The Right Thing (22 page)

“Hush up, Troy.”

No running, Annie. This time's going to be bad, very bad. Maybe the worst yet, but where else do I have to go? Possibilities flood my mind—Memphis? Atlanta? Angkor Wat?

I'll have to pray that they take me in. So even though I'm shaking with the cold and the knowledge that I'm in serious trouble, I square my shoulders in Ted's jacket and tighten my grip on Troy's hay rope. Climbing the sweeping front steps to the columned porch, I discover the front door with its heavy brass knob isn't shut all the way. I slip inside, feeling as though I'm wearing an old-fashioned diving suit—lead-footed, cut off from the world above with all its air and light. At least it's warm inside the house. Troy's nails click briskly on the travertine floor as we tiptoe through the foyer.

Raised voices are coming from the living room, Du's heavy baritone drawl louder than them all.

“Cut the effin'
crap
. What's this forty-eight hours shit? You can't tell me my wife isn't a missing person!” he bellows. I wince. My mother murmurs something I can't make out before he responds angrily, “She's s'posed to be in bed, but she's not. She's gone. That makes her a got-damn missing person!”

Like a coward, I peek into the living room first. Two cops in blue uniforms—one short and ferret-faced and the other the size of a small asteroid—are parked in front of the fieldstone fireplace, my most recent portrait simpering above their heads. Like the cops have heard this same story one too many times, their body language radiates a skeptical professionalism, while my mother is slumped on the Danish linen sofa Du picked out last year, a handkerchief to her eyes. Wearing his bathrobe and slippers, my husband paces around the grand piano neither one of us knows how to play, looking like he just fell out of bed, with the back of his hair standing up in disordered spikes. Du's face is as red as I've ever seen it: he always gets mad when he's scared. Gulping past the trepidation I feel in my chest like a hot rock, I force myself to walk in the big double doorway to the living room. I clear my throat.

“Hey, y'all,” I manage, my voice faint. “I'm home.”

I have never wished for a pair of underwear more in my life.

“Annie!” Du's jaw drops, a look of bafflement crossing his crimson face, as though I'm an inappropriately dressed ghost of myself. I don't think he even sees the dog at my feet.

My mother's face is the pure white of paper, of snowshoe hares, of freshly laundered sheets. “Annie!” she exclaims in a low voice, getting up from the sofa.

“Where the
hail
you been?” Du crosses the football-field-sized Tabriz rug in about two furious strides, his bathrobe flapping. “Do you know how got-damn crazy I've been? You stop to think about that, huh?” he says. His mouth twisted, he grabs my shoulders in Ted's jacket and shakes me like Troy would shake a rat. “But you don't ever stop to think, do you?”

Christ, I've never seen him this mad before. What have I done?

“Du!” I squeak. For the first time in our years together, I'm scared of what he might do to me. At my feet, Troy Smoot's hackles lift like a little hedgehog's, a miniature growl thrumming in his barrel chest.

My poor mother's mouth is a shocked
O
. “Duane . . .” she begins, but the ferret-faced cop cuts her off.

“Mr. Sizemore, I know you want to get a handle on your temper.” His tone is calm, but this pair of Jackson's finest is on the alert now, ready to run my husband in for getting physical with his wayward wife—even though Du would cut off his own arm before he'd ever hit me. I think. Du drops his hands from my shoulders, clenching them at his sides, and, freed, I find my voice at last.

“Honey, I'm so sorry.” Gripping Troy's leash as though it were a lifeline in that midnight fire at sea I'm always saying I'd rather be in, I drop my eyes in shame, looking down at the pattern of the rug.

“And your mother!” Du's tone is like a stranger's, heavy with contempt. “I called her at four this morning when I went to look in on you, saw you weren't in bed—just a pile of fucking pillows. You could have given her a heart attack.”

My mother speaks up at that. “There's nothing wrong with my heart, Duane Sizemore,” she says. “We all need to calm down, now that we know Annie's safe.” Her eyes are a red-rimmed, steely green, her backbone ramrod straight. Silence fills the big, overdecorated room. Du turns away from me to the officers in his house.

“Well,” he says, stiff as a length of stove wood, “y'all can see she's home now. Sorry to have called you out for a false alarm.”

