Page 19 of Something Has To Give

Elsie was quiet for so long he thought she’d gone back upstairs. “Please come up to bed,” she said thickly. He could definitely hear the tears in her voice and beneath that small request, as loudly as if she’d spoken it instead, he heard her begging him,Please stop being mad at me.

He wished he could. He clenched his hands tighter. As evenly as he could, through gritted teeth, Quint told her, “Elsie, the next time I get into bed with you, neither one of us will be getting any sleep. Not for a long, long time.”

She didn’t move. He couldn’t even hear her breathing, not until she whispered, “Okay.”

Quint opened his eyes.

Without waiting for him, Elsie disappeared back upstairs, leaving him to lie in stunned silence for almost two full minutes before he suddenly realized the mountains were gone. One minute, unscalable; the next minute, poof.

“Well, hell,” he said, marveling. Kicking out of his blankets, he headed up after her. There was already a tight burn of tension pulling low in his belly. It extended quickly down into his groin, bringing a flare of giddiness and anticipation to life. Right up until he reached the top of the stairs. His bedroom door was wide open and there, sitting on the edge of the mattress, was Elsie. She held his grandmother’s wooden-backed hairbrush in her hands while nervously smoothing her nightshirt midway down her thighs.

“You found it,” he said, somewhat surprised. After his escape from the bathroom window and subsequent mad-dash run through the yard, he wasn’t sure exactly where he’d dropped it.

“It was in the basement under the bottom step.” For the first time, she looked at him long enough to grant him the biggest fake smile he’d ever seen. “I saw it when I was hanging the cheese.”

Quint slid his hands into his pants pockets, wondering why she was holding it now. Her hair already looked brushed, although from the condition of the bristles, it didn’t look as if she’d used his grandmother’s brush to do it. In fact, as far as he knew, that hairbrush had never once been used to brush hair. Any time his mother had picked it up, the end result had usually been his burning need not to sit down for a while. Oh yes, he had known the bite of that brush, as his father had surely known it before him and perhaps even his grandmother before that. Maydeen had known it only once in all the years they had been married, and that had been for throwing a fit at the mall over how much she could and could not spend in any one shopping trip. While it might have saved his wallet, obviously it hadn’t done their marriage a lot of good.

He wondered if Elsie knew how close she had come to having it used on her the other day.

“Will you come sit down beside me?” she softly asked, once more with eyes turned to her lap.

Quint came into the room. They were the only two people in the house, but he closed the door anyway. Somehow, that deepened the degree of intimacy between them, but sitting down beside her brought that to a whole new level.

He sat down on the bed beside her, ducking his head a little, trying to see her face.

“Will you do something for me?” She glanced at him then, a quick sideways peek that never went farther than his knee.

“What?”

When she stood up, he had the instant premonition that she was about to put herself bottom-up across his lap and in that strangely surreal moment, he was hit by both the electrifying eroticism such an offering would bring and by the absurdity. Elsie had fought him so violently the two times he had spanked her before, there was no way she’d ever just lay herself across his knee and meekly submit to having her bottom slapped.

And she didn’t this time, either. But what she did do was almost as surreal. She sat in his lap and it felt like the most natural thing in the world, when she tucked her head down on his shoulder, to wrap his arm around her. He thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t do that either. She began to talk instead and it was so soft that, were he not already straining to hear her, he would have missed one word in five.

“We were only married a few weeks when the recession finally hit our town and I lost my job. A couple days later I came home to find he’d annulled our marriage, taken all our money and all our things and just…gone. All I had was the money in my wallet, the beat-up old car I’d been driving and the clothes I’d been wearing. That’s it. That’s all. I didn’t know what to do…so I left. I put all the money I had in the gas tank and I drove until it was gone. I sat there about half a day before I pushed it off the road into a chasm between two big rocks.”

His eyebrows arched, but otherwise he didn’t move. “Why?”

She didn’t move much either, just a lift of one shoulder. “I don’t know. It looked real peaceful down at the bottom of that hole. I couldn’t see the car anymore. It was all covered over with dust and rocks. For a moment, I remember wanting to be down there with it.”

He actually drew back a little at that. He didn’t take his arm from around her, but he did try to get a better look at her face. “Why?” he asked again, trying not to sound as appalled as he felt.

“Because if no one found us, we’d never have to go back.” Her eyes fell closed for just a moment before she opened them again, shaking her head as she looked at him, silently beseeching understanding. “I can’t tell you how much I did not want to have to go back. Haven’t you ever felt that way, like things could never get any worse?”

Yeah, he had. He hadn’t pushed a car into a rocky chasm or moved into someone else’s house, but he had enlisted for another year in a violent war zone where he dodged bombs, bullets and insurgents on a weekly, if not daily basis. Of the two of them, quite frankly, she had dealt with it better than he had.

“So I just started walking. It took me two days, but when I found your driveway I just…walked down it. I sat on your porch all day long waiting for someone to come home, but when no one did and it got dark, I don’t know why but I tried the door. It wasn’t even locked.”

The way she was speaking, so flat and emotionless, it was a little unnerving. Quint stroked her back, not sure if he ought to stop her, reassure her, or just let her talk it all out.

“All night long, I sat on your couch and waited, expecting any minute for car lights to come down the driveway, but they never did. Eventually, I dozed off and when I woke up in the morning, I found out the lights and water still worked. There was dust everywhere and a few cans of food in the pantry, so I cleaned up a little and ate some peas. I kept all the cans, neatly lined up on the table so I could make a full accounting when someone came back. I knew the house was empty but I think it took three days before it really sank in that all that dust meant no one was going to come home. So I stayed. And eight months later, you did.”

She stared at her knees for a time, turning the hairbrush over and over in her hands.

“You’re right,” she finally admitted, once more her voice falling to very soft tones. “This isn’t my house and I don’t belonghere. You don’t have to evict me. Let me stay until the snow melts, and then I’ll go.”

Now it was his turn to stare. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Go where?”

She had no idea. He could see that in her eyes.

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