It was early May, two days after his thirty-ninth birthday, when David left her forever. “Forever”— that’s what he said. He stood in the downstairs hallway turning an old brown hat around and around in his hands. Cheryl had never seen the hat before. She stood on the stairs above him, coming down, carrying towels. David said he needed a different life. Behind him, the door was wide open. It was sunny and windy outside. She had made him a carrot cake for his birthday, she was thinking — now what would she do with the rest? Nobody liked carrot cake except David and Angela, who was dieting. Angela was always dieting. David continued to talk in his calm, clipped way, but it was hard to hear what he said. He sounded like background noise, like somebody on the TV that Cheryl’s mother kept going all the time in the TV room now since she had retired from her job at the liquor store. David wore cutoff jeans and an old plaid shirt he’d had ever since she’d met him, nearly twenty years before. She must have washed that shirt a hundred times. Two hundred times. His knees were thin and square. He was losing his hair. At his back, the yard was a blaze of sun.
Cheryl could remember the first time she ever saw him like it was yesterday, David standing so stiff and straight in the next-to-back pew of the Methodist church, wearing a navy blue suit, and everybody whispering about him and wondering who he was, him so prim and neat it never occurred to any of them he might be from the Peace Corps, which he was. He didn’t look like a northern hippie at all. He was real neat. Cheryl and her sister Lisa and her brother Tom were sitting right behind him, and after a while of looking at the careful part in his hair and his shoulder blades like wings beneath his navy suit, Cheryl leaned forward and gave him her program so he would know what was going on. He acted like somebody who had never been in a church before, which turned out to be almost true, while Cheryl’s own family was there of course every time they cracked the door.
But oh, it seemed like yesterday! He was dignified. And he sat so straight. He might have been a statue in a navy blue suit, a figurine like all those in Mamaw’s collection. Cheryl had sucked in her breath and bitten her lip and thought, before she fell head over heels in love right then, that she ought to be careful. Because she had always been the kind of big, bouncy girl who jumps right in and breaks things without ever meaning to, a generous, sweet, well-meaning girl who was the apple of everybody’s eye.
Cheryl handed him the program, and touched his hand too long. After the recessional she took him into the fellowship hall for a cup of Kool-Aid and wrote her telephone number down on a paper napkin before he even asked for it. “He’s just my type,” she said to her mother, Netta, later. “Ha!” Netta said. Netta thought he looked nervous. But Cheryl liked that about him, because everybody else she knew was exactly like their parents were, exactly like everyone else. David was older, a college graduate. Cheryl, who had finished high school two years before, was working then at Fabric World. She thought David was like a young man in a book, or a movie. Whatever he said seemed important, as if it had been written down and he was reading it aloud.
Later, when she got to know him, she’d go to the room that he rented over Mrs. Bailey’s garage and lie with him on the mattress on the floor, where he slept — the mattress pulled over to the window where you could look right out on Thompson’s Esso and the back road and the river winding by — and sometimes afterward she’d open her eyes to find him looking out this window, over the river, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She never knew what he thought. Then, Cheryl found this romantic.
But probably she should have gotten herself a big old man who could stand up to things, not that she didn’t have offers. Look at Jerry Jarvis, who had always loved her, or Kenny Purdue, who she was dating at the time. When she told Kenny she didn’t want to go out with him anymore because she was in love with David Stone from Baltimore, Maryland, Kenny went out and cried and rolled in the snow. That’s what his mother told Netta on the telephone: she said Kenny rolled in the snow. But David Stone had a kind of reserve about him, a sort of hollow in him, which just drove Cheryl wild. It was like she was always trying to make up to him for something, to make something be okay, or go away, but she never knew what it was.
David came from a small, quiet family, one sister and a shy divorced mother with her hair in a little gray bun on the top of her head, and a father who was not mentioned. At the time she met David, Cheryl didn’t know anybody who was divorced. Now everybody was. Including her, it looked like. With David leaving forever, Cheryl would be divorced too. Should she put up her hair in a bun? Cheryl would be a divorcée. Like her sister Lisa, like her best friend, Marie, like everyone on television.
This seemed totally crazy with all the towels she held in her arms, with how fresh and sweet they smelled. With the bedrooms upstairs behind her so full of all the children, of their shared life. Now Netta would say, “I told you so.” She’d swear up and down that she wasn’t a bit surprised. And even Cheryl knew — had known when she married him — that David wasn’t exactly a family man. She’d had four children knowing it, thinking that he would change. Because she loved him, and love conquers all. You can’t decide who you’re going to love.
And even though David didn’t really believe in God and made fun of their cousin, Purcell, an evangelist, and taught at the community college all these years instead of getting a real job, and refused to help Louis make a car out of wood that time for the Pinewood Derby in Cub Scouts, even so, there were other things — good things — as well. He liked to cook, he read books to her out loud, he’d been the one who got up with the babies in the night. It was weird to find these traits in a man, although they were more common now since women’s lib than they had been when David and Cheryl got married, all those years ago.
Cheryl looked down the stairs at David, memorizing him.
“Please don’t blame yourself,” he said formally. “I feel terrible about doing this.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Cheryl said without thinking, because she had gone for so long pleasing men.
David started to say something else, and didn’t. He turned sharp on his heel like a soldier and plunged out into the shiny day, right through Louis and his friends playing catch in the yard, and got in the Toyota and drove away. Cheryl stood in the doorway and watched him go and couldn’t imagine a different life. She wondered if David would wear the hat.
NETTA DID NOT SAY “I told you so.” Instead she cried and cried, sitting in her pink robe on the sofa in the TV room surrounded by blue clouds of Tareyton smoke. You would have thought that David Stone had left her, instead of her daughter Cheryl. But Netta, now sixty-two, had always been a dramatic woman. When her own husband, Cheryl’s father, George, died suddenly of a heart attack at forty-nine, Netta had almost died too. She referred to that time now as “when George was tragically taken from us,” but the truth was, it was tragic. Cheryl’s father had been a kindly, jovial man, a hard worker.
