When Wanda tells everyone that she’s going to visit her parents for the weekend, she’ll leave on a Friday morning, but not get to their place, which is only 100 miles away, until a Saturday morning. Six times a year, she has a day to herself, just her and her station wagon in the rolling hills of New York and all the money she’s hoarded for the past two months so she can stay in a motel under the name Alexandra Whetstone. She likes to sit in the hotel room without any sound or chore and listen to the silence while she reads detective novels.
In October, when she gets back home from her folks’ place, she finds Henry and Charles oddly quiet, oddly distant. Charles, her husband, is always distant, but Henry is usually excited because she brings him liquorice. When she hands him his candy, he doesn’t look at it, doesn’t eat it all in one sitting the way he always has before. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
Henry frowns at her as though she should now. “Grandpa died,” he says in the whine that 11-year-olds can achieve as though it’s obvious, and the weight of his words backs her up, makes her grasp the kitchen table to keep her from falling. “Dad called you and told you.”
And Wanda knows that he must have called Friday. He must have spoken to her folks but gave nothing away because they didn’t even mention the call on Saturday morning. He must have been very good with his words because they didn’t say a word. When Wanda finds Charles in the living room reading the newspaper, a highball glass full of bourbon, he doesn’t even look up. He says, “He was out back with Henry checking that bat house they built, shining a flashlight up into it to see if they had any visitors.”
“What happened?”
“Heart attack.” He still doesn’t look up from the Sunday paper.
“Right in front of Henry?”
Now, he looks up at her. “Yes.” He takes another sip from his glass. He is not a man to speak to his wife. He’ll get loud with other people, whoop it up at a baseball game or yell at someone driving stupid, but he always speaks to her with his eyes. Now, his eyes are asking a question.
Up until now, she wasn’t really worried that he’d catch her. It’s easy to fool a drunk man. “I’m not cheating on you. I go to a little motel halfway between here and there just to get a little time for myself.” Charles’s eyes quiet themselves, and he nods, at whatever peace he finds in himself in these years after the war. He came home a hero, a part of Patton’s cavalry, and hasn’t said one word about his time there, at least not to her. “Do you believe me?”
Now his eyes tell her that he’s confused. “Of course, I believe you.”
“Would you be angry if I were lying?”
He puts down the paper and grabs the armrest of his chair. “You wouldn’t lie,” he says. “Not to me about that. If you did, I’d understand.”
“Why?”
“I’m not the easiest person to live with,” he says. He takes another long sip and goes back to his paper.
In the days ahead, there will be planning and cooking and phone calls and all the million details that go with arranging a funeral, and that will take up her mind and his. There will be time to ponder the meaning of her marriage, and she wonders if he will too. She doesn’t think he will leave though. He did that years ago. He left her for Patton’s war, and she doesn’t think he’ll ever come back.
John Brantingham is the recipient of a New York State Arts Council grant and was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. Check out his work at johnbrantingham.com.