Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [81]
The pain stopped and Marilyn stood up straight.
Last Tuesday, over dinner, Sam had said, “I thought we’d do the intern thing again.”
She was in the process of cutting Chip’s hot dog into bite-size pieces. Seven years old and the boy still couldn’t manage this. “What intern thing?”
“For the Fourth. Like we did last year.”
She held her fork and knife crossed above her plate. “Today’s Tuesday, Sam.”
“Well,” he said, “I already told them it was happening.”
“Told who?”
“The interns,” he said. “Plus my family. The Houks too. And the Aherns.”
“That’s more than forty people.”
“We’ll just cook out.”
Marilyn put down her fork and knife, folded her hands on the table, and looked at her husband, who, at the moment, was concentrating on garnishing his hot dog. Along its length he ran lines of mustard and ketchup and mayo and relish as carefully as if he were laying brick. A brick, Marilyn thought, would come in handy right now.
Sam looked up. “It’s not like it’s a fancy meal.”
A smile twitched across her face. The party was, of course, an announcement as opposed to a request, though some time ago she’d demanded, upon penalty of divorce, that such would never be made again. Which had changed nothing, obviously, and made her wonder: if the small things about her husband’s behavior couldn’t be changed, how could the big things?
They could fight this out now, Marilyn thought, but once they started it would spiral out of control into things that couldn’t be resolved, only forgotten, and these memories would slam them back to where they’d been a few weeks ago, and she hardly wanted to go there. Which was the trick, Marilyn thought: not to go back.
“You’re right,” she had said.
At the window, Marilyn watched the boys run down the beach until they disappeared. Then she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, tucked her hair behind her ears, crossed her arms, and looked out over the water. It was a perfect day. Not just for the breeze or absence of humidity but also for an almost painful clarity in the light—white light, she thought, as in August. She could see everything, it seemed. Even down at Huntington Park, several hundred yards away, she could make out a man sitting in his white van, parked at the lot that overlooked the lake, as stunned, Marilyn imagined, with the day’s beauty as she was. On days like this their beach seemed tropically bright, the water impossibly blue, with scuffed clouds and a glare off the sand that made it hard to look at directly. When the wind rustled the leaves by their second-story window, it felt as if their house was a boat setting sail.
Where to start? she thought.
There was a thump in the next-door bedroom, then a long-drawn-out groan. Sam’s friend, Lester Hoversten, was up. The thought of spending the morning with him was so unpleasant that she’d managed briefly to forget he was here. Hearing him moan and stretch now only compounded her frustration: he was another of Sam’s announcements. “Les lost his job,” Sam had said, leaving for work on Wednesday, standing at the kitchen door with his back to her. “He’s going to stay with us for a few days.”
It was chicken to tell her this at the last second, almost a parting shot. “You invited Lester to stay with us?” she said.
“He’s a colleague, Marilyn. He needs my help.”
“Jesus, Sam, you act like we had some little disagreement.”
“In Les’s mind, that’s probably all it was.” He let the screen door close and walked to his car.
Marilyn was about to follow him out when Chip came barreling into the room and threw his whole weight into her legs,