“Are you shitting me?”
“No, Todd,” Adele said, reaching for a Dorito and crunching into it. “But I almost shit myself when she told me.”
Fenn shook his head and murmured, “I knew Hoot was low, but I never knew he was that low.”
“You never thought Hoot was low until I ended it.”
“No, sister,” Fenn corrected. “I always thought he wasn’t worth shit. But how do you tell that to your sister?”
“I wish you had.”
Todd and Fenn said, at the same time, “No you don’t.”
Adele covered her mouth and laughed.
“No,” she nodded her head. “You’re right. I wouldn’t have heard it. I wouldn’t have heard it to the end.”
She looked up at them.
“How could I have been so stupid?”
“Love makes you do stupid things,” Todd said, sympathetically.
“No,” Adele shook her head, savagely. “Stupidity makes you do stupid things. Blindness makes you do stupid things. Wanting something bad to be good… so much. That makes you do stupid things.”
Adele was quiet for a while, brooding over her cup of coffee.
“Layla swears that that boy is Hoot’s.”
When she said nothing, after a time, Fenn said, “And you want to go see the boy for yourself.”
“I want to talk to Hoot myself.”
“Well, I think you should,” Todd told her. “I think we should go over there and confront him.”
“We?”
“Yes,” Todd said. “Aren’t we in this together?”
“No!”
“Of course we are,” Todd shook his head, doggedly. “You shouldn’t go alone. Anytime you want to go over there we’ll drive, and we’ll stay in the car and wait for you to go up and do what you have to do.”
“It won’t make anything better,” Adele said.
“It might,” Fenn told her.
“You too!”
Fenn nodded.
“I… don’t want to do that. I can’t do that,” Adele protested. “I can’t know.”
She waited for one of them to say something. When no one did, Adele looked at them.
“What?”
“Well,” it was Todd who spoke, “see, I think you really do want to know, only you’re not strong enough for it now. I think deep inside you do know and you can’t bear to have it confirmed.”
“But Todd’s right,” Fenn said, “When you’re ready we will go with you. You won’t be alone.”
“Mom!” Nell heard Dena call as her daughter entered the house.
Years of being a mother had taught Nell that Dena’s calls were never as urgent as they sounded, and there was plenty of time to walk slowly to the kitchen. She could even shout:
“Come out of the kitchen and help me with the groceries!”
“Awriight, mom!” Dena came running out, as she went to the station wagon she said, “It’s Dad.”
“Oh, shit!”
“Be nice!” Dena sang as she headed out of the front door.
Nell stood there with a grocery bag in either arm and waited for her daughter to be out of earshot before murmuring: “No… I won’t.”
In the kitchen, after putting groceries on the round table, she picked up the ugly yellow phone that reminded her of the seventies and said, “Kevin?”
“Hey!”
Always that breathless joy, like they were old friends.
“Hey, yourself.”
“You sound a little tired.”
“I am a little tired, Kevin. Now, what the fuck do you want?”
Over the phone, Kevin cleared his throat.
“Um, I wanted to know what you wanted me to bring to the party next Saturday?”
“You don’t have to bring anything. Except for Dena’s present and half the bill for the party. And, of course, child support.”
“Of course,” he said, sounding chastened..
There was a quiet space and Dena came in with two bags.
“Kevin, what? I’m really busy right now.”
“You don’t really want me to come? Do you?”
She looked around, made sure that Dena was sufficiently out of earshot again, and then said, “Of course I don’t want you to come to the party. I don’t ever want to see you again. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“I know that,” Kevin said. His voice hardened, but Nell could tell he was trying to sound gentle. “And I don’t look forward to being stared at and hated. But Dena wants me there. I swore two things. I would never fight you for custody—”
“You think you could have won it?”
“Nell!” Kevin caught himself. He must have been taking a breath on the other end of the phone. He said, in a much quieter tone, “And the second was that I would always be there for my daughter.”
“Yeah.” Suddenly Nell hated him for saying that. She said, “You go do that. See you on Saturday, Kev.”
And she hung up the phone.
When she was seventeen Nell Meraden was accepted to Loyola but decided she’d rather go to Mount Carmel. Mount Carmel was about twenty minutes outside of Port Ridge which was, to Nell, just far enough. She imagined that if she wanted to she could go home every night, but it was far enough that traveling like that would have almost been silly. Just far enough. Adele was going down South to some Black school whose name Nell, feeling abandoned, hadn’t bothered to learn.
She’d thought that college would be the time of her life. What surprised her, after her parents drove away, was that all she wanted to do was cry. And she did. She cried and she didn’t eat for three days. She was afraid of the cafeteria, of showing up alone, of having no one to eat with. They would see her sitting by herself and say, that girl, who is she? Why is that loser all by herself? This was just too much, so she stayed in her dorm room. She had jumped at the chance to live in a dorm room by herself, to not have a roommate. In the movies people always had to live with someone else and to Nell, who had always had her own room, this seemed like an invasion of space. Now she wished she’d thought otherwise. She would have had a dinner partner. She and her new girlfriend would have gone off to eat together. With a partner she would be unstoppable. Together they would make fabulous friends.
