She had put her head in her hands and started crying without realizing it. She had been thinking about Chris being dead and the fact that none of the others had called her. Then she’d thought about the phone ringing and realized she didn’t want that either. Stu hated to hear the phone ringing. She didn’t know what she wanted. It seemed to her that everything she had ever wanted had been wrong.
The punch, when it came, had been a surprise. She hadn’t heard Stu come into the kitchen. It hit her in her left eye and knocked her backward in her chair. The chair jumped on the floor and then tilted over backward. Peggy had found herself suspended in midair. The thought that ran through her mind was: Don’t break anything I can’t break anything I can’t go to the hospital tonight. It came and went without her conscious mind registering most of the words, and then she hit the floor, hard, with her back against the turned wooden spindles of the chair and the back of her head on the hard linoleum. She was breathless. It reminded her of falling off the side of the slide in Baldren Park when she was a child. You landed on your back and for a moment or two you couldn’t breathe, and up above you the sky was bluer than it would ever be again. All that was up above her now was the light fixture. It had started out to be a modest chandelier, but three of the bulbs were out and one of the chandelier cups was broken. She could buy bulbs at the grocery store, if she remembered to bring one with her so that she could check the size. She could take the chandelier cups to the glass place in Johnstown and find out what it would cost to replace them. She might be able to get away with buying them someday when Stu was out of the house, and installing them someday when he was passed out drunk.
She felt the kick in her side as if she’d been hit by a car. Stu was wearing his shit-kicker boots, the heavy ones with cleats that he used in the winter when the driveway got bad. Peggy grabbed at her side and twisted away. The trick was not to cry and not to cry out. He kicked her again, higher, in her rib cage near her breast. She wrapped her arms around her chest and tried to roll away from him. She was stopped by the chair. She was still sitting in the chair, with her legs hanging off the seat, only she was on her back. Over her head, the chandelier swung and shuddered. The whole house was shaking. She had been crying before he ever walked in, and now she couldn’t stop. He shot a kick to her pelvis and she cried out. Her voice in the room was oddly animal, too low, too anguished, too everything.
“Fucking shit,” he said.
And then the boot hit her pelvis again and she did roll. She got off the chair somehow and rolled and rolled until she hit the wall, the cabinets near the sink, somewhere. He was picking his boots up and grinding his feet right down on top of her. The cleats were tearing at her dress and the skin underneath it. She was wet with sweat and blood. She knew that all she had to do was to stay calm, stay calm, not cry out, not get hysterical. It was all her fault when he got crazy because she made him that way. She brought it on with her hysterics and her attempts to manipulate him. She brought it on when she cried.
She had somehow managed to roll in the wrong direction. When his boot came down this time it hit her straight in the gut. It knocked the wind out of her. When she got it back she screamed, and as she did she felt her sphincter releasing, and her bladder, too, everything, she was making a mess of herself and the floor and everything, everything, she was crying and she couldn’t stop and he was kicking her so hard she thought she was going to die. She rolled herself up in a ball and turned the right way this time, pressed up against the place where the cabinets met the floor, and from then until she passed out she only cried silently, so that she couldn’t even hear herself.
Now it was half past eight in the morning, and except for the black eye—she knew she had a black eye, even though she hadn’t looked in the mirror. She never looked in the mirror anymore if she could help it—the house was cleaned up. The kitchen looked normal. The only thing that might have seemed odd was the smell of soap and disinfectant, but kitchens always smelled like that when you cleaned them, and it was better to smell soap and disinfectant than to smell what had been in here before. She was, really, very calm, but she thought she had at least one broken rib, and there was the black eye. If she didn’t go in to teach, she would be here in the house with Stu all day. There was always the chance that it would happen again. If she did go in, there would be the black eye, and the fact that she’d had to take a taxi because she hadn’t been waiting at the door when Nancy drove into the driveway, and the fact that she was having trouble walking and having trouble breathing, and all the other things. Nancy would be furious. Worse than that, she would tell the rest of them.