Roadwork - Stephen King [58]
"Oh, Bart. How are you?" Impossible to read her voice.
"Fair. "
"How are the Southern Comfort supplies holding out?"
"Mary, I'm not drinking."
"Is that a victory?" She sounded cold, and he felt a touch of panic, mostly that his judgment had been impossibly bad. Could someone he had known so long and whom he thought he knew so well be slipping away so easily?
"I guess it is," he said lamely.
"I understand the laundry had to close down," she said.
"Probably just temporary." He had the weird sensation that he was riding in an elevator, conversing uncomfortably with someone who regarded him as a bore.
"That isn't what Tom Granger's wife said." There, accusation at last. Accusation was better than nothing.
"Tom won't have any problem. The competition uptown has been after him for years. The Brite-Kleen people."
He thought she sighed. "Why did you call, Bart?"
"I think we ought to get together," he said carefully. "We have to talk this over, Mary."
"Do you mean a divorce?" She said it calmly enough, but he thought it was her voice in which he sensed panic now.
"Do you want one?"
"I don't know what I want." Her calm fractured and she sounded angry and scared. "I thought everything was fine. I was happy and I thought you were. Now, all at once, that's all changed."
"You thought everything was fine," he repeated. He was suddenly furious with her. "You must have been pretty stupid if you thought that. Did you think I kicked away my job for a practical joke, like a high school senior throwing a cherry bomb into a toilet?"
"Then what is it, Bart? What happened?"
His anger collapsed like a rotten yellow snowbank and he found that there were tears beneath. He fought them grimly, feeling betrayed. This wasn't supposed to happen sober. When you were sober you should be able to keep fucking control of yourself. But here he was, wanting to spill out everything and sob on her lap like a kid with a busted skate and a skinned knee. But he couldn't tell her what was wrong because he didn't precisely know and crying without knowing was too much like it's-time-for-the-loony-bin stuff.
"I don't know," he said finally.
"Charlie?"
Helplessly, he said: "If that was part of it, how could you be so blind to the rest of it?"
"I miss him too, Bart. Still. Every day."
Resentment again. You've got a funny way of showing it, then.
"This is no good," he said finally. Tears were trickling down his cheeks but he had kept them out of his voice. Gentlemen, I think we've got it licked, he thought, and almost cackled. "Not over the phone, I called to suggest lunch on Monday. Handy Andy's."
"All right. What time?"
"It doesn't matter. I can get off work. " The joke fell to the floor and died bloodlessly there.
"One o'clock?" she asked.
"Sure. I'll get us a table."
"Reserve one. Don't just get there at eleven and start drinking."
"I won't," he said humbly, knowing he probably would.
There was a pause. There seemed nothing else to say. Faintly, almost lost in the hum of the open wire, ghostly other voices discussed ghostly other things. Then she said something that surprised him totally.
"Bart, you need to see a psychiatrist."
"I need a what?"
"Psychiatrist. I know how that sounds, just coming out flat. But I want you to know that whatever we decide, I won't come back and live with you unless you agree. "
"Good-bye, Mary," he said slowly. "I'll see you on Monday."
"Bart, you need help I can't give."
Carefully, inserting the knife as well as he could over two miles of blind wire, he said: "I knew that anyway. Good-bye, Mary."
He hung up before he could hear the result and caught himself feeling glad. Game, set, and match. He threw a plastic milk pitcher across the room and caught himself feeling glad that he hadn't thrown something breakable. He opened the cupboard over the sink, yanked out the first two glasses his hands came to, and threw them on the floor. They shattered.
Baby, you fucking baby! he screamed at himself. Why don't you just hold your fucking breath until you turn fucking BLUE?
He slammed his right fist against