Читать книгу Song of Silence - Cynthia Ruchti - Страница 12

Chapter 6

6

He’d lied to her. He hadn’t been fishing. He’d been painting the kitchen. From the looks of it, he’d started right after she left the house. If she hadn’t stayed so long at Riverside Park, staring into the water and trying unsuccessfully to oust every verse of “The Water Is Wide” and “Down to the River to Pray” from her mind, she might have walked in on him mid-project.

Instead, she found him peeling the last of the painter’s tape from the crown molding. He rolled it into a sticky ball and tossed it toward the plastic garbage can he’d positioned near the ladder. “Nothing but net,” he said.

“Charlie, what are you doing?” She adopted her reserve-judgment-until-I’ve-heard-the-whole-story voice she’d often used on her students. And the Tuttle kids.

“Welcome to your freshly painted kitchen, LucyMyLight,” he said, descending the ladder. “How do you like it? Baby, don’t cry.” He held her against his paint-speckled once-red shirt. “It wasn’t that big of a deal. I can go fishing some other time.”

She pulled back to catch her breath.

“Oh, look at that,” he said, whipping a paint rag from his back pocket and daubing at the spot of Berrington Blue on her jean jacket. “The price of a hug, I guess. You’ll want to wash that out right away, before it dries.”

As if she hadn’t done every single load of laundry in their house for the last thirty-two years. As if she didn’t realize dried paint was a whole different animal than wet paint. As if she needed the instruction.

As if she needed him to take away the one project that would have made the summer have a small nugget of meaning to it.

“I had to hurry to finish before you got home. So we might have to do a few touch ups.”

“It looks . . . nice, Charlie. I love the color.” She wetted a corner of a clean rag and scrubbed at the paint smear.

“Me, too. You have great taste.” He smiled. “Of course, we knew that already. You chose me.”

He busied himself putting away the step stool, ladder, and his painting tools while Lucy shrugged out of her jacket to get a better look at the spot and contemplated how she’d ever pay for the counseling she probably needed. What kind of woman resents a man like Charlie? What’s wrong with a woman like that?

Resent? Had she really used that word? The indictments against her character mounted like the constellations of Berrington Blue spatters on her white cabinets.

***

She worked late into the night putting the kitchen back to rights. If only blemishes on her soul flicked off as easily as the dry dots of blue paint responded to her thumbnail. Lucy replaced half the items she normally kept on the counters, along the backsplash. As infrequently as she used truffle oil, it didn’t need to occupy space on the counter, no matter how artsy the bottle.

After supper, Charlie had watched a WWII POW movie while she worked, then kissed her goodnight and headed to bed early, smelling of the pungent rub he used on aching muscles. The whole bedroom would smell like that. Another thing she should be used to by now. Not just used to. Grateful for. His muscles ached because he tried to do something nice for her.

She found another dot of paint on the granite countertop. Flick. Gone.

A wave of satisfaction worked its way to shore from far out to sea. She felt it nearing, but so much debris had washed up on the beach during the previous days’ tides, the wave diminished in intensity by the time it reached her. The room looked fresher than it had in a long time.

Charlie’s retirement health coverage meant the impact of her job loss threatened their savings plan more than their daily budget. Olivia and SamWise had weathered the unstable years and emerged as adult versions of the joy of their lives. Nobody was in the hospital, rehab, or jail. Not every family could say as much. She’d had nineteen years at a job she loved, pursuing a passion with an endless, pulsing rhythm. Her husband—who sometimes impersonated Captain Oblivious—loved her and showed it. What was wrong with her? Was she auditioning for the most ungrateful human on the planet?

For a second, a split second, she understood why a woman with leftover pain medication might take something to quiet the internal condemnation.

Instead—and because she had no leftovers—she turned out the kitchen light and went to bed.

***

“Lucy? Lucy.”

“What?”

“How long are you planning to sleep in?”

She drew the comforter over her shoulders. They could probably set the air conditioner temperature a little warmer and save electricity. “What time is it?”

“Eleven . . .”

“Eleven!” She threw the covers off with a snap like a mainsail in a stiff wind. “Why did you let me sleep so long?” Lucy sat on the edge of the bed, fighting to get her bearings.

“Eleven minutes after eight.”

“Charlie!” Lucy fell back into her nest of pillows.

“The muffler’s done. Can you drop me off at the shop so I can pick it up?”

“Now?” She scrubbed her hand through her hair.

He pulled off the work shirt he’d been wearing, sniffed it, then threw it into the hamper. “Did you have something else you needed to do?”

“Sleep?”

“Hon, you can do that anytime now that you’re . . .”

A song from the animated movie Frozen flashed through her mind. Couldn’t he let this go?

“Sorry I woke you, Lucy.” His eyebrows scrunched forward. “You used to be up by six.”

“I stayed up later than usual last night.”

“Oh.” He tugged a polo shirt over his head. “I guess I could call Martin or somebody to take me down there.”

“No, I’ll get up,” she said. It was the least she could do. “Aren’t you a little overdressed for the muffler place?”

“Once I get the car, I’m heading over to Silver Lake. A guy there has done some worm farming in the past. I’m going to pick his brain. Want to come?”

