Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents by Child Lee

Author:Child, Lee [Child, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857899033
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2012-12-01T04:30:00+00:00

IT AIN’T RIGHT

BY MICHELLE GAGNON

It ain’t right, is all I’m saying.”

Joe just kept walking the way he always did, shovel over his shoulder, cigarette clinging to his bottom lip.

“You hear me?”

He stopped and turned, lifting his head inch by inch until his eyes found my hips then my breasts then my eyes. A dust devil whirled away behind him, making the bottom branches of the tree dance like girls on May Day, up and down. He stared at me long and hard, and I felt the last heat of the day seeping into my skin and down through my bones, reaching inside to meet the cold that burrowed into my stomach early that morning.

“She’s dead, ain’t she?” With his free hand, Joe scratched his belly where the bottom of his T-shirt had pulled away.

“Just ’cause she’s dead don’t mean she should be put down like this.”

He looked past me toward where the road met the hill and dove behind it, wheat tips glowing pink in the twilight. “What else we gonna do with her?”

We stared each other down while the shadows crept in and heat eased into darkness like air escaping a balloon. Night surrounded Joe’s head, digging under his cheekbones and into his eye sockets, carving out the face that had been so handsome years earlier that I swore he could’ve been in pictures.

I turned and shuffled back to the house, kicking up pebbles and dust with my sandals, crossing my arms against the cold that radiated out like there was a snowball growing inside me.

He was gone a long time. The six o’clock news came and went, then Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, and me checking the clock every five minutes, getting up from time to time to peer through our fading curtains. It was always so quiet at night, I swear the TV was the only thing keeping my head screwed on my shoulders.

Law & Order was on when he finally came in, bolted both locks, and went to the sink without so much as a word. Joe washed his hands for a long time. I stared at the screen, trying to figure out why some girl was crying over someone who from the look of things she hadn’t much liked anyway. He plunked down beside me and made the same sigh as his beer when he popped it open.

“So it’s done, then,” I said.

“Yep.”

And that was the last we spoke of it. But once that cold burrowed inside me, it seemed dead set on staying. It got so I couldn’t watch Joe standing in a towel with the mirror steamed up, shaving in that slow, careful way he did everything without wanting to sock him over the head with something. I kept washing his clothes and making his dinner, but when he entered me I stared up at the ceiling and endured his gasps and cries without a word, both of us pretending there wasn’t another person lying there with us, when both of us knew there was.

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