Not like David Stone, who was, as Cheryl’s friend Marie put it, an enigma. Marie came over a lot after David left, to help Cheryl cope. Marie was divorced too. She went to group therapy. “He was just an enigma,” she said. That seemed to settle it as far as Marie was concerned, only of course it didn’t.
For one thing, although David had left forever, he didn’t go very far, just about four miles out the Greensboro highway, where he rented an apartment in the Swiss Chalet Apartments, which looked like a row of gingerbread houses. At first the kids liked going over there, especially because of the pool, but then they didn’t because their daddy wouldn’t get a TV or buy soft drinks or meat. According to Angela, he said he was going to simplify his life.
“Isn’t it a little bit late for that?” Lisa asked when she heard this news. Lisa, who ran the La Coiffure salon in the mall, had had one so-so marriage and one big disaster and always took a dim view of men anyway. She disagreed with Marie and felt that David was an asshole instead of an enigma.
Cheryl sat among these women — Lisa, Marie, and Netta — in her own velvet armchair in her own TV room, feeling like she wasn’t even there. What Angela said about David simplifying his life reminded Cheryl of the old days, the really old days, when she lay with him on that mattress pulled over to the window in the room over Mrs. Bailey’s garage, when the sun fell through the uncurtained windows in long yellow blocks of light, warming their bodies. She remembered the way the leaves looked, yellow and red and gold, floating on the river that October. David had loved her so much then. Whatever weird stuff he might be saying or doing now, David had loved her then.
“Good riddance, I say,” said Netta, lighting up. David had made no bones about how much he hated cigarettes. If they hadn’t been living in Netta’s own house, he’d have made her go out in the yard to smoke.
“It might just be the male menopause,” Marie offered. Marie was thin and pretty, with long pale legs and a brand-new perm, which Lisa had just given her. Marie and Cheryl had been best friends since grade school. “He might turn right around and try to come back,” said Marie.
“Ha!” said Netta. “Never!”
But Cheryl seized on this, thinking, He might come back.
Marie’s other insight, seconded by their cousin Purcell, was that David’s sister’s dying of cancer so recently had a lot to do with this whole thing. Louise had died that January, before he left. She was forty-seven, a sweet shadowy English teacher who had never married. She was so shy. Yet it was surprising how many people had showed up at her funeral, ex-students, friends, people from their neighborhood in Baltimore. Cheryl, who never could find much to say to Louise, had been amazed. Louise had lived with David’s mother, and now David’s mother lived alone. David used to call them up every Sunday night. Now he probably called his mother. Cheryl bit her lip. David leaving was like him dying, was exactly like a death.
The first week, for instance, everybody in the neighborhood brought food. Mrs. Tindall brought her famous homemade vegetable soup, and Mr. and Mrs. Wright, across the street, sent a twenty-six-dollar platter of cold cuts from the Piggly Wiggly, where he was the manager. Helen Brown brought chicken and biscuits, Betsy Curry brought enough chili to feed a crowd. Other people brought other things. Then Johnnie Sue Elderberry came in bringing a carrot cake, and Cheryl sat right down on the floor and burst into tears.
“Mama, get up,” Angela said. Since her daddy left, Angela had gone off her diet and started smoking, and nobody had the heart to tell her to quit. Angela was sixteen.
“Sometimes God provides us with these hidden opportunities for growth and change,” remarked Mr. Dodson Black, their minister. But Purcell, their cousin the evangelist, disagreed. “I’d like to get ahold of him,” Purcell said. “I’d like to wring his neck.” Purcell was a big blond man with a bright green tie. Lisa and Marie were putting all the extra food they couldn’t eat right then into white plastic containers and freezing it. They put labels on the tops of the containers. Finally Cheryl got up from the floor. “Don’t make any big decisions for the first year,” warned their cousin Inez Pate, who had come on the bus from Raleigh to see how they were holding up. “Try some of this meat loaf,” said Marie. “You’ve got to keep up your strength.”
But Cheryl couldn’t eat a thing. She was losing weight fast. She was wearing some nice gray pants that hadn’t fit her for the last two years. She pushed the meat loaf away and said something to Marie and something to Purcell and went out the back door, under the porch light which wasn’t working because Louis had shot it out with his BB gun. He was shooting everything these days. Cheryl couldn’t keep up with him. “It’s okay. He’s expressing his anger,” Marie had said. But Cheryl wouldn’t have a light fixture or a breakable thing left in the whole house, at this rate.
She sighed and wiped her forehead. It was hot. Every summer, her whole family had rented the same beach house out from Morehead City for two weeks. This year what would they do? What would they ever do? It was almost dark. Shadows crept up from the base of the trees, from the hedge, from the snowball bush, from the nandina alongside the house. Cheryl had grown up in this very house, she’d played in this backyard. Her daddy used to bring her packing boxes from the store and help her cut windows and doors in them for playhouses.
Cheryl walked out in the yard and stood by the clothesline, looking back at the house which was black now against the paling sky, all its windows lighted, for all the world like one of those packing-box playhouses that she hadn’t thought about in years. It was her family, her house, she had opened all these doors and windows for David, had given it all to him like a present. It was crazy that he had left. He’ll come back, she thought.
But in the meantime she was going to have to go back to work, because even though David had simplified his life so much and even though Netta had a pension and they got some money all along from the rent of Daddy’s coal land, anyway, things were getting tight all around. Luckily Johnnie Sue was pregnant again, so Cheryl could fill in for her over at Fabric World while she thought about her options. One thing she was considering was starting up her own slipcover business. Slipcovers had come back in style, slipcovers were big now. Cheryl wished her mother would go out and get a job too. Her mother was driving Angela crazy. “Don’t make any big decisions,” Inez Pate had said. Poor Inez was aging so fast, she put a blue rinse on her hair now, it looked just awful. Cheryl held on to the clothesline and wept. But she didn’t have to make any real big decisions, because of course he’d come back. It was just the male menopause, he’d come back. How could a man leave so many children?