God help her, she’d reverted to her ugly self, and it wasn’t even eighty-thirty in the morning. All she could think about was how slim the pickings would be.

“Want to come along? That would be great. We can talk the whole way there and b—”

She closed the bathroom door and started the shower. “Sorry. Can’t hear you. Be out soon.”

How many prayers had God heard over the years? How many of them came from shower stalls? And how many were wordless like hers?

She toweled off, scrubbed several layers of enamel from her teeth, scrunched her hair, and slipped into the bedroom without letting too much of the humidity escape into the room. Charlie was elsewhere in the house, humming loudly enough for her to hear. Like an eight-year-old prepping for his best day ever.

She dressed quickly, fairly certain an ex-worm farmer was unlikely to be a fashion critic. Did that session in the shower mean nothing to you, Lucy? You’re profiling now? She formed an apology with no destination.

It seemed rude to humanity for her to go out of the house without under-eye concealer. So she took time for that and a minimum of other makeup before heading for the kitchen. Today, she would be grateful, patient, and optimistic. Grateful, patient, optimistic. She rehearsed all the way down the hall.

“Baked grapefruit okay with you?” Charlie asked. One of his few culinary specialties. She was . . . grateful. Genuinely. Maybe this was the day the darkness would lift.

“I’ll make coffee.”

“Done already.”

Usually, coffee warmed her insides after she drank it. Charlie’s thoughtfulness started the wave of warmth before she brought the mug to her lips. “Thanks, honey.”

“You’re welcome. It’s the least I can do for my worm partner.”

To speak or not to speak? Did every marriage wrestle with that question 24/7? “About that, Charlie.” She sipped the coffee, mind racing, opening one door after another in her search for a suitable response. Doors were still banging shut when her husband slid a bowl with a caramelized grapefruit-half across the breakfast bar toward her. She stopped it before it slid over the edge. Could she stop herself soon enough?

“Oh, we’ll find a better name for you than worm partner,” Charlie said. “Executive Director of Wormology? Worm Princess? Secretary of Squirm?”

“Charlie!”

“What happened to your sense of humor, Luce? You should see the look on your face.”

She didn’t have to see it. She felt it. “I know you think you’ve found your life’s passion.”

“Which, I might add, you’ve suggested I needed for most of our married life.” He guzzled his coffee as if proving he could.

Lucy practiced her lung-filling and lung-emptying breathing warm-up. “You haven’t even talked to anybody about how that could work. If it could work. You don’t know if you’d enjoy raising worms. Or what the market’s like. Or how much it costs to get started.”

“And that’s why we’re going to meet that vermiculturist guy today after we pick up the Traverse.”

Vermiculture? That’s what it’s called? “Charlie, it’s the ‘we’ that’s a problem for me.”

He set his coffee mug on the granite, folded his arms across his chest, and made a thin, lipless line where his mouth should be. The line softened. His arms dropped to his sides. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, snatching his cap from the hook near the door, “but the ‘we’ has never been a problem for me.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll walk to the muffler shop. I’m sure you have better things to do.”

Not to speak. That was the correct answer. And yet . . .

“Charlie, I don’t mind going with you to the worm expert.”

“Sounded as if you were thrilled at the prospect. I must have misread you.” Sarcasm seemed so much harsher from Charlie than it did from anyone else. He removed his cap but didn’t put it back on the hook.

She lowered her voice. “This is your passion. Not mine. But you’re assuming we’ll do this together.”

“Would that be so horrible?”

Lucy considered herself a decent communicator in every area except this. She pressed her fingertips to her lips. The action didn’t help her think any more clearly. “I love being with you.”

“And that would be evidenced by . . .?”

How could she blame him for what lay behind that open-ended question? This isn’t the wife she wanted to be. Not who she was . . . deep down. Little of that fought its way to the surface past the oil spill of disillusionment.

“I get it,” he said.

You get it that I don’t know how to do this, how to take a breath past these cramped vocal cords, how to reconcile the fact that my husband is ecstatic because I have nothing left to do? Nothing left? And that I think that I may be slipping into an ugliness I won’t be able to crawl out of . . . and I can’t tell the man I’ve committed to love forever because it’ll look as if I don’t love him?

“What do you get, Charlie?” Her voice broke. She prayed he’d realize the cause wasn’t disappointment in him, but in the turn life had taken. The hairpin, narrow, cliff-edge, crumbling, nauseating turn.

His gaze focused over her head. Maybe he, too, saw the dollop of Berrington Blue on the crown molding. “I get it”—he dropped his gaze to her eyes—“that I never should have changed deodorants. I’d be more pleasant to be around.” He chuckled. “Come on, LucyMyLight. You have to admit that was funny.”

His comedy act proved he really, truly, most sincerely did not get it at all.

She swallowed. The simple, no-thought-involved act didn’t go well. “What time is your appointment with the Worm Whisperer?”

“Ten-thirty.”

Lucy put her grapefruit bowl, untouched, in the sink. “We’d better get moving then.”

“Look, don’t come along if you don’t want to.”

“And miss the opportunity to expand my knowledge of a worm’s digestive process?” Courage, Lucy. Courage. It’s only part of a morning. And it’ll bless him.

“That’s my girl.”

Our daughter Olivia is your girl. I’m your wife.