a thousand pieces. It was an accident, pure and simple. His mother’s bone china with the baby-blue etchings. That Dutch boy with his shit-eating grin and the little blue windmills. The sound of it breaking snapped something inside of her, too. One by one she lifted the dirty dishes stacked on the side and started slamming them into the sink.
Logan shouted for her to stop. She heard a clatter as his chair fell over, and then he loomed in the entryway. Clara’s vision narrowed to a single red thread. Sometime during the shattering she had picked up a shard of pottery, and she clenched it in her palm.
Logan was saying something, but she couldn’t hear a word. A roaring filled her ears. A sound like a growl from her throat. There weren’t any words in her mind anymore, just the sure knowledge that if he laid a hand on her she was going to gut him with the edge of this broken dish.
Logan approached, his palms turned up, his arms spread. More words streaming out of his mouth, like he was calling her from a long ways away. Like she was falling down and down, and he was trying to reach her. Her eyelashes blinking furiously. His form blurring. A burning in her blood.
Only a few feet away Logan paused. He was still talking, saying something over and over. The space between them disappeared. He touched her arm. She didn’t stab him. She didn’t stab him. He was saying, “Clara, it’s okay.” He was saying, “Clara you’re not in danger. No one is going to hurt you. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Then he held her in his arms. A deep shudder passed out of her, a moan. She buried her face in his shoulder and let the shard fall from her hand.
He went away again; he had to. They were expecting him for the weekly service at the nursing home. He didn’t want to go; she saw it in his eyes. A wariness. Logan was afraid of what she might do. “I shouldn’t have said any of that,” he said. He tried to smile. Big black half-moons under his eyes, like someone had been punching him while he slept. The dark thing he had been talking to in his sleep. How had she not noticed his suffering?
She wanted to tell him sorry, too, because she was, but her throat felt raw, like she had swallowed something so hot it scorched away the words. She was conscious of her bare feet on the floor. A barefoot, pregnant madwoman. She glanced to the window, wondering if the sound of breaking dishes had carried out into the neighborhood, if people had heard what was happening in the parsonage, if there were eyes upon them even now. She had come back to herself. She was safe in her kitchen, but something still bristled inside her. “I know you’re under a lot of pressure, but you shouldn’t talk to me like that. Ever.”
“Agreed.” He licked his lips. “We’re supposed to make each other better people. That’s what marriage should be. Like two ropes woven together.”
“And Seth Fallon may have been a little shit … but I can’t help feeling responsible.”
“Oh, sweetie.” He was tender now, regretful. This was the man she had married. His blue eyes clear and pristine as some far northern lake. “You can’t save somebody if they don’t want to be saved.”
“I know.” That wasn’t it, that wasn’t it at all. “You aren’t mad at me?”
Dust from broken china was somehow on his clerical shirt, and he brushed it off. “No. Tell you the truth, I hated those dishes. Who eats off china every single day? I don’t want to think about my parents every time we sit down to eat.”
“I lost it there.”
“Yeah.” He exhaled heavily. “But I understand. You’ve been through a lot.”
She had, but it didn’t excuse it. Violence, in her experience, was rarely premeditated. Clara remembered the first time her former fiancé Gregory had struck her. He was a coworker from the bank where she had been a teller, and it happened after a long day at work. They were sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor of his apartment, eating slices of take-out pepperoni pizza from a cardboard box set between them. They had not been arguing, nor could Clara even recall what they were talking about. The pizza grease was wet on her lips when Gregory got on his knees, almost like he was going