James lies on the sofa trying to claim some sleep from the unremitting depths of his exhaustion. This week he has worked two doubles, the second one just last night. If he doesn’t get some sleep now, he doesn’t know how he’ll be able to survive his shift.
At least the baby is asleep. She was cooing and tossing food about the dining room during lunch, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get her down. But she went straight to sleep when he put her in her crib. She always seems to sense the needs of those around her, and react accordingly. James smiles at the thought of her. Kayla is the only thing in his relationship with Theresa that he has not yet managed to fuck up utterly beyond repair.
He visualizes a long sword dangling point down above his chest and, with imaginary hands, reaches up to the grip guard and pulls it down. Suicide is not an option. For one thing, who would take care of Kayla while Terri was at work? Anyway, his company-paid life insurance is merely AD&D, it wouldn’t pay off if he suicides. He banishes the dream-sword and tries to summon a picture, a scene, anything that will lead him to sleep.
Marin. Like a neon sign in the window of his mind the name flashes in his eyes. He tries to ignore it, but the other half flashes in as quickly and unwanted as its partner. Steve. He squeezes his closed eyes tighter against a mental image of his Terri moaning wantonly in the arms of some shapeless man.
The last time he and Terri made love (he corrects himself—they haven’t made love since before his abortive military experiment—the last time they fucked) may as well have been rape. He never even finished because he realized halfway through that not only was she not responding, she was crying. That was nearly two months ago.
Steve Marin has been on James’s mind for almost as long (longer?). Terri first mentioned him off-handedly on one of those rare nights when there was time to socialize between her classes and his work. She attended community college in the evenings; James encouraged it—he had robbed her of her last year of high school with her friends, and even if he never finished college because of his obligations, he wanted her to do so.
They were having a bite together; her accounting class had been dismissed when the teacher failed to show. She laughed to herself, and when James cocked his head in query, she said, “Steve said the funniest thing.”
“Who’s Steve?” he asked, though he was already sure he knew the answer, could feel it chewing a hole through the pit of his stomach.
There was a moment when nothing was said. “He’s nobody,” Terri said, trying to pass it off. “Just a guy in my class.” She was never a very good liar.
She was also still a very silly school girl in many respects. She wrote his name on her school books, even the notebooks that she knew were James’s, that he still used occasionally to write down his thoughts. James tried to ignore it. She also wrote the names of Bryan Adams and Alan Ashby in and on those same books, always circumscribed with ornate hearts.
One day he found Steve Marin’s name written in the margins of her accounting book. His phone number was there also. By now, Terri was making phone calls from within their locked bedroom. She came home from work late all the time, sometimes so late she made him late for his own job. One day, he was talking to the security guard that made regular coffee stops at his store, describing his plan to go back to school as soon as Terri finished hers, and the guard hit him with a look that punched him in the gut. It was a look filled with pity and contempt. It was a look James recognized because he had given that same look to this man’s predecessor whose wife worked with Terri and had begun sleeping with a tow-truck driver.
A week ago, James got another gut-punch when he saw “I ♥ Steve Marin” at the top margin of one of her pages. The next day it was gone, but he could still see its shadow, feel the indentation of it on the paper. And nothing could erase the crushing feeling in his chest.
She was late again that day; it didn’t matter, because he didn’t have work, but that made it matter more. It made the waiting infinitely worse because once Kayla was down for the night he was alone without even the thought of his job to distract him. That night it was just him and the suspicions that made the old rage well up and try to tear through his breast.
He remembered the number. He had copied it down and kept it with him, transferring it from pocket to pocket as he did his wallet (he never put it in his wallet for reasons he never fully understood). For half an hour he sat at the table staring between the number and the phone, the anger of what he believed and the fear of making it true battling for supremacy in his heart. Finally, he picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hello?” The voice on the other side was deep and masculine, and, to James’s ear, infuriatingly lacking in guilt. “Hello?”
“Is this Steve Marin?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“This is the guy whose wife you’re fucking.”
“How’d you get this number?” James heard noises in the background, but no denial.
“Why does my wife even have it?”
“You say that like she’s property.” Still no denial. When James failed to respond he was treated to a fifteen minute diatribe on the virtues of Terri Sparrow and his infinite failures as a husband, but no denial. Half an hour after he hung up, Terri came home. She glared at James as she entered the apartment, and he knew she had been there when he had called.
The next day she confronted him with the phone call, pretending that Steve had called her at work to complain about it.
Kayla is cranky, and interrupts her play with an occasional bark-like cry. James tries to ignore her and continue sleeping, but that cry reaches into his soul and makes him check. She’s fine. James doesn’t remember the last time he had more than an hour’s sleep at a time.
He wants to believe that all of his
trouble with Terri started with Steve Marin, but he knows that’s not true. There’s been no joy in this apartment that
wasn’t directly related to Kayla since he was fired by the convenience
store. There’s been no love between him
and Terri since he returned from
He thought he loved her. He thinks he loves her still, but he doesn’t know; he’s not sure. Love isn’t what he was raised to believe it was, despite the practical example of his parents’ ridiculously overlong marriage. Love isn’t a magic switch that makes everything all right. Love isn’t forever, maybe not even for right now.
He says “I’m sorry” a lot, lately. Things are so bad between him and Terri and he wants to make them right, but he doesn’t know how. She’s given up; he knows she has. She gave up during those awful months of marginal employment after the convenience store fired him and before they hired him back. He wonders if she ever tried.
He’s never hit her, but he’s shaken her, and threatened to do worse. He did do worse, once. She hits him and once he caught her arm and twisted it behind her back, threatening her as he did. He threatens her a lot. It’s stupid, he knows, because he knows he could never bring himself to knowingly carryout any of his threats, and he knows the threats only make things worse. But he’s so scared. He’s afraid he’ll lose her; he’s afraid he already has.
“Hank wants you to clean the drink station,” she says, taking off her smock. “Where’s your name tag? Hank won’t like it if he comes in tomorrow morning and you ain’t got a name tag.” James looks down and sees the empty space where his name tag should be.
“Damn it,” he barks.
“Don’t you raise your voice at me.”
“I wasn’t rai—sorry.” Mollified,
The phone rings fifteen times before James has to hang up to wait on a customer. The store is in a working-class neighborhood and does most of its business during the morning and afternoon rushes, although the thirty minutes before James locks the beer coolers often have a rush of their own, especially on Friday. Tonight is Tuesday, and there are few customers, and most of them are in no hurry.
After the customer leaves, James buys a sandwich from the cooler, carefully ringing it up and paying the exact amount. When he worked for the company the first time, his store was the site of massive theft loss and failed four audits in a row. A new District Manager was given charge and the store’s staff was taken to the corporate offices and administered polygraphs. At the time, James had a habit of taking small items from the shelf and paying for them at the end of the week when he got his paycheck. He admitted to this (a form of theft) and was “given the chance to resign” for his honesty. Two months later, after another failed audit, his former manager was finally caught juggling the books. The manager escaped jail time by putting the finger on his old DM and a number of his colleagues. James won’t learn any of this, or how he had been scapegoated by his old manager until a year from now, when he transfers to the internal audit department. For now, he believes he is only employed by the good graces of his DM, who wants him to have a second chance.