Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

It was a nice house. The interior was clean and neat throughout, furnished simply but comfortably. In the front room there were homemade curtains in the windows and magazines placed precisely on the three-legged coffee table. The furniture needed dusting, but otherwise everything was immaculate. The one expensive piece of furniture in the room was a combination television-radio-stereo. There were pictures arranged on its top in matching sterling silver frames — a wedding photo of a man and woman, more recent photographs of the same two persons, and variety of pictures of their children, some singly and some to groups. There were evidently three children, two boys and a girl, and the latest photographic evidence put the oldest boy in his early teens and the youngest around six, with the girl somewhere in the middle.

She was trying to figure out how to turn on the radio when Jimmie John came down the stairs and entered the room. “Tub and shower upstairs,” he reported. “And a big old brass bed with a mattress that about swallows you up. Turn that off, why don’t you.”

“I thought you might want to hear the news.”

“I don’t want to hear so much as a syllable for the next eight hours. Makes no difference what’s on the news. Whatever they say, we’re gonna do the same thing. Namely shower and eat and get some sleep.”

“Suppose they come home while we’re sleeping?”

“They won’t come home.”

For a moment she thought he meant that they were dead, that he had killed them after all and dragged their corpses to the cellar to spare her feelings. Then he said, “You got to learn to read signs. See how there’s a layer of dust on everything? This is a neat woman who lives here. The way she keeps this house you know she’s not the kind to go without dusting. Plus I looked at the refrigerator, and there’s nothing in it but things that wouldn’t spoil. No milk, no vegetables, no meat. They’re on a trip, it looks to me.”

“They’ll have to come back sometime.”

“It won’t be today.” He took hold of her shoulders. “Here’s something else,” he said. “All the farmhouses in the state of Colorado and we came to this one. First one we so much as took a look at, and not a soul around. Now you don’t often find a farmhouse where everybody’s gone. Too many things need doing every day. My guess is something came up sudden that they had to pull the kids out of school and everybody pile in the car. Say a death in the family and they all had to go to the funeral. So they make arrangements for someone to come by and milk the cow and throw some corn to the hens, and away they go.

“And as for them coming back, it won’t be today. It was meant for us to come to this particular house, maybe the only one in the county with nobody home. And the same thing that made it happen that way is gonna keep them from coming home today, and besides they wouldn’t come home at the beginning of a weekend, would they? They’ll be home Sunday night and not before.”

“Maybe it really was meant for us to come here.”

“Hell, didn’t I say it was? I’ll get the car out of sight in case some neighbor comes around before we’re out of here. That cow’s bag is down so the morning milkin’s already been done, but you never know who’s gonna wander by.”

“How did you notice about the cow?”

“Just happened to take it in. Why?”

“Oh, the way you notice things. I saw the dust and all and didn’t think.”

“Oh, you’d of thought it through for yourself in another couple of minutes,” he said. But she saw his face and saw he was proud of himself and pleased with her praising him.

He let her shower first. She waited in bed while he showered and shaved. When he joined her she said she didn’t think she could sleep.

“Because of sleeping all that time in the car.”

“That kind of sleep doesn’t do you any good. Real sleep in a real bed is what a person needs. How do you like the bed?”

“It’s so soft. I wish—”

“What?”

“I was just thinking I wished someday we could have a bed like this.”

“Someday maybe we will. Let me get you a glass of water.”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“No, to swallow these. Or better you just take one, not being used to them.”

“What are they?”

“Reds. They help you sleep. Go ahead, don’t be afraid of it. I’ll never give you anything that’s bad for you. I took two, but one’s all you’ll need.”

She washed the pill down with a sip of water. The water was very cold, with a slight mineral taste that she did not find at all objectionable. He went downstairs to make sure all the lights were off, then came back upstairs and got into bed beside her.

They made love. Slowly, gently, and toward the end the sleeping pill began to work and lent a dreamy slow-motion quality to the act. He used his hands on her for a long time, and then he took her, and when he shuddered and gasped on top of her a feeling of infinite peace went through her entire body.

There was a moment, between lovemaking and sleep, when bad thoughts began to come to her. But her mind was dull and the thoughts were wispy and formless, and before she could grab onto any of them everything slid out from under her and she slept.

She awoke frightened, unsure where she was, unable to distinguish reality from a ragged dream of pursuit. She lay still, her body cradled in the deep soft mattress, her face pressed into her pillow, and was afraid to open her eyes. She waited until she knew for certain just where she was and just what had happened.

Eyes open, she blinked at sunlight streaming through the chintz curtains. She was alone in the bedroom, and her first thought was that he had left her. Then she thought that he wouldn’t just leave her, that he would shoot her first, and she bit her lip fiercely, furious with herself for such disloyalty.

She walked to the doorway and called his name.

“Thought you’d sleep all day, girl.”

“What time is it?”

“Getting on for three o’clock. For someone who didn’t think she could sleep, you made a good stab at it.”

“I guess I was tired.”

“Well, throw some clothes on and get down here. Did you mean it when you said you knew how to cook? You got a chance to prove it.”

He had found bacon in the freezer and had time to thaw it, and fresh eggs stolen still warm from nests in the barn. The eggs came out a little rubbery, but he praised her cooking extravagantly and asked for more. She couldn’t figure out how to work the percolator but found a jar of instant coffee and made cups for both of them. They drank it black with sugar. She had always had coffee with cream in it, but discovered now that it was better without.

He had done some exploring while she slept. In the basement he found an old Maytag washing machine and a gas dryer, and after they had eaten she climbed down a steep flight of steps and loaded all their dirty clothes into the machine. While the clothes washed she sat with him in the front room. He had found a large leather-bound family photo album, and they sat together on the sofa and went through it, making up stories about the people in the photographs.

“Now this fellow here, he’s the bad uncle, the sumbitch nobody else can tolerate. See, he never amounted to much, you can just tell by those shifty little eyes there, but that one girl a couple of pages back, she was the ugly sister like we decided, and nobody else would marry her.”

“So he married her and the rest of the family can’t stand him but they put up a front for poor Jessica’s sake.”

“That’s just what they do. Have to put up with Tom to make old Jessie happy.”

“And he treats her terrible.”

“No, he treats her pretty good, actually, but he treats everybody else bad, and he’s so shiftless you can’t do a thing with him. They all think he married her for her money, but he actually does love her, for all that he’s a bad sumbitch to everybody else.”