Day 24

Day 24. Today will not be the day, Delinda thought as she filled the grey pot with water. Not today, and not tonight. Nope.

Even though it was one of those exquisite May evenings, the setting sun’s rays streaming through the window in a way that only a drink could make one fully appreciate. 

Even though she’d opened that sickening envelope that came in the mail this afternoon.

No ma’am. No cocktail, no chianti. Twenty-four days. “Let’s not think about 25,” she said under her breath as she opened the preheated oven and slid in a loaf of Italian bread cut open and slathered in butter and sprinkled with garlic powder. 

The front door slammed.

“Heidi Ho!” Her husband’s customary greeting.

“How was the squash game?” Delinda called from the kitchen.

“Great!” said Wayne. 

“Did you remember the club soda?”

“Oh, shoot!” She heard his duffel bag thump onto the shag carpet. “I’ll run out to the deli and get it after my shower.”

“How was Norman?” 

“Oh, fine.” Wayne was already half-way up the stairs.

“Who won?”

“Uh, it was a draw.”

“You should invite him and Barb over for dinner some time,” Delinda yelled from the bottom of the stairs. “I’d love to get to know them better.”

The shower was already running.

***

“Can you get the strainer out?” Delinda asked. Her husband, back from the deli, was putting two bottles of club soda in the fridge.

“Yeah, sure.” 

He put the colander in the sink, careful to make as little noise as possible, and slipped into the family room where the kids were watching TV.

Delinda could barely hold on to the steaming pot’s tiny handles through the monstrous oven mitts. She tipped the spaghetti into the colander, steam fogging her glasses, but the beige mass sloshed out too fast and tipped over the strainer. The spaghetti fell into the dirty sink.

She flung the oven mitts onto the linoleum floor. She couldn’t see through her glasses so she tore them off and threw them against the wall. 

“I hate this goddamn house and everything in it.” She was quiet, matter-of-fact.

She tried to scoop up the spaghetti, but it only scalded her hands. That’s when Mindy launched into one of her high-pitched barking fits.

“Jesus Christ!” Now Delinda was yelling. “Can someone shut that dog up?” The kids’ pale faces peeked in from the family room. Donny and Marie bantered over their TV laugh track. 

Wayne put down his magazine. “Out of the way, kids.”

“Whoa honey.” He put his hands on Delinda’s shoulders. “Let’s just calm it down, okay?”

The dog was still yapping, and now smoke started to billow from the oven. 

“The garlic bread,” Delinda said, voice matter-of-fact again. She shrugged out from under Wayne’s hairy hands, walked out the front door, and was halfway down the block when she noticed the wooden spoon in her hand. This was a small mystery. At what point would she have picked it up, between burning her hands and slamming the door behind her? And why? Whatever. She could toss it in the gutter before she got to The Shady Lady, next to the deli. She didn’t want to be the crazy woman at the bar with a meat-sauce-splattered spoon. 

Delinda stopped walking, and stared down the long block between her and the bar. 

“Day 24,” she said aloud. Plus, she didn’t have money on her.

Two minutes later, back in the kitchen, she could hear an ecstatic chorus from the den, harmonizing about County Prize lemonade. Mindy was licking the blackened baguette sticking out of the garbage, and Delinda resisted the urge to hammer the dog’s thin, delicate skull with her wooden spoon. No, instead she used her foot to nudge aside the dog so she could take out the garbage. She took care to close the door gently behind her when she came back in. 

She bent to pick up her glasses from the floor — they were fine, just a little crooked — and re-filled the pot to boil more water for another box of spaghetti. 

***

Dishes done and kids in bed, Delinda sat on the loveseat. Wayne was in his brown corduroy recliner, reading Time magazine. Republican Rumble, the cover read, with caricatures of Reagan and Ford. He put down the magazine. 

“Well, I’m gonna hit the hay.” He pushed the La-Z-Boy’s lever forward to make it a regular chair again, and stood up. “Packed schedule tomorrow.”

“Can you sit back down for a second?” Delinda asked. “We got something in the mail today.”

“Oh yeah?” He was walking to the doorway to the kitchen.

“It was addressed to you. Big envelope, no return address.” 

“Okay thanks. Probably work stuff. Just put it in my study. I’ll check it out tomorrow.”

“Where were you this afternoon, Wayne?”

He turned around, peered at her from the doorframe. 

“I told you.” He looked puzzled. “Squash.”

“Really?” Her voice was quiet.

He walked back to her. She could see the behind his eyes he was doing some calculations. 

“Sit down please,” Delinda said, in control of herself, and, she was surprised to realize, the situation. She knew she should not be enjoying this even a little bit. This was serious.

He sat down on the edge his brown corduroy chair. He composed his face into that calm, forgiving, open-minded, almost game, expression. The face he put on when she told him she’d realized she was an alcoholic, when she told him about her AA meetings in the basement of the First Presbyterian church. The face he wore when they were chatting after dinner, sitting out in the backyard — him with his beer, her with her drink (club soda now). His mind ruminating on other things, but showing how present he was, here, with her, until he could get up and go into his study, or to the inevitable community event. He was a very busy man, after all. A town councilman with a law practice. Always roving, always something he was running late for.

“I don’t like you, Wayne,” she said. “I don’t think you like me either. Not any more. I think it’s time we were honest about that.”

How quickly that face of his revealed the impatience and anger underneath. 

“Is this more of your step bullshit? Because I have to tell you right now, I have been very patient with all your …”

She picked up a Manila envelope that had been tucked behind her seat cushion. 

It was addressed to Hon. Wayne Liston, but had been opened with a clean slit across the top. No return address. Delinda took out its contents. Two pieces of cardboard, with some kind of papers or documents tucked between them. 

She caught the scent of Wayne’s growing anxiety, acidic and marshy. She could almost feel his mouth going dry. 

“Take a look,” she said, handing it to him, careful to keep the contents within the cardboard sheets.

“What is this?” was all he could manage, grasping at anything to buy time before he had to look. 

“Take it,” she said. “Look.”

He took off the top piece of cardboard. Delinda watched as the blood drained from his face. He went through the black and white photographs documenting the progression of an evening. An evening Wayne spent with a young woman Delinda did not recognize. The woman in the photos had light hair that fell in soft waves past her shoulders. She wore a stylish black cocktail dress, and high heels with ankle straps. 

The pictures show their evening progressing like this:

Wayne and the woman shaking hands, a familiar smile between them, at some catering-hall cocktail party. They are surrounded by people holding drinks, milling around, chatting.

Wayne and the woman walking, their backs to the camera, in a vast parking lot crowded with cars. 

A grainy shot of Wayne unlocking a motel door, the woman’s hand on his ass. (Delinda guessed they drove out to Suffolk. They didn’t have motels like that around here, the kind where you can park right in front of your door.) 

The last shot: Wayne by himself, mid-stride between the motel door and his maroon Grand Am. He’s checking at his watch.

Now Wayne, ashen, looked up at his wife.

“Someone is trying to blackmail me,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s politics, or from my work, some defendant…”

She lit a Parliament, and leaned back against the sofa cushion and crossed her legs. She studied her husband through her crooked glasses, through the smoke of her cigarette.

“You’re on your own, Wayne,” Delinda said. “But I’m going to make it to Day 25.”