I didn’t know why it bothered me so much. I’d probably seen Mary eat a hundred chicken wings during those times at the bar. Would I be okay with my wife eating dead animals if she couldn’t bring herself to kill them? It was ludicrously hypocritical. I knew that. But that damn chicken’s eye wouldn’t go away. It stared up at me from the lifeless head, surrounded by a pool of its own blood.
Someone laughed in the living room and then I heard footsteps on the stairs. Mary appeared in the doorway and leaned against the jamb, mirth infusing her features.
“I found an Old Maid card set and thought it might be fun. Then Winifred said there were too many old maids in the room already.”
“They’re old widows, not old maids.”
“True.” She shrugged and grinned. “Do you want to play?”
“I don’t know that game.”
“It’s easy. Even Mom can handle it, I think.”
“No, I don’t feel like playing.”
“What’s the matter?” Mary came into the room and sat on the edge of the desk next to me. She brushed some hair out of my eyes.
“Nothing.” I pulled back.
“Are you still upset about the chicken?”
“You could have at least warned me beforehand.”
“Oh, come on, Peter.”
I pushed away from her dismissive tone and paced the edge of the room. “It didn’t bother you even a little, did it?”
“What do you want me to say? This is how I was raised.”
Everything about her demeanor told me I was the one with the problem. I was the aberration in the room. After seven years she either didn’t understand my moral choices or she didn’t give a shit. I shook my head and picked up a book on top of a stack by the window, turning pages like there was something important inside, if only I could find it.
“You’re not coming down?” I could hear the hurt in her question and I didn’t care.
“No. I think I’ll pass on the exciting card game with the seventy-year-olds.”
“Would it kill you to be part of this family?”
I advanced on her, jabbing the book in the direction of the barns outside the window. “What do you think I was doing this morning? You think I was collecting eggs and hauling straw bales for fun?”
“No, I know you hated every second of it. You couldn’t have made it more obvious if you tried.”
I barked out a laugh. “Oh, trust me, I could have made it a lot more obvious.”
“I didn’t think it was going to be like this.” She blinked back tears. “I knew it would take some adjustment to move here, but it’s like you’re not even trying.”
Shaking my head, I turned back to the window. If she thought “some adjustment” would turn me into a butcher, there was nothing else I could say to her.
She lingered and drew a breath, as though on the verge of saying something else, then I heard the creak of the floorboards in the hallway and her slow descent down the stairs.
I sunk into a chair and dropped my head to the book in my hand, drilling the imprint of the spine into my forehead. The truth was, I did want to be part of this family. What wouldn’t I give to relax and joke away the evening with Mary, or the Mary of before? To unlearn what I knew about her?
Aggravated, I sat up and tossed the book on the desk and that’s when I noticed the title for the first time. Shakespeare’s Complete Tragedies.
Nothing suicidal, the principal had said, sitting jovially in front of his glass cabinet full of model tractors, each green body carefully polished to catch the light. I don’t like putting suicide out in front of teenagers. Don’t want to give the misguided ones any ideas. He didn’t want to disturb teenagers who were learning to behead chickens on their fathers’ farms, who were guiding cows and pigs into trailers and driving them to their deaths.
I paged through until I landed on Macbeth.
Macbeth—arguably the most violent play Shakespeare ever wrote. I could pour buckets of red corn syrup all over the stage, let them kill and feast on each other’s blood. No romantic suicides here; Macbeth was pure carnage fueled by greed and madness and revenge. The Bard always reveals our natures and in this play he’d said that in the right situation, with the right motive, all of us are murdering monsters.
I marked the page and pushed the book to the far side of my desk, away from everything else, as if afraid of what was inside.
DEL / Monday, April 14, 2008
BY SEVEN o’clock Monday morning I had Jake digging into Hattie’s laptop and was knocking on the Kinakises’ door. Mrs. Kinakis was none too pleased to see me again, especially when I explained that I needed Tommy to give DNA samples that morning. Both parents were royally ticked off that Tommy’d landed on the suspect list, but Tommy himself didn’t have anything to say about it. He was as quiet as yesterday, sitting at his mom’s kitchen table and poking at a bowl of oatmeal turning to concrete in front of him.
“I’ll do it.” He finally spoke up, killing his parents’ arguments mid-word. He put his varsity letterman’s jacket on without a backward glance at either of them and we were on our way to Rochester.
Tommy stared out the passenger side window the whole ride, wiping his eyes every once in a while. He’d asked if he had to sit in the back before we got in and that was the last he’d spoken.
When we were almost into the city, I told him he was doing a good thing. “I could’ve easily gotten a warrant, you know. You saved me the trouble.”