He sits at his dining room table, which has a view of the high-rise next door, which makes it cheaper than the apartments that have only the expansive southern exposures. People pay so much for views and then, within a few weeks, don’t even notice them. Art is better than views, his mother always said, especially if you paint your own. She could and did, huge, vivid abstracts. He has two of her canvases, but he has never bothered to hang them. He’s saving them for a day when he might put down roots.
What if his mom were alive? What would she think of Polly? His mother was a trusting, openhearted person who saw the good in almost everyone. The only person she never liked was Adam’s wife. But she was right. Lainey—she always said it was short for Elaine, Adam always pointed out it was the same length, letter-wise and syllable-wise—wasn’t for him. She couldn’t indulge his wanderlust. What wife would? Could Polly?
This forced separation will give them a chance to see, he reasons. Rationalizes. Not much bullshit gets by him, not even his own. Maybe if you never marry a woman, she never becomes a wife. Polly says she never wants to marry again. Yet there she is with the weekly PennySaver, looking longingly at houses in Belleville. Could anyone dream smaller? The tiny scale of her desires—Adam, a house, a bed-and-breakfast—makes her achingly precious to him. He just needs to bring her up to his level, take her hand and lead her to a peak where she can see the world spread out at her feet, imagine something bigger. Even a partial view of a park called Stony Run would be a step up for Polly.
But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. He thinks of Polly’s face when they stood next to the dying bonfire the Friday before Halloween. She was happy that night, and it wasn’t the feverish glee of a firebug. Right? She just likes bonfires. And movies about fires. True, she also was married to an arson investigator, but she didn’t like him. Everything can be explained.
He drinks a beer, watches the news. Polly is a quiet woman, but a solitary silence is different from one shared by another person. He misses her silence.
*
He drives to Annapolis the next day to see if there’s any kind of nonprofit set up in the family name of the suspect groom. Unlikely, but it’s a basic thing to check and he likes having a reason to go to Annapolis, a smallish town that doesn’t feel like a small town. When he’s finished checking the state office for nonprofit filings, he buys a sandwich and eats it at the foot of Main Street, looking out on the bay. Where is Polly this time of day, what is she doing? Probably reading the goddamn PennySaver or taking a walk. He liked how Polly would get up in the morning and go out, letting him sleep, then slipping back into bed before he awoke. Not many women would do that.
And not many women would kill someone and blow up their own apartment to cover it up.
He finds he can’t finish his sandwich, so he feeds the leftovers to the gulls. Six months ago, when Irving came to him with this job, Adam thought it would be a few weeks of work, enough money to allow him to take off about now. Instead, he’s rooting around in one soon-to-be-married couple’s finances. And tomorrow, he’ll be watching a woman whose husband believes her to be having an affair. Quite a life you’ve made for yourself, Adam, my boy.
He drives back, straight into the sunset. It’s different from the sunset he remembers from Belleville, the slow flattening of an orange disk over the endless fields. It was so flat there. Flat in every sense. Dull, every day the same, only the rotating specials at the restaurant helping him distinguish between Wednesday (“spaghetti” night, although it was homemade fettuccine, rolled out and cut without even a basic pasta maker, then tossed in a deep, rich lamb ragu) and Friday (roast chicken). He’s looking forward to watching Monday Night Football, drinking a beer, in his own home.
Only it’s not home, he realizes, as he watches the Browns lose to the Steelers. It can never be home, even if he bought his own furniture, signed a longer lease, hung his mother’s paintings.
Home is wherever Polly is. For better or worse.
37
Polly is depressed as the holidays approach, although she denies it, even to herself, embarrassed by the cliché of her feelings. Not that anyone notices her mood, or seems to care. And it’s not as if she has great holiday memories unless she reaches all the way back to childhood. The orange Schwinn parked in front of the Christmas tree, its basket filled with Nancy Drew books. The tiny brass monkey in her Christmas stocking when she was eleven.
Ditmars freaking out over how dry the tree was and knocking it over, breaking half the ornaments. Ditmars throwing a plate at her head when the Thanksgiving turkey was overcooked and she made the mistake of not serving his mother’s oyster dressing.
Her life is a series of holding patterns. With Adam, who drives over almost every weekend, but never talks about the future. With Gregg, who has not answered her open-ended inquiries about moving forward with the divorce. With Max and Ernest, her own private hell. She likes to tell Adam: “They have only two topics. One of them is the weather and the other one isn’t.”
She decides November feels dreary because she remembers where she was a year ago, the giddy high of planning her escape. She had just hired Barry Forshaw to sue the hospital and while he was properly cautious about keeping expectations low, she knew they would do okay, even with a settlement. On Thanksgiving Day, Polly made the smallest turkey possible—it was only the four of them, Gregg, Savannah, Jani, and her—and didn’t trouble herself too much, taking any shortcut that modern convenience could bestow, buying the sauerkraut instead of preparing it herself, a sacrilege in her mother’s book. (Polly’s mother was old Baltimore. Polly should make Adam sour beef one day, and cabbage rolls.) Thanksgiving a year ago, when it was time for the blessing, Polly-still-Pauline bent her head over a plate of white meat and ready-made cranberry sauce and bakery-bought Parker House rolls and gave thanks for what she had decided would be three million dollars, give or take. Take, it turned out, because Forshaw was getting 40 percent, plus whatever interest her money generated while it waited for her. She was not a big believer in signs or portents, but the number three had been swimming in her head for days and she believed it was more than superstition. Let other people play El Gordo, the big state lottery with a ten-million-dollar jackpot. She was playing her own game.