Flowering Judas(132)

She parked her car in the driveway and went up to the house by the front walk. She liked that approach. The front doors were double doors. They were wide enough so that, if you propped them open, you could drive the Focus itself right into the foyer. Charlene remembered building this house. She remembered sitting at the kitchen table in the old place, the place that was closer to the office, and spreading out the blueprints so that she could go through them with a magnifying glass. The children were all in bed. Stew was in the living room, falling asleep in front of the television. The house, like the business, had been her idea to begin with.

She went into her living room and looked around. There was the big couch, and the love seat, and an overstuffed chair for Stew. There was her own wing chair, with its upright back, that made her feel safe. Charlene didn’t like relaxing, the way most people did. Relaxing made her feel like her life was going to hell.

She crossed her legs at the ankles. She folded her hands in her lap. She stared straight ahead. When she heard a car in the driveway, she didn’t even flinch. It wasn’t their car. It was Stew.

Stew came in through the side door, through the kitchen, the way he always did. He called out “Charlene?” as soon as he was in the house.

Charlene unfolded her hands and looked at the palms of them. “I’m in here,” she said.

Stew stumbled through the kitchen and then out into the hall. Stew always stumbled. There was something about his body that did not work right. It never had, even when they had all been in high school.

Charlene looked up when he came through the archway from the dining room. She folded her hands again. She didn’t smile.

“You could have told me you were leaving,” Stew said. “I’d have come with you. I never said I wouldn’t come with you.”

“I asked you before,” Charlene said. “I asked you and Mark and Suzanne and Kenny. Kenny hung up on me. Did you know that? I think he was with that girl. That girl he met at the college. Another one from the trailer park. What happened to our children, that all they want to know is people from the trailer park?”

“That isn’t true,” Stew said. “Suzanne is married to a very nice boy. You practically picked him out yourself. And Mark—”

“What about Mark?” Charlene said. “It will probably turn out that I’m responsible for that. Mark without a girlfriend. Mark without a girlfriend for years. Maybe he’s gay. Maybe I made him that way. It’s what everybody will say, in the long run.”

“I don’t think Mark is gay,” Stew said, “and I’m pretty sure you couldn’t make him that way if he wasn’t. You’re not thinking.”

“I’m thinking fine,” Charlene said. “They’ll be here any minute, and then we’ll have to listen to the whole thing, all the bilge, everything. It would have been different if he had died. Then, I mean. It would have been different if they’d have found him dead when he went missing. It wouldn’t have been like this, then.”

“And that’s what you wanted? You wanted him to be dead?”

“He came here, you know, before he went over to that girl’s house. He left me a note. Maybe if I’d have been here, it would have been different.”

Stew sat down on the love seat. Charlene tried to remember what it had been like sleeping with him, but she couldn’t. She could remember a time in her life when sleeping with somebody was the biggest decision any girl could make, and girls talked about it in the bathrooms at school, talked and talked about it, as if talking about it would make it disappear. She hadn’t talked about having sex with Stew, because she hadn’t had sex with Stew. Not until they night they were married.

“Charlene,” Stew said.

“I was thinking about high school,” Charlene said. “You and me and Howard and Marianne and Althy Michaelman. Girls getting pregnant. Girls getting kicked out. Boys telling lies. I suppose I thought it was normal. Boys always tell lies.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I burned the note,” Charlene said. “I did it as soon as I heard he’d been found hanging from that billboard. I knew he’d committed suicide. I knew it as soon as I heard he was dead. She must have strung him up there herself, just to laugh at me.”

“Herself?” Stew said. “Do you mean Darvelle? Darvelle couldn’t have gotten Chester’s body up on that billboard. She’s a tiny thing.”

Charlene shrugged. “Then she got that boyfriend of hers to do it for her. It doesn’t matter. Why would it? I did everything but cut out my own heart to make things right for him, and in the end I might as well not have bothered. He accused me of it. Did you know that? He accused me of it.”