And Cheryl thought of them now, of Angela too grown up for her age, too big breasted and smart mouth, smoking, suddenly too much like Lisa; of Louis, who’d always been edgy, getting in fights at school; of Mary Duke, only six, and whiny, who didn’t really understand; and of Sandy, who was most like his father, so sober and quiet his nickname had always been too sporty for him.
Right after David left, Sandy had run away for four or five hours, and when Purcell finally found him down by the river he said he was sorry he was so bad, he knew his daddy had left because he was so bad. Purcell had brought him home in the rain coughing, and Sandy was still coughing, although Dr. Banks couldn’t find any reason for it. Dr. Banks said the cough was just nerves.
Suddenly Cheryl heard a funny, scraping noise. And speaking of Sandy, here he came up the driveway, dragging a box along the gravel, walking backward, coming slow.
“Mama?” he said.
Then suddenly Cheryl felt like she hadn’t actually seen Sandy, or any of her other children, for years and years, even though they had been right here. She had been too wrought up to pay them any mind. “What are you doing, honey?” she said.
Sandy pulled the box more easily across the grass and stopped when he reached her. “Lookie here,” he said, leaning over, reaching down. Netta opened the back door just then and hollered, “Cheryl?” Cheryl looked down in the darkness, down in the box. Sandy coughed. His hair caught the light for a minute, a blur of gold. Netta slammed the door. Sandy straightened up with something in his arms that made a sniffling, slurping noise.
“Mama, this is Bob,” he said.
“THERE’S BEEN SOMETHING WRONG with that dog from the word go,” Netta said later. “You never should have said yes in the first place. Yes was always your big mistake.”
But by then, by the time Netta got around to “I told you so,” it was too late. Sandy just loved Bob to death. The first thing Sandy did after school every day was throw down his books on the hall floor and run into the TV room to see how Bob was doing. Every day Bob was doing the same. He lay between the sofa and the wall, hiding. When he heard Sandy coming, he thumped his tail. But he refused to stay outside. When they put him outside, he sank against the wall of the house and wailed, the longest wail, the most pitiful thing you ever heard. He sounded like Cheryl felt.
The kids thought that this was because he had been abused, and abandoned — Sandy had found him in the weeds along the interstate, near the overpass. Lisa said Bob wouldn’t go out because he was stupid. She said he’d never learn anything and said they should take him straight to the pound before they got too attached to him.
But by then it was clear that the kids, especially Sandy, were already too attached.
And if they took Bob to the pound, he’d never find another home. People want a watchdog, a hunting dog. Nobody wants a dog that won’t even go outside. Especially not one of this size. Because Bob was growing. It was clear he was getting big. Everybody had an opinion about what kind of dog he was, and although nobody knew for sure, Purcell felt certain he was at least half hound. He had that pretty red freckling, those long ears, and that kind of head. But he hung his head and walked sideways, getting behind the couch. He put his tail down between his legs. Bob looked ashamed, like he didn’t have any pride. And the TV room smelled awful, as Netta pointed out.
“It’s him or me,” she said.
“It’s him, then,” said Angela, who was tired of having her grandmother at home all the time.
But then Lisa offered Netta a job at La Coiffure, making appointments and keeping the books, so she was gone nine to five anyway. Bob had the TV room to himself. He used a newspaper, but he wouldn’t go outside. As he got older, his messes got bigger. This was supposed to be the children’s job, cleaning up after Bob, but before long Cheryl noticed she was doing it all by herself. She did it in the mornings before she left and again when she came back home from Fabric World. She sprayed the den with Pine-Sol all the time. She got a stakeout chain so the kids could put Bob out in the yard in the afternoon, so they could get in the den to watch TV. It was clear then that Purcell was right, that Bob had some hound in him for sure, because of the way he howled.
The neighbors, who had been nice about Louis shooting out all the streetlights and nice about Angela’s new boyfriend’s motorcycle, complained.
“He’ll get used to it,” Cheryl told them. “He’ll quit.”
But she didn’t believe it either. One problem was that Bob was so dumb he kept tangling himself in his stakeout chain. He’d tangle his chain around the lawn chair, or the barbeque grill, or the snowball bush.
“I guess I need to build him a pen,” Cheryl said.
“I think you need to get rid of him,” said Marie.
“Well . . .” Cheryl said in that slow, thinking way she had. She stared off into the purple dusk beyond the backyard, beyond Bob on his chain and Marie in a lawn chair, drinking a gin and tonic. Somehow it had gotten to be June. Now Marie was having dates with Len Fogle, a local realtor. She came by every day after work for a gin and tonic and described these dates in detail: where they went, what she wore. When Cheryl sat back in the lawn chair and closed her eyes, listening, it was almost like she was the one on the date, and she could imagine herself back with David again. “Then he kissed me in the car,” Marie said. “He’s got this little Honda? Then he asked if he could come up for a nightcap and I said yes.” Nightcap was a dating word, a word Cheryl hadn’t heard for years and years. She imagined herself and David having a nightcap in Marie’s apartment, she imagined David putting his hand on her knee. “I was so glad I’d changed the sheets,” said Marie. Cheryl sighed.
The real David was dating somebody else, a frizzy-headed math teacher at the community college who didn’t even wear any makeup or shave her legs. Her name was Margaret Fine-Manning. She had been married before. But she was young. Last weekend her yellow Datsun had been parked at David’s Swiss Chalet apartment from eleven in the morning until nine or ten that night; Cheryl just happened to know this because she had formed the habit of driving past the Swiss Chalets on her way to work, and then maybe if she ran out on the highway to pick up a burger or what she usually got, a fish sandwich, on her lunch hour, and then maybe also on her way home.
David was growing a beard. He looked skinny and picturesque, like a scientist in a documentary, like Jacques Cousteau. He was also getting a tan, from sitting by the apartment pool with Margaret Fine-Manning.
