Laura Benedict: The Erstwhile Groom

* * * *

Livia comes out of the florist’s wearing an irritated look. More money, he thinks. They had saved for Mitzy’s wedding, but he had hoped that it would come a few years later, after the money had gained more interest.

“They wanted half the final bill,” Livia says, getting into the Chevrolet.

“We’re not going to pay it,” Kurt says. “They can try to come and get it from me.”

Livia shuts the door. “I already gave them a check,” she says.

Kurt drives away from the florist’s in silence. Is this how things are going to be, now that he is retired? Did she think that she would be making the money decisions? If he’d had any idea, he would’ve stayed on the city payroll, no matter how good the early retirement deal had been.

“I’ll deal with the dressmaker,” he says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the edge of Livia’s mouth lift just slightly. Is she laughing at him? He chooses to think that, given what she’d just done, she wouldn’t dare.

* * * *

Danny Kelley was known to Kurt, and many others, as a small-time criminal who dealt in liquor and cigarettes without tax stamps, even some marijuana. Kurt was astounded that his Livia would be involved with such a man.

The lovers met the next Wednesday, and the next. It was on a Monday morning that Kurt came into the shop to find that Livia was gone.

* * * *

Brent’s car is in the driveway when they get home. Eda Hidebaugh stands with a hose, watering the plot of struggling strawberry plants at the edge of her yard. Kurt can tell by the way she tries to wave them over that she wants to talk.

“She would have to be out here,” Livia says. “Will you deal with her too?”

“Why are you making a joke?” Kurt says. “Just go inside.”

They walk together to the back door. Hearing Eda’s tremulous Hello, Kurt doesn’t turn around, but raises his hand in a brief wave.

The kitchen is cool and silent in the midday heat. Mitzy has remembered to close the windows before noon. Kurt wonders what state he’ll find her in with Brent there. He tells himself that they should have known better than to believe her when she told them that she wanted nothing to do with him ever again. But she’d seemed so resolute that morning, her tears dried, her voice calm. It hadn’t been like the other times she’d called off the wedding when she’d been almost hysterical in her vehemence. Her mercurial nature was a puzzlement to him. He wondered if it didn’t have something to do with Livia’s having an Italian grandmother on her father’s side.

“Mitzy?” Livia calls softly down the hallway. Kurt follows her. He doesn’t like how quiet the house is. He expected weeping, or words of anger — not this fraught silence.

Livia enters the light-filled living room a second before him. “Oh good Christ,” she says.

Kurt looks down to the floor to see his daughter, her blouse open and her skirt kicked away, lying beneath Brent, whose bare behind is glaringly white in the sunshine. Mitzy makes a low moaning sound; it is not a sound of passion, but of the deepest pain.

Kurt pushes Livia out of his way and grabs Brent by the shoulders, expecting to get him off of Mitzy and give him the beating of his life. But when he tries to lift Brent away, the weight is such that he can only shove him to the side and onto the rug. It’s then that he sees the kitchen knife jutting from the wound on Brent’s neck and the blood soaking his daughter’s half-naked body. Freed, Mitzy rolls slowly onto her side and curls into a ball, still moaning, sounding as though she will never stop.

* * * *

Danny Kelley lived in a row house down near the river. Kurt bought a car with the money he’d been saving to buy a ring for Livia and took to spending hours in the hillside park overlooking the shabby neighborhood, waiting, watching for signs of Danny Kelley and Livia coming and going from the house. Livia wore different clothes — even her walk was different, more languorous, seductive. He was losing her a little more each day.

* * * *

Brent’s body is heavy, but Kurt must wrestle with it alone. Livia has taken Mitzy upstairs to bathe and calm her. He could hardly bear to watch as Mitzy shambled away, her head pressed to her mother’s side, Livia’s arm supporting her. It’s best that neither of them should see what he is going to do.

The shelves are so stiff on their supports that Kurt nearly falls back more than once onto the cans littering the basement floor as he yanks them off the wall. Twenty-some years of rust and dirt has secured them even with the shades he’d hung as protection. He stacks the shelves against the wall and stands looking at the exposed door.

* * * *

Danny Kelley struggled.

It was late afternoon, just before five o’clock, when they approached the shabby roadhouse on the Kentucky side of the river. Kurt had followed Danny Kelley there before and knew where to pull off the road and into the trees as Danny Kelley went on to the roadhouse’s driveway — in fact, Kurt knew enough about Danny Kelley’s routes to offer them to any policeman who wanted to know. How easy would it have been just to have Danny Kelley arrested. But then Livia would have been shamed further, and Kurt would never have had her. His pride demanded that much.

Kurt got out of his car and moved quickly through the thin woods separating him from the roadhouse. Several yards from Danny Kelley’s flashy Buick, he stopped, watching as Danny Kelley, loaded down with a pair of crates, was let inside the building.

At first, Kurt hadn’t any idea but that he would wrap his hands around Danny Kelley’s throat and squeeze the life from him, but as he slipped into the back of the Buick his hand came to rest on one of the ropes Danny Kelley used to secure his bottles.

He waited, barely breathing. Sweat ran in a rivulet down one of his temples and into his eye. As he twisted the coarse rope in his hands, his decision — which had seemed, in the beginning, to be a painfully obvious one — began to feel to him like madness, like a fever that had overtaken him, but was now cooling.

Before he could reflect on his thought’s logical conclusion — that a sane man would simply have declared his love for Livia and wooed her with gifts and letters and promises, as, surely, Danny Kelley had done — Danny Kelley was in the car and had started the engine. Kurt fought against the urge to close his eyes as he dropped the rope around Danny Kelley’s neck and jerked it backwards, knocking the man’s cheap straw hat to the seat. Danny Kelley’s hands were suddenly in his hair, grabbing frantically at Kurt’s ears; his fingers jammed into Kurt’s eyes and nostrils. Only the Buick’s enormous steering wheel kept Danny Kelley in his seat as his body tried to arch away from Kurt. It seemed to Kurt that an hour passed before Danny Kelley stopped moving. The rope felt as though it had seared itself into Kurt’s flesh, but for a long time he was afraid to let it go.

* * * *

Brent’s body lies on the basement floor, wrapped in the area rug from the living room, surrounded by cans of apples, carrots, green beans, corn, stew, yams, beets, and sauerkraut. Only the rug’s padding, which Livia had insisted that they buy when they brought the rug home, had kept the blood from soaking through to the living room’s wood floor.

It takes some work to get the door to the hidden room open; Kurt forgot that he had nailed it shut. As he works, he can’t get the image of Brent’s face in death out of his mind. The boy’s pale forehead was broad and open, his empty eyes a bright, honest blue. He was from good German stock. Brent, even though he’d sometimes treated Mitzy shabbily, always had an air of innocence about him that Danny Kelley had never had. He was nothing like Danny Kelley.