Company by Shannon Sanders

Author:Shannon Sanders [Sanders, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

The November sunlight glowed persimmon-colored in the window. Anthony had tried a persimmon once, at a Japanese coworker’s wedding. The thing looked like an underripe beefsteak tomato and tasted like a gummy bear.

Merritt stirred beside him in bed, still asleep. She was rumpled and irritatingly beautiful, her shoulder-length hair imprisoned in a silk bonnet. She looked like a younger, less-assured version of her mother, frowning in her sleep. She snored lightly, as she always did in the suburban aridity.

Anthony showered and then dressed in the dark, fuming. On moving day, they’d had a whole discussion about setting up standing lamps in the walk-in closet. It was one of about twenty things Merritt had promised to do with her rafts of unstructured time, and it hadn’t gotten done.

Back in their old apartment, they had always brushed their teeth simultaneously at the his-and-hers sinks and snuck touches as they dressed together in his-and-hers suits they’d had tailored in Chinatown. On Ashburn Street, he had been asked not to make too much noise if she was still knocked out when he descended the stairs and headed out to work.

He gave the front door a hard tug and experienced a nasty little current of satisfaction at the loudness, then an aftershock of guilt. The guilt settled in his throat—or was it the start of a November cold?—and stayed with him all day.

From the driver’s seat of his Prius, he sized up the front lawn, the pale frost on the hedges, and began a voice-to-text email to his father-in-law. “Good morning, sir,” he began, as he did weekly, starting the ignition. “Checking in with a little update on lawn care.” It was one of the explicit terms of the arrangement: someone was to keep his in-laws apprised of the state of the home, just as regular tenants would, but more vigilantly, given their close relationship. Merritt had said she would do it, but the responsibility had gradually shifted to Anthony. He wouldn’t even bother asking this time. Even if he did, she would say she didn’t know anything about winter plant aeration, and still it would fall to him.

Concentrating on his verbal email, he drove slowly toward the main thoroughfare, casting a glance down Greer Lane as he passed. The school bus was stopped there, waiting; the stay-at-home mothers shepherded fleece-bundled kids inside. Lucy among them? Anthony couldn’t tell; they were all pink and laughing, not so much as a brunette among them, everyone in a uniform of yoga pants. And now he had passed, so mote it be. What the fuck sort of word was mote, anyway? He had started to look it up after Merritt’s first mention, but the headings on the search results—Wiccan shit, and Freemasons—had unsettled his Baptist-reared heart. His mother would have disapproved, and so he’d abandoned the research. The unease had remained.

“Anyway,” he concluded, wrapping up a remark about fertilizer, “let me know if that sounds good to you. Thanks again, sir.” And, send. He liked his father-in-law, who

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