And furthermore, David, who used to be so quiet and considerate, was turning mean. He asked Cheryl not to drive by so much, for instance, and he was sarcastic about her making slip-covers. “That’s a perfect job for you,” David said. “Just making pretty new covers to cover up old rotten furniture. Just covering it all up, that’s all. Avoiding the issue.”
Cheryl had stared at him — this conversation took place in broad daylight in the parking lot of the Swiss Chalet Apartments, in early June. “You must be thinking about upholstery,” Cheryl had said. “I don’t do that.”
“Now listen to me,” said Marie. “I’m trying to tell you something.” She stood up and got more gin. “It’s so satisfying to have a relationship with all the cards out on the table. You don’t have to be in love, Cheryl, is what I’m trying to tell you. It’s much better to have a relationship based on give-and-take, on honesty. No big promises, no big regrets. Pay as you go, cash ‘n’ carry, as Lenny says.”
“I think that’s awful,” Cheryl said.
“Just think about it,” insisted Marie. “His needs are met, your needs are met. A mature, adult relationship. You’ve got to shed this high school attitude and get out in the real world, Cheryl.”
Cheryl sighed, stirring her drink with her fingers. She smiled to herself in the dark.
Because, speaking of high school, there was something that even Marie didn’t know. Cheryl’s mind went back to three days earlier at the hardware store, where she had gone to buy a new stakeout chain for Bob, he’d torn the old one up completely, you couldn’t even imagine how. Anyway, Cheryl had stepped up to the counter with Mary Duke in tow, and who should just happen to be there but Jerry Jarvis, the owner. Jerry Jarvis owned four stores now, he traveled from place to place. You rarely ever ran into him in town anymore.
“Hel-lo there!” Jerry had said. He ran his eyes over Cheryl and then slowly back over her again. Cheryl was feeling spacey and insubstantial — she wore shorts that day.
“You’re looking wonderful as always,” Jerry Jarvis said. He probably hadn’t realized how fat she’d been. Cheryl hadn’t realized this either. “So how are things going?” he asked.
“Just fine,” Cheryl said.
“Daddy left us and went to live in the Swiss Chalets,” said Mary Duke.
Later, Cheryl could not figure out what had possessed the child. Normally Mary Duke was too quiet, and held too tight to your hand.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Jerry Jarvis. But it was plain as day from the way his eyes lit up that he wasn’t sorry at all. He’d always loved her — so he was glad! In fact, that very night he had called her on the phone and asked Cheryl if she’d meet him at the bar at the Ramada Inn on Wednesday for a cocktail, he’d like to help her out in any way he could.
“Thanks but no thanks,” Cheryl said then. “You’re married.”
While this was of course true, Jerry Jarvis admitted, there were a lot of factors involved. He’d like to talk to her sometime, he’d like to explain these factors, that was all, he’d always thought so highly of Cheryl’s opinion. Finally Cheryl had agreed to meet him at the Deli Box for lunch, sometime when she felt up to it. The Deli Box was right in the middle of town, it proved his good intentions, Cheryl guessed. She couldn’t decide if she’d go or not.
Meanwhile a big truck had arrived the next day, from Jarvis Hardware and Building Supply, bringing a four-by-four wood frame and a load of sand to go in it. “For Mary Duke,” he had written on his business card. “See you soon? Your friend, Jerry Jarvis,” as if she didn’t know his last name! Cheryl had told the men to unload it in the corner of the backyard, where it sat right now, in fact, looming up whitely at them from the darkness beyond Bob on his stakeout chain.
“You need to meet some men,” Marie was saying. “You ought to sign up for a course.”
“Listen — “ Cheryl said suddenly. “Listen here — “ And she started at the beginning and told Marie all about Jerry Jarvis and the Deli Box and his sending the sand. “Isn’t that weird?” she asked at the end.
“Why, no,” Marie said. “I think it’s romantic.”
“But he’s married,” Cheryl said.
“So what?” asked Marie. “He might be on the verge of a divorce, you never know. We call those ‘men in transition’ in my group,” she said. “Anyway, you don’t have to be in love with him. You can’t marry anybody anyway, you haven’t even got a divorce. Plus you’ve got all these children. It sounds to me like he’s a real safe bet for you right now. I think you ought to go out with him.”
“What?” Cheryl couldn’t believe it.
“You know that old song?” said Marie.
“What old song?”
“Oh, you know the one I mean. It goes something about if you can’t have the one you love, then love the one you’re with.”
“I think that’s awful,” said Cheryl. But she sat out in the lawn chair for a while longer, thinking about it and missing David, after Marie left in her Buick, bound for romance. Lenny was coming by later for a nightcap, so she said. Cheryl wondered what David was doing right now.
And then, in that way he had of anticipating you, of knowing just how you felt, Bob started to howl, low at first like a howl in her own head, and then louder until she took him off the chain and put him in the TV room.
This made Netta furious. “I work all day and what thanks do I get?” Netta said. “I can’t even watch my program.” Netta’s program was Dynasty, which was on now. Netta had gotten bitchier and bitchier since she had started working for Lisa, who was real hard to work for. Cheryl sighed. She knew her mother was difficult too. Lisa said Netta insisted on sweeping up hair all the time instead of waiting until the girls were through for the day. It made both the girls and the customers nervous. But Netta said she couldn’t stand to see that hair just laying all over the floor, she had to get it up. Then Lisa would yell at her, and then Netta would cry. It was really bad for business, Lisa said, to have your own mother in your shop crying and sweeping up hair. Now Netta was crying again. “Don’t bring that dog in here,” Netta begged. “Just let me watch my program in peace.”
“I can’t leave him out on the chain anymore, Mama,” Cheryl said. “You can hear how he’s started that howling. I guess I’ll have to go ahead and hire Gary Majors to build him a pen.”
Bob hung his head and scuttled sideways toward the sofa, panting.
“Well,” Netta said. “Just do what you want to, then, you always do anyway, both you and your sister Lisa.”