The asteroid-sized cop closes his notebook. “Happens more often than you think, Mr. Sizemore,” he says cheerfully. “We'll be on our way now. Y'all have a happy Thanksgiving.”

That's guaranteed not to happen in this house, but I say anyway, “And the same to you, officers. I'm sorry again about the mix-up.”

Du walks the cops to the front door, doing his best to look like he's got this situation under control. There's a low-voiced exchange outside on the porch I can't quite hear, but from the cops' guffaws I gather his good-ole-boy instincts are coming through in the clutch.

My mother crosses the room and folds me into her thin arms. Dropping Troy's hay rope so I can hug her back, I'm aware of her ribs beneath my hands, frail as swallowtail butterfly wings under her woolen dress.

“I'm so sorry,” I whisper into her shoulder. “I shouldn't have worried you.”

“Oh, Annie,” she sighs. “What have you gone and done now?”

My throat closes around any words I might have spoken when Du stalks back into the living room, his footsteps loud as the banging of my heart. I move away from my mother's side, wondering if my marriage, the life I left behind yesterday, will survive this Thanksgiving Day.

“I'm gonna ask you one more time,” Du says, his voice cold and distant as the surface of the moon. “Where you been? And where the hail did that
dog
come from?” Troy's tail is erect and quivering, his expression wary, but he holds his ground.

Taking courage from the dog, I walk across the acre of carpet toward my husband, and with every step I feel the rosebush voice howling inside me. I choose the easy question first.

“He's a rescue,” I tell him, my voice shaking. “I, I found him in an elevator.”

Du snorts in disgust. “I mean it. Where. You. Been.” I peek at him. He folds his arms, eyes narrowed to coin slots. I look down at his fleece slippers, away from the mask of rage on Du's normally amiable face.

Here I am again.

It's time to grovel. I'm literally being called on the carpet, an all too familiar experience. For more times than I can count, Du's spoken to me as though I were a disobedient child, but this is the first time in thirteen years of marriage he's been so angry he doesn't sound like he wants to forgive me. Like always, I can't speak up because I don't know what to say, how to justify the unjustifiable.

And then, with a jolt of self-awareness like a thrown breaker, I'm amazed to discover I'm mortally tired of this. I'm sick to my soul of the carpet and my usual place on it. I'll be damned if I can stand living like this anymore, always wrong, always apologizing. For better or for worse, this is me.

I lift my chin, tilt my head back, and look my husband in the eye, defiant. “I was helping a friend.”

“Which friend?” Du demands. “Where were you all night, dressed like a damned slut?”

I'm not turning back from this. If I'm going to be damned, let me be damned for the truth—at least, the parts of the truth I can tell him.

“Starr Dukes is my oldest friend, my best friend since I was seven years old. She needed a ride to New Orleans, and I drove her.” With every word, I know I'm not wrong. Not this time, not about
this
. “Before you ask, I didn't tell you because I knew you'd say I couldn't do it since she's Bobby Shapley's pregnant girlfriend, the one everybody's been talking about. Starr didn't have another soul in the world to help her. It was the right thing to do, and I did it.”

In this room, among the carefully curated furniture and artwork, the outward and visible manifestations of Du's success, my explanation falls like a dead bomb: nobody wants to pick it up because it might go off.

Du's blank-faced, his eyes dull. He slumps, and his big, meaty shoulders collapse inward as though he's taken a body blow from the heavyweight champion of the world. When he finally speaks, he says heavily, “You thoughtless bitch. Bobby's pregnant girlfriend. You helped that little whore, and now I'm going to have to deal with the shit that's gonna come down.
Goddamn
you, Annie. The Judge will see me tossed out of the firm and doing wills for niggers when he hears about this.” Blindly, Du turns and stumbles away from me, his hands in his hair. I can only watch him leaving the living room, crossing the foyer, taking the stairs to the second floor.

“It's too much. I can't take this shit anymore. I'm gonna pack me a bag, go somewheres else and think things over.” Du's voice dwindles with his footsteps, and then I hear a door quietly shutting upstairs. My mother's tired face is oblique, unreadable, but she says nothing.

I should go after him.

But I don't.

