The Alarm He Called Paranoid

The night nobody called

I did not let him back in the house. That was not a decision I labored over. He stood in the drive a while and knocked on the front and then the back and then he called my phone eleven times, and I sat at my own kitchen table and let it ring, the same way I had let the watch chain ring, because I had learned in one afternoon that there is enormous power in not answering a man who is used to being answered.

Around dark his brother came out from town and got him. I watched the headlights turn in and turn around and go back toward Halesboro, and then it was just me and the house and the ticking of it cooling down, and the siren long silent, and the pool out back holding a truck fob at the bottom like a coin in a fountain.

I did not cry that first night. That surprised the people who love me. My sister Denise drove down the next morning with a casserole she had made at eleven at night, because that is what the women in my family do with grief, we bake it, and she found me on the back step with coffee, dry eyed, watching the water.

“Sharon,” she said, “you can fall apart, you know. Nobody’s grading you.”

“I know,” I told her. And I did fall apart, later, in pieces, over months, the way you actually do it, which is nothing like the movies. But that first morning I mostly felt clean. That is a strange word for it and it is the only one that fits. For a year and a half a woman had been walking coral lipstick into my kitchen to read my calendar, and my husband had been building a whole second life five feet from my basil, and I had felt something wrong for months and told myself I was paranoid, the same word he used for my cameras. And now it was out in the daylight in front of forty phones and a sheriff’s log, and there was nothing left to feel crazy about, because it was all true and now everybody knew it was true.