“Good. Go to the market in St. Christopher. It’s not much, but it’s better than that nasty little store down the road.”
“Okay,” he said, although he had no intention of going all the way to St. Christopher; that was a ninety-mile roundtrip, and he wouldn’t be back until almost dark. It didn’t occur to him until after he’d hung up that he had lied to her. Something he hadn’t done since the last few weeks of working on Village, when everything started to go wrong. When he had sometimes sat for twenty minutes in front of the same laptop he was using now, debating between a grove of willows and a copse of trees. Both seemed right, neither seemed right. Sitting hunched over the laptop, sweating, resisting the urge to pound his forehead until he jarred the right descriptive phrase loose. And when Lucy asked him how it was going—with that I’m worried furrow in her brow—he had replied with that same single word, that same simple lie: Okay.
Undressing for bed, he told himself it didn’t matter. If it was a lie it was a white one, just a device to short-circuit an argument before it could be born. Husbands and wives did it all the time. It was the way marriages survived.
He lay down, turned off the lamp, sneezed twice, and went to sleep.
14
On his fourth day of work, Drew woke up to plugged sinuses and a moderately sore throat, but no fever he could detect. He could work through a cold, had done so many times in his teaching career; prided himself, in fact, on his ability to bull through while Lucy had a tendency to take to her bed with tissues and NyQuil and magazines at the first sniffle. Drew never scolded her about this, although his mother’s word for such behavior—“spleeny”—often came to mind. Lucy was allowed to pamper herself through her twice- or thrice-yearly colds, because she was a freelance accountant, and thus her own boss. In his sabbatical year that was technically true of him, as well… except it wasn’t. In The Paris Review some writer—he couldn’t remember who—had said, “When you’re writing, the book is the boss,” and it was true. If you slowed down the story began to fade, as dreams did on waking.
He spent the morning in the town of Bitter River, but with a box of Kleenex near at hand. When he finished for the day (another eighteen pages, he was absolutely killing it), he was amazed to see he’d used up half the tissues. The wastebasket beside Pop’s old desk was drifted with them. There was a bright side to this; while struggling with Village, he had regularly filled the wastebasket beside his desk with discarded pages of copy: grove or copse? moose or bear? was the sun brilliant or blazing? There was none of that bullshit in the town of Bitter River, which he was increasingly reluctant to leave.
But leave he must. He was down to a few cans of corned beef hash and Beefaroni. The milk was gone, ditto orange juice. He needed eggs, hamburger, maybe some chicken, and for sure half a dozen frozen dinners. Also, he could use a bag of cough drops and a bottle of NyQuil, Lucy’s old standby. The Big 90 would probably have all that stuff. If it didn’t, he’d bite the bullet and drive to St. Christopher. Turn the white lie he’d told Lucy into the truth.
He made his slow, bumping way out Shithouse Road and pulled in at the Big 90. By then he was coughing as well as sneezing, his throat was a little worse, one ear felt stuffed up, and he thought maybe he had a touch of fever, after all. Reminding himself to add a bottle of Aleve or Tylenol to his shopping basket, he went inside.
Roy DeWitt had been replaced behind the counter by a scrawny young woman with purple hair, a nose ring, and what looked like a chrome stud in her lower lip. She was chewing gum. Drew, his mind still turned on from his morning’s work (and maybe, who knew, that little touch of fever), saw her going home to a trailer up on cement blocks and two or three kids with dirty faces and home haircuts, the youngest a toddler dressed in a saggy diaper and a food-stained tee-shirt saying MOMMY’S L’IL MONSTER. That was a meanly vicious stereotype, and elitist as hell, but that didn’t necessarily make it