The Relive Box and Other Stories by T.C. Boyle

Author:T.C. Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

THE BLAME GAME

One thing I like to do in the late afternoon once I’m done with work (I consult for a couple of the big wine-growing operations on the Central Coast) is pour a glass of wine, put on some music and wait for Leah to get home so we can decide what to do about dinner. Half the time we wind up going out. We’re not foodies per se, but there are a whole lot of fine restaurants in this little tourist enclave by the sea, and our choices are virtually limitless. Plus, our two favorite places are an easy walk from the apartment. On this particular afternoon, the afternoon of the theft of the car and abduction of the dog (whether planned or incidental), I got back late, having declined an offer of a lift from Officer Mortenson only to wind up walking the twenty blocks home. Every step of the way I’d been thinking about Leah—her look of shattered disbelief when she found out, the tragic extenuation in the way she would freeze her lips and pinball her eyes, her uncanny ability to hurtle from shock to sorrow to accusation and play the blame game—and if I’d already put away half a bottle of an ambrosial Santa Rita Hills pinot by the time she came in the door, who could blame me? It had been a day. And it was far from over.

About Leah: she’s thirty-seven, a year older than I, and she works for a sometimes intemperate older woman named Marjorie Biletnikoff, who has her own interior design business here in town. Most days are placid, meeting with clients, choosing fabrics, carpets, antiques, that sort of thing, but every once in a while—once a week, it seems—things can get inordinately stressful because Marjorie Biletnikoff goes off the wagon in a major way (if she ever even bothered to climb up on it in the first place) and tends to take her frustrations in life out on Leah. Maybe I’m imagining things, but from the moment I heard Leah’s key turn in the lock I thought I could detect the sort of forward thrust and abrupt wrist action that would indicate that today was one of those days.

The door yawned open, slammed shut, and here came Leah down the entrance hall and straight into the kitchen, where I was standing at the counter, cradling my wineglass. She didn’t say hi and I didn’t either and there was no pecking of kisses or embraces or anything usual because as soon as she came through the door I said, “Something happened,” and she said, “You’re drunk,” and I was on the defensive.

Finally, when I got the news out that the car had been stolen from the parking structure at the library, she softened and murmured, “Oh, James, that’s awful,” even as she went to the cabinet to reach down a wineglass for herself. “You must feel terrible.”

“Yeah,” I said, shifting my gaze, “but that’s not all.”

She’d swung round, glass in hand, and had lifted the bottle by its neck before she paused, her eyes boring into me.

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