buy her a house, furniture, and pretty clothes and take her to the library and the hair salon and it still wasn’t enough. Who could understand it? Was it so hard to clean the house and cook dinner? He never wanted to hit her, only did it when he had no other choice. When she was stupid or careless or selfish. She brought it on herself.
The engine droned, the noise steady in his ears. She had a driver’s license now and she was a waitress at a restaurant called Ivan’s. Before he left, he’d spent some time on the Internet and had made some calls. It hadn’t been hard to track her down because the town was small. It took him less than twenty minutes to find out where she worked. All he had to do was dial the number and ask if Katie was there. On the fourth call, someone said yes. He hung up without a word. She thought she could hide forever, but he was a good detective and he’d found her. I’m coming, he thought to himself. I know where you live and where you work and you won’t get away again.
He passed billboards and exit ramps, and in Delaware the rain started to fall. He rolled up the window and felt the wind begin to push the car sideways. A truck ahead of him was swerving, the trailer wheels riding the lines. He turned on the wipers and the windshield cleared. But the rain began to fall even harder and he leaned over the wheel, squinting into the fuzzy orbs of oncoming headlights. His breath began to fog the glass and he turned on the defroster. He would drive all night and find Erin tomorrow. He’d bring her home and they’d start over again. Man and wife, living together, the way it was supposed to be. Happy.
They used to be happy. Used to do fun things together. Early on in the marriage, he remembered, he and Erin would visit open houses on the weekends. She was excited about buying a house and he would listen as she talked to the Realtors, her voice trilling like music in the empty homes. She liked to take her time as she walked through the rooms, and he knew she was imagining where to put furniture. When they found the house in Dorchester, he’d known she wanted it by the way her eyes were sparkling. That night, lying in bed, she traced small circles on his chest as she pleaded with him to make an offer and he could remember thinking that he would do anything she wanted because he loved her.
Except have children. She’d told him that she wanted kids, wanted to start a family. In the first year of marriage, she’d talked about it all the time. He tried to ignore her, didn’t want to tell her that he didn’t want her to get fat and puffy, that pregnant women were ugly, that he didn’t want to hear her whining about how tired she was or how her feet were swollen. He didn’t want to hear a baby fussing and crying when he got home from work, didn’t want toys scattered around the house. He didn’t want her to get frumpy and saggy or hear her ask him whether he thought her butt was getting fat. He married her because he wanted a wife, not a mother. But she kept bringing it up, kept harping day after day until he finally slapped her and told her to shut up. After that, she never talked about it again, but now he wondered whether he should have given her what she wanted. She wouldn’t have left if she had a child, wouldn’t have been able to run away in the first place. By the same token, she could never run away again.
They would have a child, he decided, and the three of them would live in Dorchester and he would work as a detective. In the evenings, he’d come home to his pretty wife and when people saw them in the grocery store, they would marvel and say, They look like the all-American family.
He wondered whether her hair was blond again. Hoped it was long and blond and that he could run his fingers through it. She liked when he did that, always whispering to him, saying the words he liked, turning him on. But it hadn’t been real, not if she’d been planning to leave him, not if