“Mama,” Cheryl said. It wasn’t fair. They were driving her crazy. All of them, her mother and Lisa and Bob and the kids too, oh especially the kids, summer was awful with them out of school. Except for Louis, who had flunked ninth-grade math and Spanish — he’d almost flunked everything — and now had to take summer school. Meanwhile David just sat by the pool at the Swiss Chalet Apartments getting browner and younger looking, with Margaret Fine-Manning. Cheryl didn’t see how Margaret could get any sun at all on her legs, she had so much hair on them. It wasn’t fair. Joan Collins got out of a car on TV, Bob thumped his tail on the floor. “Good night, Mother,” Cheryl said.
JULY WAS A BUSY month with a lot of things happening. The first one was that Louis passed math but flunked Spanish and had to take it again in the second semester of summer school. The second thing was that Cheryl took Bob to obedience training at Triangle Vet, where he pitched a fit and tried to chew up his leash instead of walking around in a circle with the others. “Now, now, now!” said the instructor, a Mrs. Livers, pulling the leash out of Bob’s mouth and squeezing his muzzle shut with both hands. “We don’t love with our teeth!” she exclaimed. After the second class, she kicked Bob out. Then Mr. and Mrs. Wright across the street, who had always acted so nice, showed their true colors at last. They started calling up on the telephone every time Bob howled and then they started calling the police. They swore out a warrant calling Bob a pernicious nuisance, which wasn’t true at all, and enjoined him from howling. But Bob refused to be enjoined. If he stayed inside too long, he messed on the floor, but if he stayed outside on the chain too long, he howled. Cheryl was at her wits’ end. So she called Gary Majors and asked him to build her a dog pen, and Gary Majors said okay, but she’d have to go to Jarvis Supply and sign for the materials.
As soon as Cheryl walked in the door she saw him, Jerry Jarvis, behind a big computer. He stood up right away and stared at Cheryl, hard, across the store. Their eyes locked. Then he came hurrying over and asked her what he could do for her today. Somehow what he said sounded dirty, and Cheryl blushed. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything like that, honest, swear to God,” Jerry said. Jerry had thinning red hair and beautiful big brown eyes.
Cheryl believed him. She believed that the reason he was still so crazy about her was that in all their years of dating they’d never actually done it. Cheryl had been so religious in high school, plus they all wore panty girdles in those days.
Now, Jerry was trying hard to make conversation. He asked her about playing tennis and Cheryl told him that no, she did not play tennis, and she needed to sign a note for whatever Gary Majors might require to build a pen for Bob.
“Gary Majors?” Jerry Jarvis acted amazed. He said he’d come over and build the pen himself, how about that?
Cheryl looked at his seersucker suit, his nice white shirt, his bright red tie. “No, Jerry, I don’t think so,” was all she said.
But later that same week, when the stuff from Jarvis Supply arrived, there was a new ornamental gate with wrought-iron flowers on it, and his business card saying, “Pastrami on rye? Chicken on white? Your friend, Jerry Jarvis.”
Then Gary Majors, a high school dropout about Cheryl’s age, came by and started Bob’s pen. Luckily this kept Mary Duke and Bob both happy, someone in the backyard to talk to them. Cheryl was having trouble getting Angela to stay at home and babysit with Mary Duke — Angela kept hanging out at the mall where her boyfriend worked. Sandy was at day camp at the Y, thank God, but Louis was flunking Spanish in summer school.
Finally Cheryl, who didn’t know any Spanish at all, went to see Louis’s teacher in late July, to ask him if there was any way she could help Louis, anything they could do at home to improve his grade. His teacher turned out to be a short, stocky man with big liquid eyes and so much hair on his body that it curled out over his shirt collar. His name was Amerigo Ramirez, which sounded like a country. Cheryl met him in his office at 5 p.m. on July 21, before a whirring fan. For a while they talked about Louis and Louis’s attitude, which was a problem, Cheryl had to admit. Cheryl felt so hot she felt like she was bursting through her clothes. The fan went on and on. Mr. Ramirez gave her a list of verbs for Louis to learn. He gave her a record for Louis to listen to. Cheryl was hot, hot. It was hard to pay attention at all in this heat, surprising that the school had no air-conditioning. “Are there any problems at home?” asked Mr. Ramirez. Cheryl started crying. “Mrs. Stone, you are a very attractive woman in my view,” said Mr. Ramirez. His eyes were large and moist; he took off his shirt, Cheryl had never seen so much hair. Mr. Ramirez locked the door and re directed the fan to blow toward the green chenille-covered cot in his office. Cheryl went to bed with him there, that afternoon, while the football team drilled out on the field in that terrible heat. Cheryl could hear them grunting — “Ooh! Oof! Aah!” — like figures in a cartoon. She could hear the coach shout numbers at them through the hot, still air.
The following day, Mr. Ramirez sent her some roses from Jo’s Florist, but she wouldn’t go out to dinner with him. She didn’t think she’d see him again, because, as she told Marie, she just didn’t feel a thing. Nothing. Zero. Nothing like it had always been with David, from the word go.
David meanwhile had bought a Nissan station wagon and announced to them all that he and Margaret Fine-Manning were going to Colorado, for their vacation. He gave Cheryl his itinerary, typed out. Bed-and-breakfasts, country inns.
“La di dah,” Netta said. “I’d sue his pants off if I was you.”
BUT CHERYL AND THE KIDS went with Netta to the beach for a week, which is what they had always done every summer that Cheryl could remember, renting the very same house that they had rented for so many years. Before Cheryl’s father died, before the children were born, before David left.
This year, the people who owned the house had installed a new outside shower and bought new redwood furniture for the porch. And even though the boys had a great time and Angela fell in love with a freshman from UNC, even though Purcell joined them for four days, the house seemed twice as large as it used to, way too big. The seashell wind chimes sounded so sad that Cheryl took them down. Netta ate shrimp every night. When Purcell was there, he caught crabs every day by dangling chicken necks on string from the end of the pier. While Louis and Sandy played endlessly in the endless surf, Cheryl lay on the beach and wept with her face hidden under a People magazine.
