Red Weather

12. The Indian Summer

72 12 TheIndianSummer It had happened once, a few months before she left Atlanta, and then it didn’t happen for a long time. The phone rang one evening. It was Will. “I’ll be late,” he said. “A meeting and then some things to do at the office.” “Okay,” Neva said. “Maybe I’ll go to the movie. Five Easy Pieces is playing and you probably don’t want to see that.” There was silence on the other end. Then Will said, “I’d rather you just stay home.” “I’m just going to Five Easy Pieces. They’re showing it at the Tara,” Neva said. “You know I love that movie.” “I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t like the idea of you running all over Atlanta at night.” She went anyway, distracted when she stood in the ticket line, glancing at her watch from time to time. It’s just a movie, she thought. He’ll be mad, she thought. Midway through, she gave up, knew she couldn’t concentrate, and left early. The apartment was stuffy. Will didn’t come home for hours after, and she finally gave up and went to bed. She woke when she heard the door slam, the refrigerator door open and close. She could smell him in the doorway, yeasty with all the beer he’d drunk that night. Pretending to be asleep, she heard him lurch away, bumping into the doorway. She stretched out, relieved. He turned on the stereo, and the music he loved, vintage seventies, blasted through the apartment. She lay, still as cotton, through one song, then another. He stood in the doorway, the light behind him outlining his body. “Oh, come on,” he said. “You’re not asleep.” Neva had never been so still. She breathed through her nose in tiny, short breaths. 73 “Oh, right,” he said. “Like you’ve been home all night.” He turned on the bright overhead light. Neva opened her eyes and looked at him. “I’m really tired, Will,” she said. Pleading. He looked at her. She knew that look. He looked at her while he thought of the next thing to say. He was so drunk it took a few moments , during which Neva knew anything could happen. He could change his mind, lurch back to the living room and pass out. “And just what made you so tired?” When Neva didn’t answer, he said, “Huh? What made you so tired, Neva?” He pulled the covers off the bed. She lay like a dead woman. “Huh, Neva? Huh?” he said. He wrapped his fingers around one of her ankles and started pulling. Still, she said nothing. She said nothing while he dragged her out of the bed entirely and onto the floor. She refused to look at him, to make eye contact. He left, but before she could get up, he was back, leaning in the doorway, with a beer in one hand and a sandwich in the other. He ate a few bites and took a long drink from the beer. When she still didn’t move, he stood over her, tearing the sandwich into pieces and dropping them one by one. They landed mayonnaise-side down and stuck to her skin. He took one last swallow of his beer and poured the rest on her. She lay there. She refused to speak. It was her way of fighting back. Other things had happened—she saw that now. He had cleaned out the closets, insisting she gather up clothes she didn’t wear, old magazines, a toaster that only toasted the bread on one side. In a frenzy, he loaded boxes into the trunk of the car and took them to the Salvation Army. A week later, tagging along with Miriam who hunted for vintage jewelry at all the thrift stores, Neva found a sunflower print set in a pewter frame so like the print she’d kept from the farm. “That looks like the one you used to have,” Miriam said. “I know,” Neva told her, tilting the print away from the window’s glare. She paid the shop owner a dollar for it and hung it back on its nail in the hallway. Sometimes everything seemed like an accident. If she and Miriam hadn’t gone into that shop that day. If she hadn’t knocked the print off the wall. If. The night of Will’s lecture at Georgia...