David Gates - Jernigan

She shook her head. Didn’t look at me. “Weird beyond belief,” she said. “I was just — I don’t know, you probably won’t believe this, I mean why should you, but I actually today did get the name of this lawyer that Tim’s sister used. When she got her divorce.”

“Did you,” I said.

“I had a really long talk with Tim today,” she said. “He really helped me.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“But so now there’s this,” she said.

The stove grumbled: something inside shifting and settling. Me in the Morris chair; Martha, feet tucked under her, in the corner of the couch farthest from me. Each of us sitting still, yet voyaging through deep space, as if aboard the Starship Enterprise, where there was no north or south or even up or down, really. On the one hand, I wanted to see this whole deal blow into a million pieces right now, as in the Big Bang theory, and to get in the car and head for New Hampshire. But on the other hand, I hoped this would be just one more dustup, and over by the time Star Trek came on. Maybe tonight, in tribute to Christmas, they’d have the one about the space people Captain Kirk thinks are sun-worshippers but actually turn out to be space Christians who worship the capital-S Son (i.e., of God). Though probably, if they were going to run it, they would have run it last night. Martha and I were really out there, boy. This whole thing was making me remember when Judith and I got married. Most of our friends were there (no family except Rick: she had vetoed her mother, forcing me to veto my father as compensation) and the minister had charged them to “support and defend” our marriage. Defend , yet: a minister in touch with his times. What he meant, I imagine, was that when one of us wanted to bag it, one of them was supposed to talk us out of it. Or that Uncle Fred wasn’t supposed to introduce me to women he worked with anymore. But with me and Martha it had been just the two of us: no supporters, no defenders. Not that the supporters and defenders had done me and Judith much good in the long run. But me and Martha: even the kids had cut us loose as soon as they’d managed to get us together. And of course we didn’t even know each other. I looked out the window. Snow really coming down now, boy.

“So this is actually true,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was so wrong not to tell you.”

“Amazing,” I said. “I thought — I mean, you led me to think — that I was walking into one situation, whereas I was actually walking into a whole other situation. Which if I had known about—”

“So in other words I was right,” she said. “It would have made a difference to you.”

“How can I say from hindsight?”

“Oh Peter, don’t bullshit me. Not at this late date.”

“Well? You’ve been bullshitting me , right? You were presenting this thing as this nice regular little American family that just somehow happened to run into a teensy weensy leetle speck of trouble.” I pinched thumb and forefinger to show the dishonesty of it all. “Only later do I find out”—I started flipping fingers up to keep count—“A, that your daughter knows how to shoot up drugs; B, that your husband has been in the slammer; and C, that you’re not even divorced from this character. And D, whatever creepy shit went on with him and your daughter. Plus him hitting you and God knows what-all else that you’re still not telling me.”

“You believed exactly what you wanted to believe, Peter,” she said. “Did you actually think there were all these nice wholesome families just ready and waiting for you to come along? You’re a drunk whose drunk wife killed herself. And you want to know something really pathetic? You looked good to me.”

“So maybe we’re even,” I said. “You’re disabused, I’m disabused.”

“So I guess I should’ve known,” she said. “That you couldn’t actually be a friend to me without knowing what you were being a friend to. Except I was afraid to tell you because then you wouldn’t want to be my friend. Catch-22.”

“Something happened,” I said. Right over her head.

She nodded. “Danny told you?”

Huh, I thought, so something did happen. Here it comes. “Sketchy version,” I said.

She fetched a sigh. “I really didn’t know,” she said. “I mean, maybe I subconsciously knew, but I really didn’t until I kind of walked in one day and he was—” She hung down her head and cried, like Tom Dooley. Fucking Tom Dooley anyway: years since we thought of that , probably.

I must have gone off onto Tom Dooley in order to distance myself.

“And this is the person you’re still married to,” I said. Not often that I found myself in a superior moral position; I wanted to see what it felt like to push it a little.

“You don’t understand,” she said, once she’d pulled herself together enough. “It’s probably, you know, not very understandable. But I did kick him out of the house, and I told the police he’d hit me and been threatening us, which was true as far as it went, and I got a court order for him to keep away from us. And I also got Clarissa right into therapy after.”

“So why is she not still in therapy?”

“Peter,” she said. “You see how we live. And Rusty’s always going to send money and then he doesn’t, and then a bunch of other stuff was supposed to have worked out and it didn’t, and it’s just been really really hard. Ever since, really, when they sent him away. Like before Clarissa was even born.”

I shook my head. “There are free places you can go,” I said, based on nothing whatsoever. “There’s the school shrink, for Christ’s sake.” This I did know. Danny had gone a couple of times when his grades dropped so badly. The shrink thought it had something to do with his mother dying. Hey, not for nothing was this guy pulling down twenty-five big ones or whatever it was.

“Right,” she said. “And do you know how many kids he sees in the course of one day?”

This was all getting boring and technical. Plus my hand hurt.

“Why the hell didn’t you divorce him?” I said. “You certainly had grounds. If you’d divorced him, he’d have to send you money, or else they’d throw him back in the jug.”

“I was afraid what he might do,” she said. “Really, just going through the thing itself would have been bad enough, plus putting Clarissa through it all again when she was really starting to get past it. But Rusty’s a crazy person.”

“And it didn’t occur to you,” I said, “to tell me any of this?”

“Yes, it occurred to me, Peter,” she said. “I don’t know, it’s so stupid. I was afraid you’d run away. Which I guess is what’s ended up happening anyhow. You’re really not going to forgive this one, are you?”

That made me think of the old We forgive those who trespass against us. Like a sign they’d have up, say at the cleaner’s: IN GOD WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH. All this stuff was so long ago: hanging down your head Tom Dooley and forgiving those who trespass against us. As if it had been someone else and not me who had known all that stuff and where it fit into anything. About all I could come up with right now was: If you could just get out of here tonight your hand would stop throbbing, maybe. But this was magical thinking. Magical thinking was wrong.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “Danny and I have been talking for a while now about how we should maybe be thinking about a place of our own.” Well, we did talk about it once. “All this does really is just sort of—” Another thing I was sick of was searching all the time for the words for things. “Like, consolidate it.” Consolidate was a word, almost certainly, but was it the right word? What about reinforce? What about exacerbate?