But she tanned easily, and the weather was perfect, and she looked terrific in her new bathing suit, cut up high on the sides of her legs. She had lost seventeen pounds. Netta had started to say something about the bathing suit, but didn’t. You could tell. Netta was being nice to Cheryl now since she wasn’t speaking to Lisa, who had fired her from La Coiffure. Lisa said that Netta’s crying and sweeping was ruining her business, her mother just had to go. Then when Netta refused to quit, Lisa fired her. So Lisa and Netta were mad, and Lisa didn’t come to the beach with them this year, but Marie did. Marie came down for a weekend while Lenny went to the National Guard camp.
Marie said everybody back home was talking about Netta and Lisa’s big fight, some of them holding that Lisa had been wrong to fire her mother, and others that Lisa had been wronged by a mother who wouldn’t act right. Everybody in town had an opinion. Cheryl and Marie rubbed coconut suntan lotion on their legs and talked about it. Cheryl couldn’t decide what she thought. It seemed to her that Lisa had a point, but Netta had a point too. People must have stopped talking about her own separation by now, her separation must be old hat. This gave Cheryl a pang. She missed David. She did not miss Lisa, or Bob. With Bob in the kennel, Cheryl was getting a lot of rest.
Then Marie said that Angela had asked her to get her some birth control pills and she had said she’d do it, but she just thought Cheryl ought to know. So Cheryl had that to think about too. She and Marie lay back on the sand, smelling like big sweet tropical drinks.
Netta came out of the house then, wearing a flowered robe and a big-brimmed hat, smoking a cigarette, picking her way toward them through the sand. It took her a while to get there. For the first time it struck Cheryl how old her mother looked, and how crazy. Netta was starting to look like Mamaw, who had been dead for years and years. Netta said she was going to take Mary Duke over to the water slide, which she had been doing every day. For some reason Mary Duke had decided on this trip that she didn’t like the ocean, and she wouldn’t go near it with a ten-foot pole. So Mary Duke was staying mostly in the house watching TV and driving everybody crazy.
“I don’t see how she can be afraid of the ocean and not afraid of the water slide,” Marie said.
“She thinks there’s things in the ocean,” Cheryl said. “You know — jaws.”
Netta leaned across Cheryl and tapped Marie on the knee. “Did you hear how my own daughter Lisa did me?” she asked, and Marie said yes, she had heard it all right. Then Netta grabbed Cheryl’s knee so hard Cheryl sat up. Netta’s face beneath the huge hat brim was pale and trembly. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, honey?” she asked.
“Do what Mama?” Cheryl said.
“Get rid of me like that, you know, for no reason.”
“No,” Cheryl said. “Of course not.” It was true.
“Grammy, Grammy,” Mary Duke called from the house. Netta straightened up and started across the sand.
“My whole body feels different since I’ve been having this relationship with Lenny,” Marie began. “It’s hard to explain.”
Cheryl lay flat on her back in the warm sand, smelling sweet and staring straight up at the hot white sun.
“GREAT TAN,” JERRY JARVIS SAID. The way he said it sounded suggestive, but then when she thought about it later, Cheryl was not so sure. Maybe he didn’t mean to sound that way, maybe he was just being nice after all. Certainly it was nice of him to stop by like this after work to check out the dog pen and see how things were going. Not so well, was the truth, which she didn’t say. Bob had grown bigger and stronger at the kennel while they were away, and now he kept digging out of his pen despite the pretty ornamental gate that Jerry had sent over, despite the rocks and boards and things that Cheryl and the kids kept piling around the bottom of the fence to keep him in. The week before, Cheryl had bought a whole truckload of cinder blocks, and every time he got out, she’d put a cinder block where he did it, or a big rock she lugged up from the creek. It went on and on. Last Thursday when Bob got out, he went two streets over and stole a three-by-five Oriental rug from the Lucases, who had just moved down here from Fairfax, Virginia. Another time he knocked over Mr. Ellman’s brother, who had a pacemaker.
Now Bob bounced against the fence, in high spirits. Cheryl sighed. She knew he could get out anytime he wanted to, until she got something along every inch of that pen. Every inch. Bob was such a hassle, but Cheryl couldn’t bring herself to consider getting rid of him, she couldn’t have told you why. And now Margaret Fine-Manning had moved in with David and they jogged together every morning. They ran from the Swiss Chalet all the way to Burger King, along the highway. Cheryl, driving to work, saw them every day. Margaret wore ankle weights.
“Cheryl?” Jerry Jarvis was saying. “Listen to me.”
Cheryl looked at him. His hair was red, his face was flushed, his eyes were brown and sincere. He was a big impressive man. “I can have a boy over here tomorrow to run you a little old electric wire right around the bottom of this fence and then you won’t have no more trouble. It won’t hurt him a bit. Just a little jolt is all, he won’t hardly feel it, but I guarantee you he’ll stay in this pen.”
“Well, thanks, Jerry,” Cheryl said, “but I think that’s awful. Shocking him.”
“Wouldn’t hurt him a bit, now,” Jerry said. He grinned at her. He had big white even teeth, and Cheryl found herself grinning back.
“No,” she said. “I know you think it’s stupid, but I won’t do that. I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing. We’ll just put more stuff around until he can’t get out, that’s all. Sandy would have a fit if Bob got electric shock.”
“It’s not electric shock, Cheryl.” Jerry was laughing. “It’s really nothing, just a little whammy, that’s it.”
“No,” Cheryl said.
She stood by the fancy gate as Jerry Jarvis walked over to his hardware truck. Sometimes he drove the truck, and sometimes he drove his BMW. It was September now, almost time for school to start. The leaves on the hickory tree looked papery against the sky, yellowing. Cheryl felt cold suddenly, although it wasn’t cold. She couldn’t think why she was being so silly about this pen.
Jerry Jarvis reached his truck and opened the door and then suddenly slammed it. He turned and walked back to her, fast. He grabbed her and pulled her to him and crushed her up against his yellow shirt. “Cheryl, Cheryl,” he said. “I’ve got to have you, it’s only a matter of time.”
