Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz Read Free Book Online Page A

hangs up.

RUTH
    F ROM THE BED , still holding the phone, she makes her way quickly to the bathroom, unsure whether to pee or throw up. In the end doing neither, choosing by default, because she’s already there, simply to stand at the sink looking at the haggard scarecrow the mirror gives back to her. A purple cardigan over her checked flannel nightgown, little patches of scalp gaping whitely through the sparse new growth of hair on her head. Were she to witness such a picture of another woman in a bathroom at night, she feels certain—the cardigan and nightgown, the henpecked coiffure, the tag-sale regalia—she’d have to draw a host of ungenerous conclusions about her and her life situation, starting with her ability to be a good and responsible mother. For if you can’t take better care of yourself than this—if, certainly no longer young, you let yourself go to the extent of wearing pilled sweaters to bed and having hair that resembles a mostly empty bowl of popcorn; if, peering into the bathroom mirror at an hour when most women should be snuggling up with their husbands in front of An Affair to Remember instead of The Daily Show alone, what you see staring back at you from the looking glass is, in effect, not yourself as you once recalled her but an answer to one of the more absurd questions in the Sunday New York Times crossword—well, you do the math. And she has; she’s done the math. Which is why, probably, standing now in the bathroom, she finds herself suddenly chilled despite the cardigan and the thick rag-wool socks, feeling the April cold in her poisoned bones to a degree that goes way beyond the seasonal meteorological average (not for nothing is Bow Mills called “the icebox of Connecticut”) or the fact that, responsiblyfor a woman who some months ago decided that she would rather live alone and sick than with a silly man who too often made her want to laugh at rather than with him, she’s turned the thermostat down to sixty-two degrees for the night.
    The hand still holding the phone is trembling—again, nothing to do with the cold. She sets the black plastic instrument on the sloping clamshell rim of the sink and lets go, only to watch it slide down into the bowl and come to rest on top of the dulled chrome drain. She stands looking at this, the earpiece out of which her ex-husband’s voice with his terrible unhappy news has sprung at her, her urge to turn on the tap and electrocute the thing ferociously strong.

DWIGHT
    W HEN S AM’S DOOR REMAINS CLOSED , I take a second beer out to the patio and, zoo-like, pace back and forth. Some ominous little weeds have sprouted around the cement, I see, and I make a mental note to spray the hell out of them with Roundup over the weekend. Meanwhile, someone’s grilling chicken in his backyard a couple of houses over, the marinated smoke rising up plump and fragrant; and a neighbor’s dog begins to bark hungrily, then another. Then both animals’ voices abruptly fall dead, and the evening is still again.
    Minutes pass like this, the dusk settling in—the lazy, arrogant, slow-moving dusk of Southern California, where the world is your oyster and there’s time enough for any dream. And I remember that my son, who until an hour ago I stubbornly continued, against various odds of my own making, to think of as a sensitive boy forever young, is now twenty-two years old, a grown man who has violently struck another man with a baseball bat. A physical expression of some roiling darkness in him that I surely recognize, because it is mine.
    And, at some point, one has to ask: What are a kid’s odds going to be growing up, when his father does time for killing a boy, accident or not? What are his odds going to be, anyway? Not even my old man did that to his family.
    My bottle is empty. I sit down heavily on the one chair in my backyard.
    Tomorrow I’ll buy another chair, I finally almost decide; and more plates, and maybe a bigger freezer, too. I’ll think