandmother plenty of times.”