 

My mother and I are outside down by the rose garden, letting Troy Smoot run around in the backyard. Off the hay rope, the dog's hurling himself across the frosted brown grass like a manic Frisbee, peeing on the lawn furniture and chasing imaginary rabbits through the bushes.

The BMW turns out to be parked in the garage, the keys in the ignition. On the front seat I found my purse and parka, its pocket still stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. It's something of a relief that now I don't have to remember Starr as a thief but as an inconsiderate, lying, ex-best friend instead. I can imagine Du thought the worst after he discovered the car, after he'd found I wasn't in the house. Actually, I can't imagine what he thought and I'm not sure I want to try.

My mother's bundled up in her old mink, sitting on the cement bench beside the denuded rosebushes and smoking a cigarette. She offers me one from her pack.

As I light it, she surprises me by asking, “Where'd you get the dress? It's not your usual style.”

So grateful for being able to smoke again, without thinking I say, “Maison-Dit.”

She takes a ladylike drag on her Parliament. “Somehow I can't see Dolly selling it to you. And I doubt the jacket came from there.” The dog sniffs inquisitively at one of the rosebushes, the Peace hybrid tea, scoping out his new surroundings. My mother smiles. “I like him,” she says.

“He's a sweetheart of a dog,” I say absently, wondering how I'm going to explain that I stole Troy Smoot from that perverted cheapskate Jerome Treeby. “I guess he's mine now.”

“Not the dog,” my mother says. “I meant the man who loaned that jacket to you—he must have been worried you'd be cold.” My mouth falls open at this. She stands up and smoothes my hair behind my ear. “It's been the most dismal fall,” she says, “far too chilly for Thanksgiving.”

“I love you,” I say, my voice breaking. “I'm sorry I did this to you, to Du.”

“Mercy Anne,” she says, “Duane's a grown man. He can take care of himself. And if you wanted to help Starr, I'm glad you did—although it would've been better to have told him what your plans were. He really was beside himself when he called me.”

“But I knew Du wouldn't let me even have
coffee
with her. I couldn't exactly tell him I was driving Starr to New Orleans to get money for a lawyer so she could take on the Shapleys. Besides, the whole damned thing was a terrible idea, a waste of time, not worth what I may have lost here today.” I bite my lip and look away. “She just . . . left me.”

My mother mashes her cigarette out on the cement bench and asks casually, “How did it go so wrong between you and Starr?”

So I tell her about Starr's predicament, about her trouble with the Judge, her inexplicable decision to get back together with Bobby, how she stranded me in New Orleans. I give her an abbreviated version of how I got home, too, leaving out the truck stop part. Even now, the memories of Starr's betrayal, of Ted's face as I left him, tear through my heart like a dull knife cutting a ripe tomato.

“And so it was all for nothing,” I say when I've finished. I stub my cigarette out on the sole of my boot. “I should have known Starr would act like that. It was a, a . . . trashy thing to do, just like what everyone used to say about her.” I gulp, remembering my husband's reaction. “And Du's so
angry
.”

My mother's mouth tightens. “That's ridiculous. I can only imagine what it's been like for you,” she says. “Duane Sizemore has always meant to keep you on a pretty short leash. I could have told him that taking such a heavy-handed approach would end up, well, much the way it has.” She points at Troy Smoot, who's digging in the rose bed, scattering the pine-straw mulch with furious energy. “Isn't that the Treebys' dog?”

“Yes,” I confess.

“Good for you. Someone should have taken that poor thing away from Jerome a long time ago. I almost stole him myself once.”

At this astounding information, I have to sit down on the cold cement bench next to her, remembering right away I really ought to go inside and put on some underwear. That's why I don't notice that the dog has unearthed a small pile of dusty EPT tests and has dropped them beside my boots like he's sharing a kill. My mother and I seem to see them at the same time.

“What's this?” she asks. She reaches down, picking up one of the wands.

Of course. Let the unraveling of my lies continue. Why ever not?

“Oh, Annie.” Shaking her head, my mother's voice is sorrowful. “Why have you
buried
”—she gestures at the pregnancy tests on the ground with an air of despair—“all this? Why didn't you tell me? I'd assumed that you and Duane had decided you didn't want children after all.”