I watched her shrink across the field, her steps eating up the ground with a callous teenage confidence that would have told the sun itself to fuck off. My desperation grew proportionally with the distance between us. Everything in me burned to run after her, to haul her back here, tie her to this tree, and put her mouth to use until it couldn’t speak a word of truth or lies. Give her exactly what she wanted and then find a car and drive. Show her everything. Make us both forget this town and ourselves and every terrible decision that had brought us to this place and time.
But New York? What did she expect me to say? Yes, I’ll move to New York with you? I’ll throw away any chance of getting my life in Minneapolis back and go live on the streets of New York City with you? That’s where we would be—on the street. Even if I could miraculously line up a teaching job for the fall, I wouldn’t get a paycheck until October. I had a thousand dollars left in my savings account, which was nothing, yet Hattie thought her two grand would somehow support both of us in the most expensive city in the country?
She had no idea what she was facing. She had no friends there, no contacts, no plan. She needed me. God, she needed me almost as much as I craved her, and the temptation to give in to her insane demand practically overwhelmed me.
Except I couldn’t forget Mary.
Mary kept me rooted to the spot, watching Hattie until she disappeared into the woods. I didn’t give a shit about the rest of it—my job, my reputation—nothing in this Pine Valley life mattered anymore except Mary. She’d told me her plans to stay on the farm over a month ago and we’d been living in a stalemate ever since. I hadn’t given her an answer as to whether I would stay and she hadn’t brought it up again. We existed in parallel, passing perfunctory remarks like well-mannered yet distant neighbors. I knew she was waiting for me to make a decision, but I honestly couldn’t tell whether she cared about what that decision would be.
Was it any wonder I’d set up this rendezvous with Hattie? Hattie, who’d curled up in my lap like I was her haven from the world, who’d pleaded with me and threatened to break me, like I was someone worth breaking.
I drank the rest of the wine and tossed the leftover food to a circling crow, then lay down and stared at the sky through the bared branches.
Would she really do it? Would Hattie talk to Mary the next time she came into the pharmacy? She’d told me over and over that she would do anything for me, that she was the right woman for me, but which version of her? Even if she wasn’t a born actress, she was still eighteen, for fuck’s sake. What wouldn’t a scorned eighteen-year-old do?
When I couldn’t stand thinking about it anymore, I gathered everything up and walked back to the barn. Hattie was already gone when I got there. Maybe she was home already, planning the best way to ruin me. It wouldn’t take much. A quick phone call to Mary or a confession to her parents, and my life would be over.
I hurled the empty wine bottle against the barn wall, but it didn’t even crack, so I kicked it into the pond that was forming on the far side of the building. It was tempting to toss her picnic blanket in after it. Instead, I left it in a dry corner wrapped around the book.
When I arrived back at the house, Mary’s truck was parked in the driveway. She’d said they were going shopping in Rochester after the doctors’ appointments, but it wasn’t even noon. They were home early.
I tossed the picnic basket in the backseat of my car and then opened the front door quietly. If I had any ideas of sneaking upstairs, they immediately died when I saw Mary sitting on the couch in the living room, staring at me like she’d been counting the minutes until I got home. The TV was off. Elsa was nowhere to be seen. The overwhelming assault of guilt compounded as the seconds ticked by and Mary remained motionless. She’d hardly paused in the last year. Could there be any doubt about the reason for her still life now?
On a completely different level from the nausea and slamming of my heart, I wondered how she’d found out. I started scanning the pages of my life, looking for the subtext that must have spilled over and given me away. Or maybe I hadn’t done anything. Maybe Hattie had already made good on her threat.
“Where were you?” Mary finally broke the silence.
“Out. Walking.” I didn’t admit anything yet.
“Walking where?”
“In the fields. Back there.” I swung an arm in no particular direction. “I wanted some fresh air and didn’t feel like a run.”
Mary laughed without any humor. “You live on a farm and you had to go walking to get some fresh air. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s it right there.”
“What’s ‘it’? What are you talking about?”
“Nothing.”
“Where’s Elsa? I thought you were going shopping.”
“She didn’t want me pushing her wheelchair around. I dropped her off at Winifred’s for a visit.”
“Okay.” I waited for the accusation, the tears and the rage, but nothing came. She kept sitting there with that unreadable expression.
“Is there something else?” I took a step toward the stairs, instinctually retreating.
“Sit down, Peter.”
My ass hit the chair immediately. Part of me even welcomed what was coming next. It was the end of my marriage—new paperwork to file in front of the old—but the end of the deceptions, too, the end of pretending I was anything good.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “You’re acting strangely.”