The Blessings (14 page)

M
argie has seen her story multiple times on
Dr. Phil
, enough to know that she's the one to blame. The parents drag their child (son, usually) on the show and describe how he's wasting his life, sleeping on their couch and making no plans to move out. Typically, the mother outlines the situation with eagerness and certainty, sometimes even a touch of self-righteousness, sure that Dr. Phil is going to punish the son and whip him into shape. But inevitably—have they not watched the show before?—Dr. Phil turns the tables, criticizing the parents for not making the son leave.

“He stays,” Dr. Phil says, “because you
let
him stay.”

The mother looks stricken, the father uneasy. The audience applauds. Margie is sure Phil is right about this, but still, she has questions: What if the mother makes her son leave and the son hates her forever? What if the son leaves but never comes back? She isn't like these mothers who go on the show and think themselves blameless. She knows that she's responsible for what Stephen's life has become. But that's just it: How, then, can she turn around and evict him? She'd rather be blamed for his staying than for his leaving and never coming back.

The numbers on the kitchen stove clock roll slowly to 12:38. Margie sits at the table, a cup of lukewarm tea in her hands. Even after midnight, Tyson Avenue is awake with all kinds of noises, rattling mufflers and thumping car stereos. But Margie knows the sounds she's waiting for: the hard, sloppy shuffle of her son's sneakers climbing the porch stairs, the whine of the front door as it bangs shut behind him, the shiver of the wooden cross on the kitchen wall. It could be two minutes or two hours. She lifts the tea, takes a sip—too bitter. She forgot to fish the teabag out.

“Sitting in the dark again?” Joe says, making her jump.

Her husband practically fills the kitchen doorway, his massive torso extending past both sides. When they started dating in their senior year of high school, Joe was broad-shouldered, bearish, a star defensive lineman for the St. Bonaventure football team; now, in his late forties, he's a man the world would officially call fat. The kind who carries his bulk as if it's a separate person, who can't fit into seats on buses and in movie theaters. When he sleeps, his snores are ragged, violent, like something struggling to the surface from the bottom of the sea.

“Just waiting,” Margie says. As if he doesn't know why she's sitting there.

He looks at her for a beat, then opens his palm, revealing the crumpled Big 4. “Missed by one.”

“Too bad.”

“Stupid,” he says, shaking his head. “Nobody ever actually wins these things.”

Joe says this every night, but tomorrow he'll keep on playing. Mega Millions, Daily Number, Powerball. Margie can't bear to think what her father would say. Her father, who was always so careful—respectful—with money, having raised four children, lived through the Depression, worked at the Budd Manufacturing plant for thirty years. He always picked up pennies on the sidewalk—
five of them make a nickel
. To him, playing scratch tickets would be a sign of laziness, weakness of character. Even if Joe was right when he said, as he would inevitably tomorrow:
Somebody has to win, right?

They do, Margie concedes, though somehow the winners always seem to have the same sad, desperate affect. Sort of like the people on
Dr. Phil
.

Joe leans over to drop the stub in the trash can—lately, even his smallest movements look like an effort—then reaches up to rummage in the kitchen cabinet for a consolation prize. He selects a bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips and pulls a Coke from the fridge. Something about the sway and hump of her husband in the darkened kitchen makes Margie's heart soften a little. Over the years, Joe has had to take on a bigger role in her family, one she knows he didn't ask for and, truthfully, isn't made for. But there was no choice: Other men disappeared. Her father. Her brother John. Her brother-in-law, Dave, after the divorce. With each man missing, a little more responsibility fell on her husband's thickening shoulders—hanging the heavy mirror in her mother's old apartment, putting up the Christmas trees, carving the turkeys. At parties, the crowd of men around the football game shrank to only Joe and her brother Patrick—almost ten years apart in age, friendly enough but never close—and the boys, whose appearances grew increasingly erratic, busy with friends and sports and then off to college, Joey on his basketball scholarship, Alex to the Ivy League. Stephen, of course, was always there.

Joe closes the fridge door and lumbers back across the kitchen, then turns in the doorway. “You okay, Marge?”

She stares, listens to his heavy breaths, the faint whistling sound in his chest.
You okay?
After twenty-six years of marriage, what do you say? More okay than some people, less okay than others. One son a constant source of fear and worry, keeping her awake nights, drowning in regret. The other happy and carefree, a graduate of the University of Maryland, great at sports and popular with girls. Fifty-fifty.

“I'm just waiting for Stephen,” she says.

Joe looks at her a moment longer, then says, “Okay,” and she listens to the slow creak of the floorboards as her husband ascends the stairs.