“Let go of me this minute, Jerry Jarvis,” Cheryl said.
“You’re driving me crazy,” said Jerry Jarvis.
Then he kissed Cheryl slow and hard, a kiss that left her breathless, leaning against Bob’s pen. Jerry rubbed her cheek and smiled into her eyes, it was clear he didn’t even care who might be looking. “You know where to call me if you want me,” he said.
THEN JERRY JARVIS SENT her twelve free cinder blocks, but he didn’t come back again. School started. Cheryl was swamped with orders for slipcovers — fall was very big in the slipcover business. Angela cut off all her hair except for one long piece down the back, which she dyed pink. Lisa almost died when she saw how Angela looked. But Angela liked it. Cheryl didn’t know what to think about Angela’s hair — at least Angela’s old boyfriend, Scott Eubanks, had gotten busted for marijuana over the summer and had been sent to live with his father in Georgia, so that was something. Cheryl guessed she could stand Angela’s hair. And Louis started off better in school this year. He liked English. Of course he had passed Spanish, after all. Sandy was doing better — he’d stopped coughing, for one thing, and his Cub Scout troop had a new leader who was young and energetic. Sandy had earned merit badges in knot tying, carpentry, and letter writing. For his letter-writing badge, Sandy had to write a hundred letters. He had a Cub Scout pen pal in England who wrote to him on thin crinkly see-through paper. Sandy had also written several letters to his father, which just killed Cheryl. She couldn’t imagine what in the world he said. Also, Sandy had a new friend named Olan Barker who had moved in with his family up the street. So Sandy was doing better, all in all, and his interest in Bob had waned. Oh, Sandy still patted him and fed him sometimes, but he never took Bob walking — and in all fairness to Sandy, he almost couldn’t. For Bob had grown and grown. Sandy couldn’t control him. Bob had become Cheryl’s dog, finally, totally, after all. And sometimes he still got out of his pen: he’d move a cinder block, tunnel out, and run wild until somebody called the police, who came and got him and put him in the pound.
THIS HAPPENED IN LATE SEPTEMBER. When Cheryl went down to the police station to get him, the officer in charge was very friendly. At first he said there’d be a forty-two-dollar fine and then when Cheryl looked stunned to hear that — it was the end of the month, she wouldn’t get paid till the first, and David had paid only half his child support for reasons he hadn’t explained — when she looked so depressed, the officer in charge said, well, nobody was there but them, and why didn’t he just tear up the ticket like this? — he tore it up before her eyes and dropped it in the basket by his desk — and he’d issue Bob a warning instead. He filled out the warning on a green card and handed it to her.
This officer was young, blond, and plump, with a big wide smile. He said that actually he didn’t give a damn, that he didn’t think the police ought to have to deal with dogs anyway, that every other town he’d ever heard of had a dogcatcher. He said this was a one-horse town in his opinion, with no nightlife. He said he was from Gainesville, Florida. He wore a badge that said “M. Herron,” so Cheryl guessed this was his name. She looked around the police station, and he was right. Nobody else was there at all.
The police station used to be the agriculture extension office. She’d had 4-H in here. The gray painted concrete floor was exactly the same. Almost the only way you could tell it was a police station was by the messiness of it — cigarette butts jabbed down in sand-filled containers, paper cups on the floor. The county extension agent, Betty Gore, would never have allowed this disorder. Cheryl remembered Miss Gore’s tight yellow curls and how particular she was about buttonholes. It was right here, all those years ago, that Cheryl had started sewing. She’d made an apron, an overblouse, a Christmas-tree skirt with felt appliqués. Now, wanted posters hung on the wall, full face and profile: one man, bearded, looked like David. Or she thought he did.
Cheryl, daydreaming, was so confused that when M. Herron offered to pick up Bob at the dog pound and bring him home after he got off duty, she said yes. Later she realized she should have said no. But by then it was too late. And when M. Herron showed up just at dark in his police car, it was real exciting. Clearly, Bob was glad to be home. He barked and lunged at them all and rolled on the grass. It took Cheryl, M. Herron, and Louis all working together to catch him and put him back on the stakeout chain, where he’d have to stay until Cheryl could get his pen fixed.
Then M. Herron let Mary Duke and Sandy get in the police car and showed them how everything worked. They even got to talk to headquarters on the radio, and M. Herron drove them around the block with the blue light flashing. He told Netta he loved children. When he finally left, Angela said he was cute. “Ha!” Netta said.
M. Herron came back on Tuesday, Cheryl’s morning off, to give them some free burglar-prevention advice, which he said they needed. By coincidence, Netta was not at home, having gone to the outlet mall. M. Herron was not wearing his uniform. He walked through every inch of their house checking doors and windows and then advised Cheryl to go right out and buy dead-bolt locks. “You can’t be too careful,” he said.
Cheryl went to bed with him in her own bed, and after it was over, she got up and went in the bathroom and took a shower and then came back and saw M. Herron still there in her bed, against the yellow sheets. She thought he’d be dressed, but he wasn’t. All he wore was a gold neck chain. He held out his arms to Cheryl and said he wanted to give her a big kiss. Then he said he hated to brag, but he was a pretty good cook, and would she like to come over for dinner on Saturday? He said he lived at the Swiss Cha-lets. “Well, thanks,” Cheryl said without batting an eye — she was proud of herself, later on — “but actually I have a long-term relationship with a dentist in Raleigh and I can’t do this anymore. I guess you swept me right off my feet,” she said.
BY LATE OCTOBER, Lisa and Netta were reconciled. Purcell, who had a lot of influence in community affairs, had helped Netta get a job at the new Council on Aging, which had just opened its office downtown in the courthouse. This job suited Netta to a tee. It was as good as the liquor store had been for seeing people, but nothing about it made her nervous, the way watching the hair pile up around the chairs and not sweeping it up did. Netta had a list of practical nurses, maids, and companions for the elderly, and she matched them up with names of older people who needed help. Also, she organized craft classes, gourmet cooking classes, genealogy classes, and so forth. Netta loved her job. She said it made her feel young again.
