Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [71]
SAM AND I were doing weighted dips in the basement when Suzanne came downstairs crying. She wore a dark sweater and hip-hugger jeans and her eyeliner was smeared. After her rape, no one in the family talked about it much, and neither did she. She may have gone to a counselor once or twice, but I don’t think so, and now she knew for sure something she’d suspected for a long time: that Kench was cheating on her. He was living with a nurse named Denise over the state line in New Hampshire, and Suzanne wanted her things back, her record player, a turquoise ring of hers he’d liked and stuck on his finger. “Please, you guys, I don’t want them in her house.” She covered her face and Sam put his massive, sweating arm around her. In minutes we were driving north up the highway in our sweats, our muscles still pumped with blood.
The nurse lived in a trailer park in the pines. It was after ten on a weeknight and we were driving down a dirt road over exposed tree roots, a bed of pine needles running down the center. Most of the trailers were set back into the trees, their window curtains drawn, many of them dim or dark. Some of the mobile homes had small porches or decks built onto them, and there were grills and lawn chairs and a few flower boxes nailed to the rails.
“That’s it,” Suzanne said. “That’s his car.”
Sam and I were walking in the dark across a strip of grass to a white trailer. I gripped the knob, turned it, then stepped into an unlighted living room, the thin carpet wall-to-wall. I could see my sister’s record player on the shelf across from a couch, the only light from a hallway to the left. I could hear Kench’s low stoned voice talking to someone, a woman’s voice, too, louder, clearer, then she was in the light of the hallway looking back at him, not seeing us at all. She was naked. I took in her breasts and hips and dark pubic hair and stepped back into the shadows beside Sam. “Kench! We’re here for my sister’s stuff. Get out here, you piece of shit!”
There was the slamming of the bathroom door. “Who are you?! Get out of my house!” Then she was in the hallway, knotting the belt of a blue terrycloth robe, peering into the darkness where we stood.
Sam yelled, “Be a man, Adam. Get out here!”
The back room was silent. I pictured him lying naked under a sheet in his postcoital surprise, letting his girlfriend defend him the way he never defended my sister in Boston, and I wanted to walk back there and beat him where he lay. But the woman was yelling at us to get out, and now Suzanne was pushing past us, crying and calling Kench’s name, looking past her boyfriend’s girlfriend as she stood there suddenly still and quiet in her lighted hallway, everything clear to her now.
Sam and I watched as Kench emerged from the bedroom. He was barefoot and his jeans were unbuttoned, his T-shirt on backwards, his long thin hair flat against his head. Suzanne was screaming now, swearing and calling him names, and she walked up to him and grabbed his wrist and jerked her ring off his finger, then was back outside, the door slamming behind her.
I grabbed her record player off the shelf and yanked the cord from the wall. Kench and his new girlfriend stood in the lighted hallway together as if they were watching something terrible happen to somebody else. “I see you again, Kench, I’ll fucking kill you.”
SAM DROVE over the dirt road while Suzanne