“Fuck you, Russ.”
Remembering how it felt to want to murder someone, she thought she might yet become a women’s libber. But she was done with the psychiatric dumpling. No imaginable breakthrough could leave her more broken through than she was now. She felt like going home and emptying her hosiery drawer of its remaining cash, to forestall any temptation to crawl back to Sophie, and spending it on an extravagant present for Perry, but the stores were all closing.
She saw what she had to do next. She had to confess to Perry, too. Confiding in Sophie had only been practice, a warm-up. Someone in her family needed to know what she’d done, and it sure as fucking hell wasn’t Russ. Perry was the person most like her, the person in danger of disturbance like her own, the person she had to warn. Wherever her disturbance might lead her, whether back into Bradley’s arms or merely to a divorcée’s career in local theater, she would have to bring Perry along with her. Her responsibility for him would keep her from flying too dangerously high. This would be the deal she made with God.
Insulated by her fatness, she went around the side of the library, pushed through a weak spot in its hedge, and made tracks across its front lawn, which she’d never seen one person set foot on. New Prospect was lovely in the snow but not as beautiful as Arizona, because it was already shadowed by a tomorrow of gray slush-puddles, of salt-corroded snowbanks blackened by the exhaust pipes of cars gunning their engines, spinning their wheels. In Arizona, the white purity had persisted for weeks.
Fighting uphill against the wind on Maple Avenue made her aware of nicotine’s poisoning of the heart. At the corner of Highland, she stopped to catch her breath and check her watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. With all the snow, Russ might only now be getting home himself. She could always say to him, “Fuck the reception—I’m not going.” But a sweeter way to punish him would be to let him wonder why she hadn’t come home. She was pretty sure he’d lied to her at breakfast, pretty sure he was with his widow friend. And there was, she realized, an easy way to be certain. Kitty Reynolds, his putative companion for the outing in the city, lived in one of the little houses farther up on Maple, near the high school.
Decisions being simple for a person unafraid of consequences, Marion crossed Highland and proceeded up Maple, into the wind. Her feet were frozen, her fingers getting there. She couldn’t quite picture Kitty’s house, but she recognized it when she came to it. There was light in every downstairs window, a sports car with a Michigan license in the driveway, no wreath on the door, no lights on the bushes. Marion marched up the front walk, noting that it had been shoveled perhaps an hour earlier, and rang the doorbell. For a heart-clutching moment, she confused what she was doing with the thing she’d done to Bradley’s wife, as if she were reenacting it. Then clarity returned. Her situation now was exactly the reverse.
An elderly man in a thick cardigan opened the door. She was afraid she had the wrong house, but he identified himself as Kitty’s brother. “She’s just draining the spaghetti,” he said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you at dinnertime.”
“Who can I tell her is here?”
“I—it’s not important. I should have stopped by earlier. Was she here in the afternoon?”
“Yep. Trouncing me at Scrabble. It was the perfect day for sitting by the fire. Would you like to come in?”
“No, I, no,” Marion said, turning away. “Thank you. I’ll see her in church on Sunday.”
“And you are…？”
She raised a hand and waved it as she walked away. As soon as she heard the door close, she took out her Luckies. One of her match packs was sodden, the other still usable. Suspicious though she’d been that Russ had lied to her, it had taken conclusive proof to make her furious about it. His lie had been stupid, easily found out, the lie of a little boy, and this made her even angrier. Did he think she was stupid? Probably not even. She’d barely registered as a person at all. She’d been little more than an inconvenient object at the breakfast table, an annoying vase in the way of his sugar bowl, not even worth telling a decent lie to. Soon enough, when she’d lost her fat, she would have more ways to make him pay. For now, the sweetest punishment would be to say nothing, let him think she knew nothing, let him damn himself by telling further lies.
It was nearly seven thirty when she got back to the parsonage. There was no sign of the car, no car tracks in the driveway. Inside the back door, she took off her shoes and coat and ran her fingers through her slushy hair. On the kitchen counter were sugar cookies whose allure she could no longer fathom. Everything in the kitchen seemed lusterless and alien. She might have been entering the house of someone recently deceased.