Bent Road - Lori Roy [10]
Rolling down her window, Ruth inhales the smell of cut feed and freshly plowed sod. Nearing the top of the hill that separates her and Ray’s house from Arthur’s new home, the landscape even seems prettier. The gently rolling hills, the dark fields, the brome-lined ditches. Ray must see it, too. He seemed happier today. He stopped with one glass of whiskey at Mother’s. His eyes never drooped. His speech never slurred. At Arthur’s new house, just half a mile from Ruth and Ray’s home, Ray had worked hard, unpacking and piecing together the bed frames, hauling boxes in from the truck, unwrapping dishes and silverware. And as they began the short ride home, he drove with his hat pushed high on his head and one arm draped around Ruth’s shoulders. He had seemed content with Ruth, as happy as he had been in their earliest days together. Never as happy as he had been with Eve. But almost happy.
Once they are over the top of the hill, Ruth sees their house down below. As new and different as the landscape looks and the air smells, their house is the same. By the time they reach the bottom of the hill, the happiness is gone. It’s a subtle change, like a shifting shadow. Arthur is home again and he still loves Ruth, but no one else is coming with him. He is a reminder of happier times but also of all that has been lost. And Evie, too. Ruth had wondered if Ray would notice the resemblance. When Evie first walked out of Mother’s house, skipping across the gravel drive, cheeks flushed with heat, braids swinging behind, bangs brushing her forehead, Ray had blinked and cleared his throat into a closed fist as he looked down on her. Then the memory was gone, or Ruth thought it was. Now, as she and Ray sit in front of their house, the truck idling beneath them, she realizes they have not come home to the same place they have lived for twenty years. They have come home to a worse place, a lonelier place, and Ruth is more afraid of Ray than ever.
Chapter 4
Walking down St. Anthony’s stone steps for the first time, Celia pins her pillbox hat to her head with one white-gloved hand. In Detroit, all of the ladies wore gloves to church. Here, the women have bare hands and dirty nails. Midway down the stairs that widen as they near street level, Celia stops, the other parishioners filtering around her, and plucks a few cockleburs from the hem of her blue cotton skirt. She frowns at the brown oval smudges that stain each fingertip of her white Sunday gloves. Perhaps the reason none of the women wear them. Having lost Arthur in the crowd that filed out of the church following the end of service, she lets the flow of the other churchgoers lead her. All around, people talk in whispers even though church is over.
“Didn’t you hear?” one woman asks another.
“Such terrible news,” says a third. “Simply terrible.”
Tugging off her stained gloves one finger at a time, Celia scans the crowd until she finds Ruth standing near the bottom of the stairs where everyone seems to be gathering. Her perfectly formed oval face wrapped in a blue and yellow print scarf is tilted up, smiling.
While fending off houseflies with her church bulletin, Celia had spent her first Kansas sermon looking from one hometown parishioner to the next, noticing, as they shifted about on the pews and swatted at flies, that they all had the same overgrown ears and fleshy noses. There were a few, probably in-laws like herself,