Margie and Joe have a secret, which Joe confided to her in high school after a football game one Friday night. They had been going together three and a half months. Their team had won the game (they would go on to win the Catholic League championship that season), and there was a party later on the field behind the rec center, so by the time they were alone together Joe was plenty drunk, but he didn't seem happy. Maybe that's why he told her: to unburden himself, make way for his own happiness. They were sitting in his parents' car, a tan Dodge Charger that smelled like the cigars his father smoked. When Joe started talking, Margie saw a blue vein bulging on his forehead, a single vein that forked in two.

Last summer, he said, before he met her—later, this would feel significant to Margie, as if he'd been a separate person when he did it—Joe had stolen money. Almost four thousand dollars. He took it from the safe at Lynch's Hardware, where he'd been working since sophomore year. He was closing, and the safe had been left open, the money just sitting there. He grabbed it—didn't even think, he said. He roughed the place up a little, he told her, to make it look believable. The next morning, when Mr. and Mrs. Lynch found it missing, they never suspected him; they loved him like a son. Panicking, he put the money in a shoebox and buried it—a special place only he would remember—and vowed not to touch it for five years. By then, the money would have been forgotten. When Margie asked about the special place, he shook his head firmly. He didn't want to implicate her, he said.

The entire time he spoke, Joe kept his eyes on the windshield, hands gripping the wheel, as if ready to take off at any moment. Margie rubbed at the little gold cross around her neck, her heart beating fast. This wasn't like stealing from your parents—this was a crime. Joe was a
criminal
. An act of impulse, but still—had she ever seen this potential in him before? She thought about his extra notch of jubilation—it was almost like anger—when he tackled another player on the football field. How he cut class sometimes or skipped church or drove too fast down Roosevelt Boulevard, cradling a beer between his knees. But what she saw wasn't malicious. It was almost impossible to imagine him doing what he'd described. In fact, sitting there in the Dodge, Joe in his blue jeans that were an inch too short, white gym socks peeking out, smelling like beer and mown grass, the laughter of the party in the distance, Margie felt his story had a surreal cast, like hearing the plot of a show on TV. Maybe it was this sense of unreality that made her stay with him.
I don't want to implicate you
—there was something almost genteel about it, she thought. He would protect her. He would keep her safe. Even the five-year rule struck her as appealing in its prudence. Most boys would be blowing that money on a car.

At the same time, there was an awful twisting in her gut, like a towel wrung dry. She couldn't bear to think what people would say—her father, the priests at St. Bonaventure's. Her sister, Ann, who never did anything wrong. This was more than just wrong. It was a mortal sin.

Margie looked at the windshield. The glass had grown thick with steam, as if giving them cover. “You should return it.”

Joe didn't answer right away. Margie's heart was thumping. She chewed her dry lips, tasted the last of her waxy pink lipstick. “I don't know,” he said. “I could get caught.”

“You should confess. Apologize.”

“And then what?” he said. “I'd be dead, Margie. My dad would kill me.”

Margie stared at the shadows of the party on the distant field, rubbing at her cross. She was thinking of what her own father would say, how disappointed he would be.

“Plus,” Joe added, “it's a lot of money,” and he reached over and squeezed her hand.

It was the squeeze, the damp, complicit press of it, that brought Margie to the edge of panic. Was it fear of getting caught that was stopping Joe from doing the right thing, or was it greed? They seemed like two very different things.

“If you don't return it now,” Margie said, facing him, “that's it. You can't go back for it later.”

Joe kept his eyes on the windshield but squeezed her hand again, kept squeezing it, like kneading dough.

“Joe,” she said, her cheeks hot, “I mean it. Do you hear me? Not in five years, not ever. You have to forget it's there.”

“Okay.”

“You have to promise me,” she said. “You have to swear to God or—or else.”

“Or else?” He looked at her and smiled, as if her tough talk were cute.

“Or else—I'll break up with you,” Margie said. She was feeling flushed, slightly hysterical. She had never talked this way to him—to anyone. “I will, Joe. I mean it. I'll break up with you on the spot.”

“Okay.” His smile dropped, face sobered up again. “I swear.”

“To God.”

“I swear to God,” he said, then let go of her hand. His neck slumped forward suddenly, as if it were broken. “I'm sorry,” he said, and his voice cracked, and he startled Margie by laying his head in her lap. For minutes they sat there like that, inside the fogged windows, and neither of them spoke. She wondered if he could feel her racing heart. She curled one finger around the soft curve of his ear, over and over again, feeling as though she had stepped over some threshold into adulthood: This crumpled, intimate pose confirmed it. She tried to comfort herself by looking at the spot just above Joe's ear, where the barber had trimmed his hair in a neat straight line, until one of his friends shouted—
O'Brien! Don't do anything I wouldn't do!
—and Margie dropped her hand and Joe sat up and drove her home.

