Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

She sobbed softly, and he held her again, rocking slightly, the two of them standing by the door. “I love you,” she got out. “So much.”

“Honey, why are you crying? What is this with us?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. We’re — we’re fine. We’ll be fine.”

They were quiet again, rocking slowly in the embrace.

Finally he said, “Gotta go.”

They moved apart, and he reached over and brushed the hair from her brow, set it along the side of her face. “There,” he said. He thought he had never seen anyone so darkly beautiful.

“I’ll call you,” she murmured.

He stepped out on the small stoop and closed the screen door. She stood in the granular frame of it with her hands at her sides. “Leave the mess,” he said. “I’ll get it when I come home from work.”

“It’s nothing,” she told him.

It occurred to him that they probably looked like newlyweds in the first flow of life. He thought his heart might give out.

At the job, he saw people in trouble, mostly men, all of them looking for work. And there was so little to be had. The largest local business, FedEx, had been badly hurt by the grounding of all the airplanes just after the attacks, and other companies were either laying off workers or simply unable to hire anyone new. Faulk kept trying to get interviews for people and to find some strategy for them to pursue other than simply collecting unemployment. It made him feel useful while it frustrated and saddened him for how little he could accomplish under the circumstances.

This morning, a man entered and, sitting in the chair beside the desk, looked hard at him. He was gaunt, dark, with a deeply lined face. There were pockets of darker skin under his eyes. “I know you.”

“You weren’t sent in here?” Pete asked from his desk.

The man turned to him. “Oh.” He handed over the form.

“You recognize the padre?”

“Yeah.”

“Weird to see him here, right?”

“What kind of work are you looking for?” Faulk kept his gaze on the form.

“Anything. Handyman. Anything. Yeah. Padre. I know you.”

The form showed that the name was Samuel Witherspoon and that he had eighteen years of employment with the airlines, three different carriers, the last of which was Delta. And that he had spent the last two years in prison for assault and battery with intent to kill.

“The airlines,” Faulk said.

“I was a flight attendant,” said Witherspoon. “Haven’t ever done much of anything else.”

“We’ll find you something,” Faulk told him.

“Grace Episcopal. Yeah. Father — Father Faulk.”

“He’s quit that,” Pete said.

Witherspoon simply turned to look at him.

“Walked away from it. Matter of principle,” Pete said.

“No,” said Faulk.

“You know what happened to me, Father?”

“I’m not Father Faulk anymore. It’s just Mr . Faulk.”

“Every day my wife came home late.”

Faulk nodded, looking through the list of job inquiries for general repair work, house painting, and carpentry.

Witherspoon went on, “I got nobody to talk to. Christ.”

“There’s a couple of things here,” Faulk said. “Look, I don’t do that anymore.”

“But I feel”—the other put one hand on the desk—“I can talk to you, you know?”

“I’m sorry, but this is neither the time nor the place.”

“I saw you all those Sundays,” said Witherspoon. “It hit me the second I looked at you sitting there. You were the one every Sunday when I was a good citizen.” He let go a small, rueful laugh.

Faulk nodded slightly and said nothing.

“Why’d you leave, anyway?”

“Mr. Witherspoon. You’re here to find work, and I’m here to see if I can help you do that.”

Witherspoon wasn’t listening. “She went with somebody else. The wife. We hadn’t been married two years.”

Faulk saw the lines in the other’s forehead and at the corners of his eyes. Witherspoon glanced over at Pete as if his presence was somehow threatening.

Pete sensed this. He looked down at the page he was writing on and concentrated.

Witherspoon went on. “Father, I can’t help it. I just found out last night she went ahead and married the son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry,” Faulk said, thinking, Please .

“Excuse the language.” Witherspoon sighed and sat back, putting his legs out, a hand on either thigh. It was a gesture not of trying to get more comfortable in the chair but of exhaustion. His head came against the chair back. “She came to see me in prison. Now why would she do that? I beat the son of a — I went after the — I hit him with a cane, you know, repeatedly — I thumped him with it and broke his skull. Nearly killed him. Wanted to kill him. Coming around like we’re friends and sleeping with my wife. And I get sent up because he needs surgery on his head, and she comes to visit me. Comes to visit me, Father.”

Faulk felt himself taking on the habitual mind-set of the priest, wanting to offer counsel, solace, some remedy out of the grandeur of the church he used to represent, though this urge to use his former state was also, he knew, an element of the wish to fend off the other man, keep an official’s distance. “Have you talked with anyone else about it?”

“The whole time I’m there she keeps coming to see me, the wife suffering through her husband’s jail term, telling me how sorry she is, and she’s living with him. The whole time. She was with him the whole goddamn time. She felt guilty about the trouble I got in. Christ. I gotta find something to do for work.”

Faulk turned to the screen and cursored down to the list of contacts for handyman kinds of work: electricians, carpenters, landscapers. They were mostly contractors, seeking to hire people specializing in specific tasks. “Can you do electrical work?” He heard the quaking of his own voice. He cleared his throat and repeated the question.

“I remember looking forward to what you had to say on Sundays. Sorry. It was just a shock to see you here. Sorry. It’s nothing you need to worry about anymore, is it, and maybe it never was.”

“You have to concentrate on this,” Faulk said, seeing his own distressing images and trying to clear his mind. It came to him that it was going to be impossible for things to keep going on as they were. He would shake her out of her denials, would get it out of her some way, the real truth. The real truth . He put his hands to his face for a moment, his elbows resting on the desk. His own thoughts appalled him.

“I don’t know how to do electrical,” Witherspoon said.

Faulk stared at the screen. “I’ve got someone here who needs a carpenter. Do you have any formal training in that?”

“No.”

“Well, I can send you over there to talk to the guy.” He wrote the address and number down and handed the paper across the desk.

“Thanks, Father,” said the other, folding the paper. He shoved it into his pocket and went out the door into the bright sunlight.

Faulk turned to the computer, trying again, without success, to repress his own apprehension and doubt, seeing the mental image of Natasha with someone else, on the beach in Jamaica. He sought to shut it down, break it up into the reasons to deny it, to bring forth out of himself the belief that nothing had happened. He could not concentrate. And again he thought of forming the words simply to ask her outright: What did you do in Jamaica that you can’t tell me?

Except that he had asked her about it in direct and indirect ways, and in the same ways she had steadily denied everything while pleading with him not to bring it up, not to mention Jamaica at all.