“I know,” she said, flushing. She smiled, wrinkling up her nose. “Just wanted to say something to you. Have a good night.”
As he passed the Big Winner mirror he noticed how rounded his shoulders were. He stood up and pulled them back, stretching his shoulder blades—like angel wings, the chiropractor had told him after Chris’s accident, back when his headaches were nonstop and he worried he had a brain tumor. He really needed to practice better posture. He used to have that naturally from training horses. It was probably the driving. He would exercise in the morning. That kind of self-discipline was something he’d always been good at. It had always been his secret weapon, in business and in life—his ability to pursue the goals he set with unwavering determination. He glanced at his watch. 10:57.
Fuck.
He hurried to the car.
Carol and JW’s house was on a residential street opposite the city park. When he was a kid the park had been groomed like a golf course, but in the twenty-five years since the mine closed the city had gone longer and longer between mowings. As he pulled over, he saw dandelion heads glimmering like pale mold in the moonlight. It was the house of the fateful dinner, and now it was theirs. When Carol was pregnant with Chris, Bob and Mary announced that Bob had accepted a new job in Atlanta. They had purchased a condo there and were going to keep an apartment here in town. They were giving them the family home so that their grandchildren could grow up like Carol had: playing in the park until the squirrels scampered at dusk, and dreaming of England and being royal.
The house was dark now, except for their second floor bedroom window. The clock glowed dimly on his dash: 11:15. She was likely in bed reading, or watching the late show. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. He stepped out of the car and eased the door shut. He crossed the street. He would apologize. He had been delayed, and he had forgotten to charge his cell phone, he would say. It had run out. How stupid of him. But as he headed up the walk the window darkened. He continued on to the doorstep, where he saw his mail lying in a small bundle. A sticky note flapped in the breeze:
John—
Went to bed.
Carol
He picked it up. He ran his fingers down the grooves of the doorframe’s half-Roman column. Rousing her at this point would not end well. He stood quietly for a moment as his hopeful vision of the evening dissolved, wishing there were some way he could reverse time and power past the gravity of the casino. He turned back to his car. He sat there outside his darkened house, then finally drove off into the night.
Aside from a few bites at the casino, he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He stopped on the way home for gas and some food. He pulled a Chuckwagon sandwich from behind the glass cooler door and stuck it in a microwave on the orange counter by the window. Outside, the local sheriff’s deputy, a big bearish guy named Bob Grossman, had his red and blue lights flashing as he talked to a car full of kids parked in front of the store. He didn’t look happy.
The microwave dinged. JW pushed the greasy button and pulled out the hot plastic pillow, avoiding the steam emanating from the tear he had made in the corner. The police lights shone into the store as he made his way toward the counter, turning the customers faintly red, then blue. A bunch of Native American kids tumbled out of the car. He watched them jostle each other, laughing like they didn’t care, as Grossman yelled at them. He set his sandwich on the counter.
He had seen Grossman do this before. The Lions’ Club had even had him in to talk about what a hazard the reservation kids were, and his strategy of keeping pressure on them. The boys ran wild and drank and caused problems ranging from burglary to traffic accidents. The dysfunction, addiction, and poverty of the reservation was a regular point of contention at Chamber of Commerce events, where the more conservative members groaned about how the Native Americans lived in a welfare culture, while the liberal members said it was because of a cycle of poverty and broken families. Grossman was a member of the Rotary club, the Chamber, and the Lions, and was widely felt to be the best check they had on the problem. Some people were talking about supporting him for sheriff when Big Bill Donovan retired. JW grabbed a few paper napkins from the dispenser next to the register.
“Gas on three,” he said.
The cashier typed in the gas and bleeped through his food with a bored affect as JW studied the rolls of lottery tickets under the scratched plastic fog of the countertop.
“Thirty-one forty-nine. Anything else?”
“Yeah, give me a hundred and fifty in scratch-offs. Loons.”
He felt embarrassed, as if he were asking for a copy of Penthouse. She pulled out a long streamer of shiny-foiled tickets. The loons’ backs glinted in the light.
“Thanks,” he said, folding them accordion-style as he hurried out the door, forgetting his sandwich and drink inside.
He stuffed the remaining bills and coins into his pocket, then headed past the Native American boys, who were clearly drunk. He thought about the wreckage his ancestors had caused by introducing alcohol to the Native Americans, and they by giving tobacco to whites. He scratched his thumbnail across a glistening loon to reveal the number sets—it was a loser—and got into his car, thankful that he didn’t have those kinds of problems.
His apartment building was just half a block farther up Sixth, behind the Food ’n’ Fuel. It was on a narrow strip of land between Sixth and the highway, just beyond Sabo’s Guns. The building was long and short, clad in rough plywood siding wavy from rain. Thin layers of it sloughed off like dead skin in the summer. The building had a crabgrass lawn and a gravel parking lot. A billboard loomed overhead, advertising Dr. Reed Orput, who could renew your confidence with a mouthful of dental implants. Remake your life, it said, with Dr. Reed and the Smile Factory. Orput’s porcelain grin had become a navigation point for JW, indicating where to turn.
A much smaller sign at the parking lot entrance said Whispering Pines Apartment’s, Your new home! Every time JW pulled past it he was irritated by the misplaced apostrophe, but he hadn’t gotten around to scratching it out. There were no pine trees on the property, but someone had once planted juniper bushes amid wood chips that were crumbling to soil next to the building’s foundation.
He approached the entrance carrying his briefcase, his bindered stack of mail, his keys, and his ribbon of spent lottery tickets. A large Walmart semi barreled past on the highway, buffeting him in its hot backwash. He twisted his key in the lock, pulled the glass open, and went inside.
His apartment was on the second floor, six steps up from the street. Second-floor units cost ten dollars a month more than first-floor apartments. JW stuck a small key in his dented brass mailbox, but there was nothing inside. He headed up the stairs, his shoes sticking to the yellowing plastic runner. The hall smelled of borscht. His door was halfway down the hall on the right, the highway side. A bright orange piece of paper was stuck to it:
EVICTION NOTICE.
You are hereby ordered to
VACATE YOUR PREMISES IMMEDIATELY
due to NON-PAYMENT OF RENT.
Move now! Save court costs!
—Whispering Pines Management
An artery pulsed hot in his neck as he peeled the notice off. He heard clattering dishes from somewhere, a TV, late-night laughter with some woman. He wondered how many of the tenants had seen it, and wished management had simply called him.
He went inside and tossed everything on the coffee table. The apartment was cheap anyway. That had been its advantage, and it came furnished, so when JW moved out of the house he didn’t have to buy all-new furniture for a temporary separation while he and Carol worked on their marriage. Of course, tonight he may have blown that too, he thought.
He turned on the TV and headed into the kitchen, a small galley that