Chapter Thirty-nine
On his way back to Simi Valley, Henry stopped at the same restaurant in North Hills that he had eaten at the night before. The same cute blonde waitress, Brenda, once again waited on him, and she showed him an adorable smile when she recognized him.
“I guess you just can’t get enough of us, huh?” she asked. “You must be a glutton for punishment.”
“I’m a glutton for your beautiful smile. It warms my heart just to see it.”
He ordered the same steak dinner he had the other night, and the same locally brewed pilsner, and added a shot of bourbon. When Brenda brought over the drinks, he told her a few more of his corny jokes, and did the same when she brought over the steak. His heart, though, just wasn’t in it. He was only killing time, avoiding going home any sooner than he had to. He was only half done with his steak when he waved Brenda over for the check.
“Time for me to go home and face the music,” he said.
She scrunched up her eyes, not understanding what he meant.
“The little woman is not going to be happy with me,” he explained.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s true,” he said. “I disappointed her. And I’m going to hear about it when I get home.”
“She must be a hard woman to please.”
“One could make that case,” he agreed.
As with the other night, he left a hefty tip, this time a few cents over twenty dollars.
When he arrived home, he didn’t say a word to Sheila, nor her to him. He simply carried her to the bathroom, undressed her, scrubbed her clean in the bathtub, and put her in pajamas that were freshly laundered from the other night. It wasn’t until he had her in her wheelchair and in the kitchen that he spoke, asking her what she wanted for dinner.
“Are you going to make me beg?” she said in the painful way she had of speaking since the accident, where each word had to be pushed out as if it took every ounce of strength she had. “Show me the recording!”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said.
Her body became even more rigid, and her mouth twisted into the pinched, angry circle that he knew so well. She looked at him as if he had betrayed her in the worst possible way, and that made him lose his temper as well. He was trembling as he told her that he had tried to find someone, but it just wasn’t possible.
“Those police press conferences have put every blonde girl in the city on edge. Every single one that I approached looked at me as a potential serial killer. There was just no way of getting any of them alone.”
Of course, he was lying. There was that skinny blonde girl with the three-year-old boy and the eighteen-year-old babysitter. He could’ve killed all three of them if he was monstrous enough.
“You’re lying,” Sheila accused.
“I killed three people for you already! Three and a half if you count that man in Queens, since you left him half dead! Isn’t that enough?”
“You know it isn’t.”
“How am I supposed to know it isn’t? You make these insane requests of me. That’s it, I’m done! You just have to get over this craziness!”
Sheila clamped her mouth shut and looked away from him.
“Fine,” he said. “Be mad at me. I don’t care. We’re going to live like normal people for a change. I know you’re hungry. What do you want for dinner?”
After she didn’t answer him, he told her he was going to make things easy for himself and make her a fruit smoothie. He proceeded to add yogurt, almond milk, a banana, strawberries, a spoonful of honey, a pear, and vitamin powder to the blender. Once he had the concoction blended together, he took a sip, approved of the way it tasted, and placed the glass in front of his wife with a straw in it so she could drink it on her own. She didn’t waste any time using her somewhat good hand to knock the glass to the floor.
“Fine. You want to be that way, tomorrow I’ll pick up tubing and syringes for force-feeding, and we’ll do it that way.”
Henry took two beers from the fridge and brought them out to the living room, leaving his wife in the kitchen. He was brooding too much to pay attention to what was on TV. This changed for several minutes during the ten o’clock local news when they ran a story about Morris Brick’s heroics during a failed armed robbery of a jewelry store in Beverly Hills.
“You’re a busy man, Brick,” he muttered to himself.
After the story finished, he was soon back to his brooding. Later, after the local news ended, he went back to the kitchen and stared silently at his wife. She knew he was there, but she continued to act as if he didn’t exist.
“Do you want me to put you to bed, or would you like to watch some TV?” he asked.
No answer and no indication that she heard him.
He was past his brooding, and his nerves felt jangled. He couldn’t stand the silence from her. He couldn’t stand the thought that she’d rather die than acknowledge him.
“This is crazy,” he implored, his voice cracking. “You know I love you and would do anything for you as long as it wasn’t something completely nuts. Please, stop this!”
“If you really loved me, you would’ve done this for me,” she said in her painfully slow manner of speech.
“It’s not fair for you to want me to do this!”
“If there was something that was making you feel like you were suffocating, I’d do whatever you needed me to do so you could breathe again.”
Henry stared silently at his wife for several minutes, his mouth moving as if he were slowly chewing gum. Then he went back to the living room and stared blindly at the TV. At twelve thirty he got up from the sofa, and without saying another word to Sheila, he left the house.