Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [142]
Don’t have too much fun.
He wanted to get home to his wife.
“My purse,” Susan said when they arrived at the hotel. They hadn’t spoken the whole last hour of the drive.
“What about it?”
“I left my purse in that bathroom back there.”
Back there might as well have been Mars.
“My watch,” she said. “It was in my purse. My mother gave me that watch. And now it’s gone.”
He waited.
“If you hadn’t hit that stupid dog, none of this would’ve happened.”
Sheppard could not help it. He looked at her for a long time, then he laughed. He changed out of his horrid clothes, showered, and then made his bed on the couch.
In the morning, before dropping her off at her apartment, he took her out to breakfast. She’d asked him to, and he was hungry himself, and this would be his last chance to grab a bite before driving to Big Sur. They ate in silence. What else was there to say? By chance, there was a jewelry store across the street, and he walked her there after paying the check and told her to pick out any watch she wanted. Without hesitating she choose a Lady Elgin, tapped on the glass with her fingernail, the exercise joyless, a quid pro quo he regretted immediately, her final little Fuck you, and he promised himself to expense the gift, to treat it all as a write-off and be done with it. In front of her apartment she said she’d write him, Sheppard knowing full well she wouldn’t, or that if she did it would simply be to tell him what they both knew: they’d never see each other again.
“So that’s it,” she said.
She looked awful. Though she’d showered this morning, her makeup was caked on like an extra face. He saw her as an old woman and was disgusted. What a mistake I could have made, he thought. “I have to go,” he said.
It was during the drive with Chappie, while listening to him describe how he’d completely detonated his own life and was entertaining moving to Cleveland and coming to work at Bay View (home, Sheppard thought), that he reviewed those last hours with Susan Hayes and realized the only woman he’d ever truly cared about was Marilyn. For a time, yes, others had seemed terrifically important, but that importance was bound entirely to his love for his wife and a reflection of how they’d managed to lose each other. It suddenly seemed so obvious. And all he wished for now was that Chappie could make the drive go faster so he could tell Marilyn all this sooner, so between then and now he didn’t lose her again somehow. And when they did arrive at Chappie’s ranch, he stepped into the living room where the girls were sitting by the fire, the mood already wounded the moment Jo and Chappie looked at each other, it being clear, by how the girls were seated on the couch, knee to knee and face to face, Marilyn’s right hand almost touching Jo’s left, that emergency plans had been made, exit strategies discussed—for Jo, and possibly for Marilyn herself. Women together make plans, he thought. Men and women together unmake them. No, Sheppard thought, he wouldn’t have it. It couldn’t be allowed. He’d come to a realization. He went straight to his wife. “I have something to tell you,” he told