Tom Mendicino - Probation

“Yeah, then you’d be as old as me.” I laugh.

“You’re not that old,” he answers.

Home, we go directly to bed. We undress shyly, careful not to look at each other, and crawl under the covers. Long minutes pass in the dark and I think he has fallen asleep. Then, sounding younger than he has all night, he asks me a question.

“Andy?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you happy?”

Something about his tender solicitousness compels me to lie.

“Happy enough.”

“Good.”

My answer seems to satisfy him and he rolls over on his side. He’s soon swept up in the arms of Morpheus, transported to a big, fluffy bed in a penthouse in the sky and Prince Cary is swearing his eternal love and the credits roll and they live happily ever after.

I know better than to call from the phone at my mother’s house. The King of Unpainted Furniture is certain to have caller ID. He’ll have a stroke if the name Anthony Nocera pops up. (The phone is still listed in my father’s name even though he’s been dead for years.) I’m sure the King is screening her calls. Particularly today, traditionally an occasion for greetings and best wishes. I know how he thinks: Wouldn’t it be just like that little worm, that little piece of shit, to pick a day like today, when she’s even a bit more vulnerable than usual, to come sniveling around, tail between his legs, with promises of how he’s changed, how it was all just a bad dream.

Over his dead body. No, more likely, over my dead body.

He’s sure to have taken precautions. He’s probably thrown every single Catholic in the state of North Carolina at his daughter. He wouldn’t even bother to check out the portfolios of the older ones or the prospects of the young. What the fuck would he care? He’d floated me for years. Nothing he couldn’t do again. The screening wouldn’t be rigorous. Alcoholics, deadbeat dads, suspects under indictment, numerous cases of halitosis and body odor, countless fashion victims in poly-cotton blend khakis: they’d all pass with flying colors. There was only one qualification.

None of them could be me.

A shot of bourbon will bolster my confidence. A small one, just enough to give me a backbone. What if she hangs up on me? What if she tells me she doesn’t want to hear from me and threatens dire consequences if I try to contact her again? Worse yet, what if she laughs at me? That would be the cruelest response of all, more terrifying than a vicious, angry attack. Stop making excuses, I think. That’s not your Alice, she’s incapable of hate. How do I know? I know because she wrote me a letter after the house was sold. The sentences were so perfectly straight I could almost see the invisible ruler guiding the pen across the stationery. Her wastebasket probably overflowed with balls of expensive writing paper, discarded if the pen went an eyelash astray. The perfection of the handwriting and the symmetry of the pages affected me as much as the words themselves.

No prosecutor could have drafted a more damning indictment of my indefensible betrayal and her humiliation.

I finally found the courage to ask my gynecologist for the test. Knowing the questions she would ask didn’t prepare me for the shock of hearing her words. What are your risk factors, Alice? How often did you and your husband have unprotected sex?

No judge or jury would have shown me such undeserved mercy.

I would have preferred to say all this in person, but I knew I couldn’t. For too many years, I was willing to close my eyes to everything, ignoring the obvious, not because I thought things would change, but because I wanted them to stay the same. Living without a husband is easy. But every day I miss my best friend.

I’ve read and reread it more times than I can count. I wanted to, meant to, reply. One epistle, carefully crafted in my head over several days in Denver, came close to being committed to posterity. It was apologetic, empathic. I wanted her to know I wished I were different. I’d change if I could. That even if I ever found someone to love, I’d never love anyone more. I should have scribbled it onto paper while I was euphoric and light-headed in the thin air of the Mile-High City. But my best intentions sank in the oppressive humidity of North Carolina. I never set pen to paper.

Nothing has changed. I’m still rejecting her, sending her to the mailbox day after day, expectantly at first, certain I would respond, despondent when, after a few weeks, she realized I wouldn’t. Why doesn’t she curse me as the bastard I am and hate me with a blazing white passion? No, she still finds some excuse to exonerate my bad behavior, excoriating herself for the unpardonable transgression of making a small, kind effort to reach out to me. Drink me, I say, and she drinks and she keeps on shrinking, Tiny Alice in our little Southern Gothic melodrama.

Tonight I’m going to make amends. I pull out my cell phone and dial the number. She answers on the second ring.

“Dunkin’ Donuts!”

Alice sounds happy and giddy, a little tipsy. I ought to try something witty, something half-witted, like “a dozen chocolate glazed to go.” But my mouth is too dry and my voice is cracking. “Happy Birthday” is all I can manage.

“Oh my God!”

Oh my God good or Oh my God bad?

“Oh my God. I’m so glad you called.”

Oh my God good.

I hear the clatter of dishes, chatter, glasses clinking. She’s on the kitchen phone.

“Sounds like quite a bash going on there.”

“Yeah.”

She sounds a little hesitant, nervous, as if her deeply rooted Southern conscience is stricken. How impolite. Caught red-handed. She’s having a party and I’m not invited.

Hold on a minute, she says.

I hear her talking to someone. Just an old girlfriend, she says, calling to wish me a happy birthday. Who? Susie. You remember her. I’ll remind you later. I’ll just be a minute.

I hear a door open and close as she steps outside, into the quiet evening.

“That’s better. I’m so glad you called,” she says again as if she doesn’t know what else to say.

“Hey, I’m sorry I never wrote back.”

“That’s okay. I shouldn’t have written you.”

“Stop apologizing.”

“Sorry. How is Ruth? I heard about the cancer.”

“Not too good.”

“I’ve wanted to call, but I didn’t know if…”

“She’d really like that.”

“I’d like to see her. I miss her.”

“That would be real nice.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ll tell her you’re gonna call. She’ll look forward to it.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

I ask after her sisters, her mother. She catches herself before she asks if I want to say hello to them.

“Look, don’t tell them I called.”

“No. I won’t.”

It’s a nice, comfortable feeling to share a secret with her again.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“I mean, I just mean with Ruth and all. It has to be hard on you. That’s all I meant.”

“I know that.”

“So how are you?” she asks.

“I’m okay. Really.”

“I worry about you,” she says.

You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t even think about me. And if you do, it should be to hate me. Don’t let your mind drift across the years, skipping from memory to memory, skimming the surface of our life together. The Turnbull & Asser shirt and the tie from Pink you gave me on my thirtieth birthday. Our first night in our first home. A hot Fourth of July in Rome, drunk on Sambuca, celebrating ten years of marriage, promising each other to return to this same little place to celebrate our twentieth. You holding my head as I vomited in the toilet, devastated by the call telling me my father was dead. Small, insignificant events and the important landmarks of our life, now all equalized by the passage of time, none able to evoke any emotion stronger than nostalgia for the past.