He doesn’t mention the hitting, though. He admits to Sue Snead that he was thinking about leaving, but the only thing he cares about now is finding Pauline, making sure she’s not in trouble, helping his little girl, who’s brokenhearted. Divorce is inevitable, but it can be civilized, he says.
Gambling problem? Drugs? Alcohol? He shakes his head no to each question. Sure, she’s bought a lottery ticket here or there, done a bump of cocaine on special occasions, enjoys a cocktail. But she’s the opposite of an addict, the only person he’s ever known who could smoke three or five times a year, then let it go. It’s impossible to imagine her in thrall to anything, anyone. She calls the shots while pretending not to. Even in motherhood, she has shown this steely control. She was never the type of mother to get gooey about it, or make those comments about how the tops of babies’ heads smell.
“Maybe there’s another man,” he blurts out. Until he says it, he hasn’t really considered this possibility. But what else can there be? Sure, she took two thousand dollars out of their savings account the week before she left, a smart play on her part. But how long can she go on two thousand dollars? Someone has to be supporting her. She’s not fit for much work beyond McDonald’s.
He writes a check for the retainer and Ms. Snead promises to be in touch within the week. He knows he should go to work, but he calls in with a “family emergency” and goes to Wagner’s Tavern, the bar where he met Pauline. A beer at lunch isn’t really drinking, not in a place like Wagner’s, a cop bar tucked into a corner of Joppa Road.
That was the first thing Pauline ever said to him: “You a cop?”
“Do I look like a cop?” His hair was on the long side, his jeans tight.
“That’s not a no. You could be undercover. You’ve got that look.”
“What kind of look is that?”
“Like a guy who’s trying not to look like a cop.”
Forty-five minutes later, they were having sex in his car. It was weeks before she believed he wasn’t a cop, just a guy from a title company less than a mile up the street.
Today at Wagner’s, one beer turns into two turns into three and then he has to drink a big cup of coffee before he gets behind the wheel. Pauline’d kill him if he drove tipsy with Jani in the car. Well, too bad. You want to set the rules, you can get your goddamn ass home.
And then I’m going to leave. Maybe she thought she was clever, that if she left first, he would change his mind about leaving. How had she even figured out what he was planning to do? A witch, that one. She’s a witch.
Sometimes, he used to wake up in the middle of the night and find her looking at him. The light from the streetlamp threw a stripe across her eyes, and it was as if she were wearing a mask that allowed her to read his every thought.
He turns on the radio and it’s that goddamn song that’s on the radio all the time this summer, the one about chasing waterfalls. No one chases a waterfall. You go for a swim and next thing you know, the current catches you and throws you right over.
8
A new convenience store, a Royal Farms, has opened near the spot where the bypass will eventually join the beach highway. It’s a big deal in Belleville and Polly has heard people in the bar talking about it. The old-timers claim they will never patronize the convenience store, the first to open in Belleville, where one family has long had a lock on the grocery trade. They see it as a symbol of everything that is wrong, with Belleville and the world beyond. Open for twenty-four hours, undercutting the local gas station with its prices, a place where teenagers can be idle.
As a local, at least for the time being, Polly should stay away. But there’s something about the store’s bright, shiny newness that promises anonymity, a rare commodity in this town. In the mornings, she finds herself walking more than a mile there to buy a Diet Mountain Dew or a Good Humor bar, the one with toasted almonds. It’s a strange breakfast, to be sure, and she has to be careful about sweets: she wasn’t always thin like this and it was hard, getting the weight off after Jani. But there’s something about having an ice cream bar for breakfast that makes her feel truly free, maybe for the first time in her life. How thoughtlessly she squandered her freedom, taking up with Gregg and getting pregnant. If anyone knew her whole story, that might be the truly shocking part, the way she ruined her own second chance.
But no one knows her whole story. She plans to keep it that way.
She eats the ice cream bar in the store’s little alcove of preformed tables and benches, where almost no one else ever lingers. Only 9 a.m., it’s already hot enough that the ice cream will melt quickly if she takes it outside, and she wants to eat it as slowly as possible. She catches a glimpse of a familiar face from the bar, one of the locals who claimed he would never come here. He’s drinking a cup of coffee and eating some kind of breakfast sandwich made with a croissant. He registers her gaze, shrugs. Hard to know if the gesture is a sheepish concession to his hypocrisy or a kind of hello, the kind that says, I see you, I like you, but I want to be alone. She thinks it’s the first, but decides to believe it’s the second. What does it matter? The same nonresponse is fine for either one.
A young woman comes in with two fretful children, boys, no more than eighteen months apart, maybe both still in diapers, although the bigger one is walking alongside the double stroller. “Can I have?” he keeps whining. “Can I have?” Polly studies the children intently, waiting to see if she feels anything. No. She feels nothing. She is not an indiscriminate lover of children. Wait, that’s not quite right. She feels intense empathy for the mother, who looks miserable. The poor thing has large, fleshy thighs, dotted with a scarlet rash. Her hair is almost half and half—six inches of dull brown roots, six inches of a brassy blond that looks slightly greenish. She can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three, but she moves with the shuffling tread of a much older woman.