“I put him out of his misery.”She sets the cup in front of me.“There’s a difference.And out here, we know the difference.We’ve always known.My mother knew.Her mother before that.You don’t let people suffer because it makes you feel better about not having to make the hard choice.That’s vanity.That’s not love.”
She sits across from me.Folds her hands in her lap.The same way she folded Charles’s hands on his chest.
“I called the doctor,” she says.“He’s on his way.He’ll see what I see.What everyone’s seen for weeks.A man with a tumor who finally stopped fighting it.”
I look at the banana bread.The tea she just poured me.The tea she poured Charles.
I don’t touch it.
“I know this is hard,” she says.Her voice softens.The first crack.Small.Human.“I know you did everything you could.You were a good wife to him, Marin.The Lord knows that.The whole town knows that.”
I did everything I could.
I look at Charles one more time.The folded hands.The closed eyes.The face I kidnapped and restrained and watched movies with and screamed at and loved in every broken way I knew how.That face is still now.Permanently still.And the woman who made it still is sitting across from me with her hands folded in her lap waiting for the kettle to cool and the doctor to come and God to confirm what she already knows—that she did the right thing.
She did the right thing.She’s sure of it.The way she was sure about the casseroles and the prayer chains and the beads from Father Donnelly.
I sit in the chair.I look at the tea I will not drink.I look at the man on the couch.I look at Mrs.Mather, who is already thinking about what to bring to the funeral.
Luke took my choice from me.And Mrs.Mather took the rest.
I don’t say a word.
Because there is nothing left to say.
65
Luke
Marin comes through the front door and I know before she says a word.
Her face is white.Not angry.Not scared.Something past both of those.The face of a woman who just walked into a room and found the ending she wasn’t expecting.
“Come with me,” she says.
I don’t ask where.I follow her off the porch, across the road, up Mather’s front steps.The porch light is on.The door is open.The house smells like banana bread and chamomile and something final.
Charles is on the couch.
I’ve seen more dead men than I’d like.Enough to know what it looks like when a body stops being a person and starts being a thing.Charles looks like a thing.A well-arranged thing—quilt, folded hands, closed eyes, slippers beside the couch—but a thing.
Mrs.Mather is in the kitchen washing a plate.
“Luke,” she says.The way she’d say it if I came to fix her fence.“Would you like some tea?”
“No ma’am.”
“Banana bread?There’s some left.”
I look at the plate on the coffee table.Half a loaf gone.I look at the tea, gone cold.I look at Charles.
“No ma’am.”
Marin is standing in the middle of the living room.Not moving.Not speaking.Her arms are crossed and she’s looking at Charles the way you look at something you broke and can’t put back together.Not grief exactly.Something more complicated than grief.The particular expression of a woman who did terrible things for a man she loved and lost him to a woman with a kettle and a Bible and no doubt whatsoever.
“The doctor’s on his way,” Mrs.Mather says.She dries the plate.Sets it in the cupboard.“I called right after I called you.He should be here any minute.”
She’s right.There are headlights on the road.A car pulling up.A door opening and closing.
