Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [33]
“Are you okay to drive?”
“I’m fine,” Rhee said. She seemed a little out of it.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes, no problem!”
“Well.” Melissa watched her cousin hunt around for her purse. “Thank you. I don’t know how to thank you enough.”
“Oh Lissa, what little I did I was happy to do. We’re family! And you and I are buddies too, sort of the wild hairs of the clan. But believe me, they all show up at my door sooner or later.”
Melissa giggled; she felt relief, along with a burning need to know. “Who?”
“Life is so much more interesting than people think!” Rhee found her purse and heaved at the door. “You’d be amazed. Take care, Lissa.”
Melissa arrived home that evening to find a message from Dirk on the answering machine—he would be late, a SOC briefing was going to keep him at the base. She changed clothes and went for a run, then started on supper while the sweat wicked off her skin, leaving a gummy residue like tree sap. The dusk was deep enough to see fireflies through the windows when she noticed the silence; usually she put on music and sang while she cooked, but tonight she’d forgotten, a lapse that brought on a fit of self-consciousness. She stopped what she was doing and listened, staring out the window at the trees. After a minute she began to feel afraid, the fear grounded in a near-religious conviction that James was out there in the woods, watching her. Abruptly she turned and stepped across the kitchen to the door; after locking it she stood there with her head bowed, listening, her hand on the deadbolt latch. After a moment she turned the latch again, unlocking it.
So if you really thought he was out there, would you do that? Are you really so brave? she asked herself. She moved down the hall peering into every room, and on her way back, with no real purpose in mind, she stepped into the spare bedroom. There was just enough light for her to make out the altar, the ratty flea-market jumble strewn over the shelves, the cheap comic-book colors of the Virgin prints. She approached the altar and clasped her hands as Rhee had done. The two Madonnas stared back through the muddy light with the vapid self-regard of fashion models.
Melissa stood there for a while, waiting. She became aware of her breathing, the loom of her heart inside her chest. Various aches and itches asserted themselves. Eventually it seemed necessary to speak.
“I,” she said, and flinched—the word went off like a gun in the tiny room. I, what—acknowledge you? But that seemed corny, false. She took a breath and tried again. “Maybe I can live with you,” she said, wondering if she’d finally lost it, “but I want you to know Dirk is mine. I found him first, I married him, he’s already taken. And if you think I’m going to give him up…”
She felt a tingle, a quilled prickling running up her spine—did that mean anything?
“…well, you’ve got another thing coming.”
A kind of spasm, a jolt of exasperation almost made her laugh. Was something happening? She felt punchy, loose in the head, and with that came a surge of sisterly affection for this thing, this Erzulie who’d turned the world inside-out. Melissa began to see the possible humor in this, and even the Madonnas seemed to take on a merry look, the joke expressed in a crinkling around their eyes, the shadows bundling at the corners of their lips. What, exactly, had she been fighting? She wanted to say some agency inside herself, and she stood there for a time absorbing it, feeling in a sure but as yet inexplicable way that she’d arrived at something. Clarity, perhaps. A sense of scales balancing out. She felt older, and saw how that might be a positive thing. She carried the feeling with her back to the kitchen, wondering as she flipped on the stereo if any of this meant that her life had changed.
Five minutes later Dirk was blowing through