another that’s a split-level and another that’s a Colonial like this.”
“Not like this,” Tommy said.
“Please, Tom,” Connie said, “I don’t want to listen again to how terrible new houses are. I just thought you would want to know.”
“How did he know we live here?” Tommy said.
“He didn’t. He came up to use the phone one day and picked our house out of a clear blue sky. I saw him out back before, and went over to say hello and take him a cup of coffee.”
Tommy’s own mug was half full. “There wasn’t enough goddamn coffee for me,” he said.
“Tom.”
“Don’t ‘Tom’ me,” he shouted over the noise from the construction site. “I don’t eat any goddamn breakfast. I have one cup of coffee in the morning. I want my one cup of coffee.”
“I’ll make another pot,” Connie said.
Tommy walked to the swinging kitchen door. Then he went out to the hall, took his jacket and tie off the banister, and was gone. The half-cup of coffee sat untasted on the table. The children could not even hear the door slam, although Maggie was sure it had. “Grandpop’s right,” she said. “Those things are really loud.”
Connie did not say anything. She was looking out the kitchen window and washing the coffee pot, but her shoulders rose and fell as though she sighed. She stood there for a long time as the children disappeared one by one, Maggie to the Malones, Terence and Damien to the ballfield, Joseph into the dining room, where he put a ball of crumpled paper into a plastic cup and took it out again.
Connie was tired. She had finally gotten the curtains she liked on the kitchen windows, and now she was afraid she was going to have to pick up and move to some house she had never seen before, a house even farther away from its neighbors than the one she lived in now, even more mired in silence. She would never have enough furniture for a house that size, and she pictured little excursions to furniture stores with Mary Frances, the two of them holding swatches of brocade, her mother-in-law arguing about price.
She realized she had been standing at the sink a long time, washing dishes mechanically, only when the earth movers stopped and the cement trucks arrived outside. Connie could tell by the insignia on the side of their doors that they were from an Italian firm that was one of Tommy’s biggest competitors. He always contended that they were owned by the Mafia, as though murder and extortion were the only way Italians could make money, and this enraged Connie, although her uncle Frank said they were Mafia, too. A truck had pulled a long low trailer to one end of the field, and the workmen gathered around it, unscrewing the lids of their thermoses, faint plumes of steam rising from the openings. One passed around a white cardboard box. She could hear the sound of their voices but not their words. Coffee break. She plugged in the percolator and started another pot.
She had tried to talk to Tommy about the new house, but it had been useless. When he was home the children were there, and when the children were asleep Connie had usually fallen asleep, too, her eyes running wild beneath their translucent lids in the fitful sleep of the exhausted.
Celeste had always told her that she had gotten out of her own marriage just in time, even though it had lasted only a year; she had gotten out when they were still talking to one another, even though most of the talking was yelling. It had taken Connie a while to understand what her cousin meant, but now she thought she did. Occasionally in the car she would look over and see another couple in the next lane, sharing the front seat, both of them staring through the windshield, looking straight ahead, saying nothing. Until recently she had not noticed that she and Tommy were doing the same.
It was not that she did not love him. It was just that she felt as if they were in separate cars, metal and glass surrounding them, oblivious to each other’s sounds. She assumed they had the same destination, but it seemed futile now even to ask. So much had been left unspoken in their marriage, and now they were speechless. She thought that if they moved to the house her father-in-law had bought, they would never hear each other speak again.