Freedom [196]
The night before he flew to Miami, where Jenna was visiting a grandparent and would meet him at the airport, he called Connie in St. Paul with the news of his impending travel. He was sorry to have to obfuscate and dissemble with her, but his South American plans did give him a good excuse to further postpone her coming east and moving into the highway-side apartment that he’d rented in a charmless corner of Alexandria. Until a few weeks ago, his excuse had been college, but he was now taking a semester off to manage his business, and Connie, who was miserable at home with Carol and Blake and her infant twin half sisters, couldn’t understand why she still wasn’t allowed to live with her husband.
“I also don’t see why you’re going to Buenos Aires,” she said, “if your supplier’s in Paraguay.”
“I want to practice my Spanish a little,” Joey said, “before I really have to use it. Everybody’s talking about what a great city Buenos Aires is. I have to fly through there anyway.”
“Well, do you want to take a whole week and have our honeymoon there?”
Their missing honeymoon was one of several sore subjects between them. Joey repeated his official line on it, which was that he was too freaked out about his business to relax on a vacation, and Connie fell into one of the silences that she deployed in lieu of reproach. She still never reproached him directly.
“Literally anywhere in the world,” he said. “Once I’ve been paid, I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go.”
“I’d settle for just living with you and waking up next to you, actually.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “That would be great. I’m just under such incredible pressure now, I don’t think I’d be fun to be around.”
“You don’t have to be fun,” she said.
“We’ll talk about it when I get back, OK? I promise.”
In the telephonic background, in St. Paul, he faintly heard the squeal of a one-year-old. It wasn’t Connie’s kid, but it was close enough to make him nervous. He’d seen her only once since August, in Charlottesville, over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Christmastime (another sore subject) he’d spent moving from Charlottesville to Alexandria and making appearances in Georgetown with his family. He’d told Connie that he was working hard on his government contract, but in fact he’d killed whole stretches of days watching football, listening to Jenna on the phone, and generally feeling doomed. Connie might have convinced him to let her fly out anyway if she hadn’t been knocked flat by the flu. It had troubled him to hear her feeble voice and know she was his wife and not rush to her side, but he’d needed to go to Poland instead. What he’d discovered in Lodz and Warsaw, during three frustrating days with an American expat “interpreter” whose Polish turned out to be excellent for ordering in restaurants but heavily dependent on an electronic translation device when dealing with hardened Slavic businessmen, had so dismayed and frightened him that, in the weeks since his return, he’d been unable to focus his mind on business for more than five minutes at a time. Everything depended on Paraguay now. And it was much more pleasant to imagine the bed that he was going to share with Jenna than to think about Paraguay.
“Are you wearing your wedding ring?” Connie asked him.
“Um—no,” he said before thinking better of it. “It’s in my pocket.”
“Hm.”
“I’m putting it on right now,” he said, moving toward the coin dish on his nightstand where he’d left the ring. His nightstand was a cardboard box. “It slips right on, it’s great.”
“I’ve got mine on,” Connie said. “I love having it on. I try to remember to put it on my right hand when I’m not in my