My Nemesis by Charmaine Craig

Author:Charmaine Craig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2023-02-06T17:04:46+00:00

10.

AND HERE WE ARE, careening toward the end of everything as it was between us.

I didn’t throw myself at Charlie in my cold living room that night. Didn’t demand to know what was going on with Nora or why he wanted to leave his wife. I believed this left me safe—morally, even—as though remaining in the realm of fantasy exempted me from guilt, responsibility. Well, it did nothing of the kind.

About two weeks after the awards ceremony, Milton surprised me by announcing that he’d booked an anniversary trip for us to Palm Springs. The plan, he said with a pallid trepidation I couldn’t help noting, was to fly into Los Angeles and stay with Charlie for a night before being joined by him, and maybe Wah, for a more leisurely visit in the desert. I didn’t mention the oddness of spending our anniversary with others; both of us knew, I think, that we were no longer enough alone—or, rather, that our excitement together was being sustained, if also complicated, by them.

Because Htet had a holiday choral concert at her school on the evening of our arrival, no one was home when we pulled onto their darkening street, and I took in everything that had changed: the state of the freshly boarded-up Victorian, in whose dusky driveway sat a gleaming black pickup truck; the way various houses were strung up with lights, some beginning to twinkle even as we maneuvered around for a parking space; and the trees, their trunks unvaryingly wrapped in foil and factory-pressed Christmas bows, many of their branches shorn of leaves so that the place appeared not just cheapened but naked and defenseless, more subject to the unremitting and now unmuffled roar of the nearby freeway.

And yet not everything was changed. As we pulled our bags down the cold sidewalk, we passed Ernie and that American flag hanging limply from the pole on his lawn. He was nestled on his porch with a glass of red wine, and though I nodded to him—we still hadn’t been formally introduced—and he held a trembling hand up to me, the blank look on his face did not waver, not even when Milton and I began to fumble and fight with the lockbox on a spigot between the properties.

“What a strange old man,” I told Milton, once our break-in was complete and we’d dropped our bags in the living room.

There was an unfamiliar smell about the place without the family present. I was taken again by how barren its shadowed rooms seemed and had the feeling that its few pieces of furniture were vigilantly standing guard, ready to report on us in defense of Wah.

“Think I’ll have a shower,” Milton said. I suppose my comment about Ernie had been mean. “Dinner at eight,” he added, heading up the stairs with our bags. The plan was for the others to drop off Htet at the house before we made our collective way to a restaurant downtown that Charlie had been wanting to try.

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