They never spoke of it again. For twenty-eight years, it was as though the conversation had never happened. Margie never told a living soul, so there was no one in the world to remind her. A month before graduation, Joe stopped working at Lynch's. When he proposed that summer, not even a flicker of doubt entered her mind. It was as if she'd willed that entire night out of existence, erased it, tamped it down. Joe never mentioned it, either. Maybe he'd forgotten he told her; maybe he'd forgotten it was out there.

But it was, Margie knew, somewhere, and at the five-year mark she found herself growing anxious. Carefully, she watched her husband—Stephen was small then, just two years old, and she was pregnant with Joey—looking for some sign that he'd retrieved it. Joe was the one who handled their money, but Margie started checking the accounts, looking for a surge of cash. It never came. Over the years, though, whenever money got tight she had a fresh bout of panic.
I'll figure it out
, Joe always said, and he did. She knew Joe did a little betting during football season—she grew nervous whenever the games were on, gauging the degree of emotion with which he watched the scores—but he always seemed to at least break even. Then came Joey's basketball scholarship, a small inheritance from an aunt with no children. Margie was certain these acts of mercy were her father's doing, reaching out to rescue her from beyond.

Still, as the years went by, she felt the presence of the hidden money throbbing in the body of her aging marriage. An aberration, a hairline fracture in a bone. It was something like the way Margie's mother described her cataracts—
everything normal
,
except this little blurred spot
. She felt its presence in church on Sundays, when she recited
forgive us our trespasses
. When her boys memorized the Ten Commandments:
Thou shalt not steal
. When the hardware store eventually went out of business, was turned into a Dunkin' Donuts, and Mr. and Mrs. Lynch were prayed for at church, listed among the sick, then the dead.
Lord, hear our prayer.
Sometimes, looking at her husband, Margie felt a silent knowledge pass between them, make their eyes lock a moment longer, a hint of shame darken his face.

I don't want to implicate you
—how foolish she had been. Because she
was
implicated. The stolen money was the lie of their lives, buried beneath the old, worn ground of their marriage. As Margie drove past the ShopRite, the rectory at St. B's, she wondered where the special place might be. Under the bleachers at the school? The hill behind the rec center, the one where their boys used to go sledding? The bills would be damp by now, stuck together, maybe worm-eaten. She doubted Joe had had the foresight to wrap them in plastic—he was just a baby then. Eighteen. He couldn't have been thinking about what they'd find when they dug it up.

The zeroes on the oven clock line up with excruciating slowness: 2:00. Closing time. The hour when real nerves set in. Joe went to bed over an hour ago—it amazes Margie that he's able to sleep at all before Stephen is home safe—and the house is quiet, the kitchen gone blurry at the edges, the tea cold. There's a smell, like sweetly rotting fruit. Bananas. Margie always has bananas in the house, because Stephen likes them.
Enabling
, Dr. Phil would say. She fingers the cross at her throat, imagining where her son goes at night. The hole-in-the-wall bar on Rising Sun Avenue? The field at the rec, strewn with smashed metal cans? He never said. He'd come in late, reeking of beer and pot smoke and wearing that strange smile—a smile that seems to hover just there, on top of his face, not coming from within. The smile scared her. It used to be, no matter what, Margie could catch a glint of him, the old him, the real him—the discomfort or the sheepishness, the tick of guilty conscience—the son she knew. But lately, she had a hard time finding it. When he was a little boy, Margie had known every inch of him. He'd always been her favorite, which she felt guilty admitting, but it was true: Joe's was Joey, Stephen hers. Joey had never needed her the way Stephen did, for one thing. From the time he could walk, her younger son was outside playing with the neighborhood kids: She can still hear that basketball, the steadiness of the bounce, swish, bounce, swish. She never had to worry about Joey—the ease and evenness of that ball confirmed it. But Stephen was different; he struggled with things. He might have been good at sports but decided early on not to care. He would never be as gifted as his little brother—a
winner
, as Joey himself might say. Winners, losers: In high school, Joey began to classify the world this way. The distinction, Margie gathered, wasn't about just winning at sports, but something more abstract. Winning at life. After her brother Patrick took Joey to a Phillies game—luxury box seats a patient had given him—her son said approvingly,
Uncle Patrick's a real winner
. He'd just turned eighteen and begun referring to adults like his peers.