David told the kids that Margaret was pregnant and that he and Margaret were “delighted” by this news. But they did not plan to marry, he said. He said marriage was an outmoded concept in his and Margaret’s opinion.
“I bet she doesn’t want to marry him,” Marie said. “She just wants to have a baby with a smart father. A lot of women get like that, they hear the biological clock just ticking away.”
Cheryl was astonished. This idea — that Margaret might not want to marry David — had not occurred to her. She thought that David didn’t want to marry Margaret, or he would. Or he would do it when the divorce became final, next spring.
“You better watch out now, honey,” Purcell said. “He’s liable to come traipsing back here with his tail between his legs, any day now. You’d better get yourself a game plan,” Purcell said.
But Cheryl didn’t have one.
All she did was go to work and come home again, glad to have a permanent job now since Johnnie Sue had had her baby and it was colicky so she had decided not to return to Fabric World after all. Cheryl made $160 a week, plus whatever extra she got for slipcovers, which would be unlimited if she had the time and the energy. She had more orders than she could ever fill; it looked like the sky was the limit in the slipcover business. Lisa had suggested that Cheryl ought to hire some other women to sew them, say three or four women, and then Cheryl could just take the measurements and order the cloth and pay the women by the hour and make a big profit. “You can start your own business,” Lisa said. “You can quit working at Fabric World and make a mint.” This was a great idea and Cheryl knew it. But for some reason she was dragging her feet, losing orders. Maybe she didn’t want to have her own business. Maybe she didn’t want to be like Lisa. Maybe . . . oh, who knows?
Anyway, Cheryl had her hands full, what with the children, and Netta, and the slipcovers she’d promised, and Bob. She was stitching a mauve sofa cover for Mr. and Mrs. Holden Bench on Saturday night in early November, just after Halloween, when Bob got out again. She couldn’t believe it. But she should have known. First, he’d howled and howled, and then he had fallen suddenly, mysteriously silent, and now here he was barking and jumping against the front door. Cheryl stopped stitching and turned off the light on her machine. She stood up. “Louis, Sandy — “ she yelled, and then stopped. Her voice echoed through the empty rooms of this house that she had lived in all her life. Too late she remembered that she was here all by herself tonight. Everybody was gone — everybody in the whole world, it suddenly seemed. Angela was off on a date, Netta was out playing rook with the New Generation card group, Sandy had gone on a Cub Scout camping trip, Louis was at the movies seeing Rambo for the fourth time, and Mary Duke was spending the night with her friend Catherine. Cheryl was home alone. She remembered M. Herron and what he had said about nightlife, and burglars.
Cheryl opened the kitchen door and Bob bounded in, wagging his tail so hard that it crashed him into the refrigerator, then into the kitchen table, where her sewing machine was set up. “Now you just come right along here,” she said firmly, grasping his collar, dragging him through the kitchen away from the mauve sailcloth all over the kitchen floor, toward the TV room. Bob reared back on his haunches and allowed himself to be scooted along. Cheryl gritted her teeth, dragging Bob. She would fix that pen right now, right this minute, by herself. And he’d stay in it. She shut Bob in the TV room and turned on The Love Boat to keep him quiet.
Cheryl put on a dark flannel shirt and a woolen cap. She felt like a burglar herself. She took off her loafers and put on some of Angela’s boots. She got the flashlight out of the laundry room and went out the back door. Lord, it was cold! A chilly, gusty wind came whipping along, kicking up all the leaves. You could smell wood smoke in the air, and something else. Cheryl couldn’t quite place what it was. Something cold, something sharp, it reminded her of winter. Winter was on the way. The almost bare limbs of the hickory tree showed against the full yellow moon and then disappeared when the moon popped in and out of the puffy dark clouds that ran across it. Cheryl’s own backyard seemed unfamiliar, a scary but enchanted place — full of moving light and darkness, wind — and she remembered M. Herron saying a lady can’t be too careful. But that was ridiculous. She could do it. Of course if she had let Jerry Jarvis send a man over here, this pen would have been foolproof months ago. But Cheryl could do it herself, and she would.
With the flashlight, she walked the fence until she found the spot where Bob had tunneled under. Then she walked back to the garage and got the last cinder block and carried it balanced against her stomach and placed it carefully in the hole. There now. And that ought to do it too, she thought, flashing the light around the bottom of the fence. There, now.
Cheryl went into the house and got Bob and dragged him across the kitchen and pulled him across the yard to his pen and pushed him inside, latching the ornamental gate securely. She felt flushed, and strong, and ready for anything, the cold night air so pleasant on her cheeks that she couldn’t bear the idea of going back in and working on the Benches’ slipcover. Instead, Cheryl went to the kitchen and got three California Coolers out of the refrigerator and opened one of them and turned off the kitchen light and went back out and sat down in a lawn chair.
The wind and the shadows moved all around her, she felt like she glowed in the dark. The dry leaves rustled at her feet, red and brown and gold, but she couldn’t see their colors, only feel them in the dark. It was true she was artistic, she did have a sense of color, maybe she’d open up a business after all. Bob barked, then rattled the leaves, then made a snuffling, scuffling noise. Cheryl opened another California Cooler, she knew he was digging out. She imagined David and Margaret Fine-Manning entertaining M. Herron right now at a gourmet dinner in their apartment at the Swiss Chalets, she saw the candlelight gleaming in David’s eyes, and the gleam of M. Herron’s gold neck chain. The moon went in and out, in and out of the tumbling clouds. Cheryl imagined Jerry Jarvis unhappily at home with his fat wife, Darlene. She imagined Marie and Lenny embracing in a motel in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where they went this weekend to look at the leaves. Cheryl leaned back in her chair and opened the third California Cooler and laughed out loud finally as Bob scraped out and shook himself off and lurched over to stand for a minute there by her chair before he took off running free across the darkened yards, beneath the yellow moon.