“How are you this week, Chris?” Nora says gently.
“I haven’t used, if that’s what you’re asking.”
It isn’t. This is obvious, even to my untrained eyes. He is sweaty, despondent, leaky—nose running, eyes running, teary. When he’s used, he’s happy, euphoric even, and jittering like a lightning bug.
“Good for you.” Nora keeps her voice neutral.
“Leandra’s giving me shit because she thinks I scored. She’s not mad I have it; she’s mad I’m not sharing. But I’m clean.”
“What made Leandra think otherwise?” Nora is very careful to keep any suspicion, any doubt, off her face, out of her tone, but the wife is rarely wrong in these cases.
“These two enormous delivery trucks drove right by the house the other day.” Chris seems like he’s answering a different question. “Some kind of restaurant supply company.” He looks up, clocks Nora’s skepticism. “That’s what Leandra thought too, but I swear. I called her to the window to see, but by the time she got out of her chair and made it over, they were long gone.”
He pauses for a moment while we all three picture how long it takes Leandra to cross a room these days.
“She said I was lying to screw with her. I said she knew I’d never do that. So then she said I was tripping, and what was I on. I said I wasn’t on anything, and the trucks were real. They had pictures on the sides. One was a fancy fridge with a screen in it. One was this sprawling stove with like ten huge burners. But she said did I know of some kind of magical new restaurant going in around here. And I said maybe it wasn’t a restaurant. And she said what else would two restaurant supply trucks be doing here. So I said there was probably enough gas in that stove you could use that shit to escape the planet in case of the apocalypse. I was just trying to make her laugh.”
He laughs a little himself, but not like he thinks he’s funny. More like he’s embarrassed he thought Leandra would.
“And what did she say to that?” Nora prompts.
“She said, ‘Too late.’”
Nora nods grimly.
But I’m thinking of his delivery trucks. I’d be with Leandra and Nora on this one except for that backhoe Rock Ramundi and I both saw and the truck full of strangers and tools Alex Malden did. Leandra’s right that it can’t be a restaurant opening. For one thing, a restaurant never opens here. For another, we’d have heard about it. But there’ve been too many strange sightings for this just to be something Chris imagined while high.
But Chris isn’t thinking about the trucks anymore. “I can’t help her if I don’t use. You know? I can’t help her.”
“You can’t help her if you do.”
“That’s not true. You know that’s not true.”
Nora nods. She means she understands what he’s saying, not that she agrees. But I do. I agree. Chris and his wife Leandra both worked at the plant. She got cancer and lost her arm and shoulder and much of her upper torso. She looks like she’s standing half out of a door even when she’s in the middle of the room. Maybe if she’d been born with only one arm, like Violet Alison and Otto Mathers in my class both were, she’d have had no trouble doing without, but she was too old. Now she needs help.
Chris has too much pain to help. Maybe it’s physical pain like his nerves are on fire, like his joints rub against each other like sandpaper, like needles are poking him. This is what he tells us some days. Or maybe it’s emotional pain like his job is gone and his town is dead and his body hates him and half his wife is missing. Or maybe it doesn’t matter which. The cure is the same. And now if he doesn’t come see Nora once a week and pee clean in a cup—one of the terms of his plea bargain—the state will send him to jail. So actually the cure does not exist.
“They help me. And they help me help her. And otherwise?” His question is not rhetorical. He is really asking. Otherwise what? If not drugs, then what?
Nora has an answer to that. “How are you fixed for dinners?”
He looks up from the floor again as if dinner is not something that ever occurred to him. From the look of him, maybe it hasn’t.
“I’m going to freeze you a bunch of casseroles and bring them over Wednesday evening,” Nora says. “Can you both be home at seven?”
Baking is Nora’s third job, and she does a lot of it. It’s not really a job, though, because no one pays her to do it. When she says “a bunch of casseroles,” she means two or three, but also a few batches of cookies, a few batches of scones, half a dozen pies, a couple of cakes. It’s true Chris and Leandra need fattening up, but this is the scale of baking Nora prefers under all circumstances.