By Thursday she ventured to the cafeteria for a little bit of food, which she ate in haste as soon as the cafeteria opened. Then she fled. Enough years have passed that now when she things of it, Nell thinks, it would have been nice to sit by yourself, to not be bothered. Why did it bother me so then? She was such a different person. Life was kinder to her back then and so, paradoxically, she was afraid of it more, never having been through anything.
Breakfast she enjoyed. The cafeteria was virtually empty. It was a time to be reflective. Lunch was the busiest and the most frightening. She skipped that altogether and listened to her stomach growl.
“How is it?” her mother asked over the phone.
“It’s nice, Mama,” she said.
It was hell. She wished she could go home. She wished she’d stayed home and gone to Loretto College.
Then, on Sunday night, she went to Mass, the one reliable thing. Toward the Lord’s Prayer the priest invited them to circle the altar—he called it a table—and hold hands through the Our Father. When Mass was over, and she was walking past the fountain outside of the church, Nell heard her name called.
At first she didn’t turn around. She didn’t believe someone was actually calling her. It must have been another Nell. But then she realized that in eighteen years she had never met another Nell, and so she turned around.
Grinning stupidly, the moon shining off of his round glasses, a gawky, bony limbed boy in shorts and tee shirt was coming up to her.
“Hello, I’m Kevin.”
“I’m Nell… But, you already know that.”
“You’re in my core class,” he said. “I sit in the row behind you.”
“Oh… I’m sorry. It’s my first week.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I was like that my first semester. Scared. I mean… I don’t mean to imply that you’re scared… Just.”
“I’m terrified,” Nell said. “I hate this place.”
“No!” Kevin said, in a wounded voice. “It’s a great place. Really. Hey, guess what? How about you go to lunch with me tomorrow, and I start introducing you to some of my friends?”
“Uh…”
Kevin smiled brightly. How old was he? He was very tall, but something about him seemed younger than her.
“I won’t take no for an answer.”
“Well… okay,” Nell said.
“Well great.” He made a quick salute and sliced the air. “I’ll see you in class tomorrow, Nell…?”
At first Nell didn’t know what he wanted, then she said, “Oh… Meraden. Nell Meraden.”
“Nell Meraden? I’m Kevin Reardon.”
“I want you to come with me, Nell,” he said.
Looking back she wonders what would have happened if he had said, “I need you to come with me.” Would that admission of need have changed the nature of their relationship? Because as long as they were together, for her the nature of it consisted in not looking too closely, not questioning. That first boylike insistence of Kevin had given way to something harder eventually. With age he had become a more solid, handsome man. His senior year he grew a goatee, a little soul patch under his chin and over the dimple in his chin, which he never lost. It drove the girls crazy. He played basketball and intramural football until his chest and arms grew powerful, and when he played he did it with the look of a demon, all black hair and fair skin and red cheeks, a man to be proud of.
But as he grew more handsome he grew more serious and more distant from her. By the time he was going into graduate school and she was a junior in college, Kevin was very much in command of the relationship. The one time he had come back to visit she had let him treat her like a child. When she went to visit him, Nell observed Kevin was surrounded by fellows. They nodded their heads and even occasionally laughed at his comments. But he had no friends.
At her graduation, when Kevin was wrapping up his second year of working on his doctorate, he told her, “I want you to come with me. I want you to be with me. That’s why we should marry.” He said it just like that, and then he took out the ring and it was done. Nell didn’t remember saying yes.
“But you’re so young,” Adele said, even though she was only a year older and engaged to Hoot.
“Everyone else I know is getting married,” Nell said. “I don’t think I’m too young.”
“I think marriage if for the birds,” Fenn said. And then he amended, “No, No it isn’t. They know better.”
“Oh, Fenn, birds mate for life.”
“And birds have bird brains,” he said. “And, incidentally, ducks mate through rape.”
Once she had seen a mallard duck climb on top of his wife and rape her. It was near the lake, outside of town, beyond the college and the green emerald wings of the mallard flapped and flapped and its yellow bill grasped the neck of the brown lady duck. It fucked her and one squawked in pain and the other in rage and triumph. Here was duck conception. What a world! And when she thought of her marriage to Kevin, for some reason this was what she thought about.
In point of fact, the marriage hadn’t been long at all. Their courtship had been much longer. Only a few months after her college graduation, they went back home and married at Saint Barbara’s. It was the first time most of the people she knew met Kevin. Everyone was courteous except that Fenn stabbed him with a knife, and then they’d gone back out West.
“What a quick marriage,” her mother told her. “Your aunts swear it’s cause you’ve got one in the oven.”
Though her mother didn’t say it, Nell felt obliged to tell her, “There is no bun in the oven.”
There could not be. Kevin was very serious, and very devout. They’d never done anything to put a bun in the oven.
But Kevin must have been potent, for they hadn’t been married a year when she was pregnant, and Kevin was finished with his graduate work.
“I’d like to stay around here,” he told her.
But by then she had found some sort of voice. And she hated being “around here”. She hated the idea of being a professor’s wife in this sterile place where she was so small and so… nothing. But pregnant.
“I want to go back home,” she said.
“Co’mon, Nell,” he cajoled her. “You don’t wanna go back home. Don’t be such a baby.”
“It’s easy for you to say. You have something here.”
“You could have something here too. If you worked for it.”
Her eyes lit. For the first time a rage, long dormant, came up in her.
“Kevin, I’m going back to Indiana. You can come with me if you want, but I’m going back.”
And that was that.
