peeked through the curtains and watched him step onto the front porch. Her mother, who was as excited as Clarice was, had dug her fingers into Clarice’s arm until her daughter pulled away from her. All the while, her mother had gushed that their matching ensembles were a sign Clarice and Richmond were made for each other.
Clarice, though, had already seen all the signs she needed. Young Richmond had a handsome, almost pretty face with a small, well-shaped mouth and long eyelashes. He had a football scholarship waiting for him at the university across town. He was a preacher’s son, his father having been the pastor of their church before moving on to a larger congregation just across the state line in Louisville. And he had those beautiful hands.
She had been in awe of his hands long before they brought him glory for palming a football in high school, college, and a professional career that had lasted only one season.
By the time he was eleven years old, Richmond was using his already large paws to show off for the girls by pulling walnuts from the low-hanging branches of the trees that lined the streets between the schoolyard and their neighborhood. He would make a grunting, grimacing production of crushing the nuts between his palms until he tired of his solo act and joined in with the other boys who ran in his pack, tossing the walnuts at the girls as they ran home squealing and laughing.
The children had named the walnut trees “time bomb trees” because when the nuts were past their prime they turned black and made a quiet ticking sound on hot days. Years later, she often thought it was fitting that her earliest recollection of the boy who would become her husband was a memory of him lobbing time bombs in her direction.
Lit by the afternoon sun from the window at the All-You-Can-Eat, Richmond Baker still looked like a square-jawed young football hero. But Clarice was doing her best not to look his way at all. Every time she glanced at her husband, she thought back to the hours she had sat up worrying until he finally staggered in at 3:57 that morning. The sight of him brought to mind those horrible, slow-passing minutes of waiting and then the time spent lying in bed beside him after he finally got home, pretending to sleep and wondering whether she possessed sufficient upper-body strength to smother him with his pillow.
At breakfast, he had dragged himself into the kitchen, scratched his private parts, and told her a tale that she knew was a lie. It was the old reliable story of having to work late and finding that every phone within a ten-mile radius was broken. For the new millennium, he had updated his excuse to include cellular phones mysteriously losing their signals. He deserved some credit for keeping up with the times, she thought. After he told his lie, he had sat down at the kitchen table, blown a kiss in his wife’s direction, and tucked himself into the breakfast she had prepared for him, attacking it as if he hadn’t eaten a meal in weeks. Screwing around, Clarice thought, must stimulate the appetite.
Before church that morning, Clarice had mulled over her situation and decided that her problem was that she had gotten out of the habit of ignoring Richmond’s little lapses; he had been on such good behavior for the past couple of years. She figured that if she just avoided looking at Richmond through breakfast, morning service, and maybe during the walk to Earl’s, she could relocate that old wall in her brain she used to hide behind at times like this. Then she’d soon be back to merrily pretending things were just fine, as she had done for decades. She had gazed at the kitchen floor through breakfast. She had stared at the stained-glass windows during church. She counted the clouds in the sky and the cracks in the sidewalk on the way to the All-You-Can-Eat. But the remedy didn’t work. The throbbing at her temples that bloomed each time she watched Richmond’s pretty, lying mouth spread into a grin told her that she needed more time before she could step back into the old routine, the way her husband apparently had.
Clarice heard a deep male voice whisper, “Hey there, gorgeous.” She looked to her right and saw that Ramsey Abrams had slithered up beside her. He placed one hand on the table and the other