Ora cleans the dishes with rhythmic ferocity. She feels angry, though she can’t quite pinpoint the source of her displeasure. It’s Dale, but nothing in particular about him. She doesn’t like it when he’s bigoted, but it isn’t that. She doesn’t like it when he chews with his mouth open, but it isn’t that. She doesn’t like it when he drags his fork against the bottom of the plate, or cleans his teeth after a meal with his tongue, or when he leaves inventory to the last minute, but it is none of these things, either. It is his very self that irks her, which fact irks her further, because he is the man that she is supposed to love. Did love. Does love, she tells herself. Does love, she insists.
She puts the last dish aside and crosses the kitchen to the door of the store. She pushes it slightly open and peers through the crack. Dale is crouched before the sundries shelf, a clipboard on his knee and a cigarette between the fingers of one hand. His back is toward her, and something about the smooth skin behind his ear, that ageless arc of pink, translucent cartilage, melts her anger into exhaustion.
Quietly, Ora closes the door. She looks across the kitchen toward the hallway and their bedroom, which used to be the living room—and Tobe’s bedroom, which was theirs until Tobe was born. Both doors are closed. On their door hangs a cross, and on Tobe’s hangs a Yankees baseball cap, as if at any moment he might emerge from within, put it on his head, and go out to wait for the bus that would take him off to school. She tries to imagine that he is in there, listening to music or reading a book, but she knows all too well that he is not.
As has become habit, she enters their son’s bedroom. Everything is as Tobe left it seven months ago. A pair of pants still hangs over the back of the room’s single chair, and a Louis Armstrong record still rests on the turntable. Everything in here is as Tobe left it seven months ago. There’s a pair of shoes on the floor by the nightstand, and an empty water glass beneath the lamp. King Kong beats his chest on a poster above the bed. On the opposite wall is a poster of Winston Churchill, with the words “Let Us Go Forward Together.” Ora has grown to hate it.
She turns on the fan and sits on the bed in the semidarkness, the only source of illumination the dim light from the hallway. She puts her head into her hands, listening to the fan’s hum as she stares at her bare feet against the blue-and-white crochet of the rug. There is a stain by her big toe: coffee, from a breakfast in bed years and years ago when the bedroom was still theirs. At the memory, her heart gives an unexpected lurch. Her boys, she thinks, her boys. She lies down and curls onto her side, her head on Tobe’s pillow. She breathes in deeply, as she always does, and notices, with a pang, that his smell is fading.