When he first arrived home with a bouquet of black-eyed Susans for Rebecca, and a new yellow dress and coat for Sally, Jonah Baum sensed nothing amiss.
He called out for his wife and daughter and, upon receiving no reply, assumed Rebecca was out running errands and Sally was at a friend’s house, as was often the case when Jonah returned from teaching his Thursday sessions of transcendental poetry and Gothic lit at Lyndon State.
A part of him was relieved to be alone. More than a part. He did not wish to face Rebecca. Not yet. And with no one home, he figured he’d get a jump on grading the papers he’d not gotten to while sleeping during his office hours in the dingy, windowless space he shared with three other adjuncts.
If he burrowed deep enough into his work, he reasoned, he might escape the gloom cast over him by his and Rebecca’s altercation the previous night. By the dull rock of ugliness hunkered in his gut, he knew his part was lamentable; he’d overreacted to his suspicions, and when Rebecca came home later he’d have apologizing to do, and he’d gladly do it.
How much apologizing, he couldn’t say. He’d not seen Rebecca or Sally that morning to gauge mood. With the world still dark, he’d stolen out of his house and into the black cold dawn like a criminal from a crime scene. Whatever Jonah’s level of culpability, the yellow dress and coat Sally had wanted, and the cache of Rebecca’s favorite flowers he’d picked across the road along the river, would carry him through.
Perhaps, a voice said, Rebecca isn’t home yet because Rebecca does not wish to be home yet.
Jonah shrugged off the voice and entered the living room, stepped around Sally’s menagerie of stuffed animals, preciously arranged for tea around the scuffed coffee table with a matchbook wedged under one leg to level it.
Jonah stopped. The watercolor painting of Gore Mountain hung crooked on the wall. Nothing new. The train that rampaged past on the tracks just across the river from their old house saw to that twice a day. Soon after moving here, Rebecca had learned to place her fragile knickknacks at the rear of shelves to keep them from skittering over the edge from the train’s vibration.
The crooked painting drove Rebecca mad, her outrage so disproportionate to the painting’s affront that Jonah had once teased that the painting and the train were conspiring to undermine her sanity. She’d slapped his arm, hard: Not funny.
No, it wasn’t.
Normally, the painting didn’t bother Jonah: if he straightened it, it would only go crooked again later this evening when the train rumbled north. But something about the painting bothered him now, and he straightened it with a blush of satisfaction as disproportionate to the deed as was Rebecca’s ire toward the painting being crooked.
At the kitchen sink, Jonah filled an empty wine bottle with water and arranged the flowers, most certainly the last blooms of autumn.
Jonah plunked his backpack and the bag with Sally’s dress and coat on the table, searched the refrigerator for a Rolling Rock. Realizing he must have drunk all his beer the previous night, he unearthed Rebecca’s two four-packs of Bartles & Jaymes, cracked open a bottle, and put half of it down at a go, scowling at its sweetness as he settled in to correct the papers with his blue pen.
Jonah never used a red pencil to correct papers. As a boy, he’d suffered enough of the shaming red graffiti on his own schoolwork, despite his every earnest effort to focus and study hard, despite his empty stomach, and the bullying exacted on him for his high-water jeans and the hand-me-down shirts two sizes too small that he had to tug down at the back to cover his ass crack and the bruises and scabs from lashings. He’d promised himself that when he grew up he’d never demean kids or dismiss their problems as petty. One never knew how deep the secret pains of others cut.
Perhaps he was soft to keep promises made as a boy whose every cell had been replaced by new cells so many times in his thirty-three years that a hundred generations of himself now stood between the boy he’d been and the man he was. He was no longer who he’d once been.
Mercifully.