I SAID. ORDINARILY, WHEN the phone rang while I was grading papers, I’d let the machine get it. But the rain that March night had started making clicking sounds against the floorboards of the deck and the dogs had come back inside wearing ice crystals on their backs. Nervous about Mo’s driving home from tai chi on treacherous roads, I was half waiting for a call.
“May I speak to Maureen Quirk?” the woman asked.
“She’s out,” I said.
“Are you Mr. Quirk?”
“Yeah, but look. No telemarketing at this number. Take us off your—”
“Do you know who Maureen’s out with?”
I uncapped my pen. Tore off a piece of some kid’s blue book to jot down her number. “Excuse me,” I said. “Who’d you say this is?”
She identified herself not by name but by association: she was Trina Hay’s best friend. Trina was sitting right there next to her, she said, but too upset to talk on the phone. “We just wanted you to know, in case you don’t know, that your wife’s having an affair with Paul.”
I said nothing for several seconds, but when I finally did speak, all I could come up with was, “Paul who?”
“Paul Hay,” she said. “Trina’s husband. Did you know they have a little boy named Casey? Or that Trina has lupus? Or that they’re building a house?” Jesus, she was giving me the whole A&E Biography, and I was still on Paul Hay? Paul Hay? Where do I know that name from? Maureen’s betrayal hadn’t broken the surface yet. Or maybe it had, because my instinct was to kill the messenger.
“So what are you—some no-life chick’s gotta borrow her friend’s business?” I asked.
“This is my business, okay?” she said. “I’m Casey’s godmother.”
“You’re fat, aren’t you? You have a fat voice.”
“Do you know who bought Trina and Paul the lot they’re building their house on? Trina’s father, that’s who. The month before he died.”
“Your options are limited, right? It’s either Tina’s problems or a spoon, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s between your knees, and Touched by an Angel.”
“Her name’s Trina, okay? And my personal life is none of your business. Just tell your little slut of a wife that if she thinks she’s moving into Trina’s new house when it’s finished, she’s…she’s…”
There was dead air for a few seconds, some muffled whispering. Then the avenger was back on the line, blubbering. “I am trying to stop your wife from destroying my friend’s marriage. Okay?”
“Yeah, sure, Fat Chunks. Your Nobel Peace Prize is in the mail.” I can’t remember which of us hung up on the other.
I paced, muttered. Sent my students’ blue books flying and the dogs running for cover. When I realized the cordless phone was still clenched in my hand, I whacked it five or six times against the refrigerator door. My car keys were on the counter. I stared at them for several seconds, then grabbed them.
The trucks hadn’t sanded Bride Lake Road yet, but I kept mislaying the fact that the road was icy. Passing the entrance to the women’s prison, I spotted oncoming headlights and hit the brakes. The fishtail I went into nearly sent me crashing into the security gate. My heart thumped. My breath came out in short blasts. I remembered who Paul Hay was.
I’d met him a couple of times at her staff parties. Reddish hair, bearish build. We’d small-talked. He’d tried home brewing once, but it had come out watery. He liked the Mets. Maureen was nurse-supervisor at Rivercrest Nursing Home back then, and Lover Boy was in her pool of per diem LPNs.
The karate school where she took tai chi was in a strip mall near the Three Rivers depot. There’s a convenience store, a bike shop, Happy Joy Chinese, and Caputo’s Martial Arts. The plate-glass window was foggy. I got out, walked to the door, opened it a crack. Twenty or so little kids in karate suits stood with their hands clasped as if in prayer. “Bow to the master, bow to the flag,” the instructor said. Well, okay, I thought. She’s guilty.
I slipped and slid my way back home. No car in the garage. I fed the dogs, picked the exam booklets off the floor, picked up the phone. No dial tone; I’d killed it. Two Johnny Walkers later, she came through the door with Chinese food. “Hey,” I said. “How was it driving?”
“Not great, but I lucked out. I followed the sand truck all the way up Bride Lake Road. You eat yet?”
“Nope.”
She hit the message machine. Her J. C. Penney order was in, one of her first-shift nurses was taking a “mental health day” and needed a sub. She put on a pot of tea, set two places, and opened the cardboard containers. “Look at this,” she said. Her open palm was piled with soy sauce and mustard packets. “If someone consumed all this sodium, they’d have a stroke.”
“So why’d you drive across town to the other place when you were right next door to Happy Joy?” I said.
“Because last time you said Happy Joy’s too greasy.”
Which was true—I had. It was.
We spooned out the food. The kettle whistled. Maureen got up to get our tea. “What happened here?” she asked. Her fingers were skidding along the refrigerator door.
“What?”
“These dents?”
“Tell me,” I said. “Who gets on top, you or him? Or do you alternate?”
Okay, this next part’s hard. I’m not proud of the moo shu and orange chicken dripping down the wall. Or the fact that when she tried to leave the room, I grabbed her so hard by the wrist that I sprained it. Or the fact that she totaled her car on her way to her friend Jackie’s apartment.
She wouldn’t come back. She wouldn’t take my calls. Each day, I went to school, taught classes, endured staff meetings, drove home, and walked the dogs. I spent my evenings calling Jackie’s number on our brand-new phone. Redial, redial, redial, redial. When Jackie’s boyfriend warned me to stop calling or else he’d have the calling stopped, I said okay, fine, I didn’t want any trouble. I just needed to talk to my wife.
Next day after school, I drove over to the town hall and found out where Hay was building their dinky little shoebox of a house. It was out in the sticks, out past the old gristmill. I drove out there around dusk. The place was framed; the chimney was up. Overhead was a pockmarked moon.
I drove back there the next morning, a Saturday. His truck was there. He was up on the second floor. He squinted down at me, puzzled. I cut the engine. That’s when I saw it, in the seat well on the passenger’s side: the pipe wrench I’d borrowed from Chuck Wagner to tighten our leaky hallway radiator valve. It wasn’t premeditated. I’d meant to return that wrench for a week or more. But suddenly its being there seemed just and right. There was a fire in my head.
Six weeks after that moment, in a darkened classroom at Oceanside Community College, I would learn via an anger management class video about the cardiology, neurology, and endocrinology of rage— about how, as I reached for that wrench, my hypothalamus was instant-messaging my adrenal glands to secrete
