would seem.
Olivia thought I had gotten drunk and buried my wife’s shoes and then, in some form of daze last night, when I was sober, dug them up?
I had not. Would not, could not, never would.
But did I know this for sure?
In my hand was the check I had made out for one hundred dollars. In the upper left corner, above my address, it said JAMES HASTINGS & STACEY HASTINGS. We still had a joint checking account. A psychologist might suggest this was further evidence that I was holding on to her.
But digging holes in the yard. What kind of sleepwalking would this require?
Someone else was messing with me, and, when I found out who, they would regret it. I ripped the check into pieces anyway, making sure the first tear went between our names.
11
Ever since Stacey died, I was terrible with keys, sunglasses, remote controls. Anything pocket-sized and losable, I lost it. Which is why I had no way of knowing if someone had broken into my storage locker at the Self-Store-It Center, where I had installed a junior high kid’s combination lock on my unit instead of the kind that you can blast with a shotgun. Those babies come with two little brass keys, and I would have lost them. The combo lock was still there, though - locked. There were no signs of forced entry, but someone with scintillatingly brilliant powers of deduction just might have figured it out. It was the date of our wedding, for one. For another, there was a card taped to the floor of my desk’s center drawer which read, in large red felt tip, STORAGE LOCKER COMBO. And below that: 09-04-04
I opened the lock, put it in my back pocket and slid the metal door up. I saw nothing out of place, but this didn’t stop my stomach from clenching, my skin breaking out in the same nervous itch. I was a junkie in the presence of my favorite fix.
Stacey’s things.
I had stacked the boxes along the walls, leaving a slot in the middle so that I would not have to empty the whole damn lot just to find one of her old mixed CDs, a photo of us at the lake house, the rugby shirt she had stolen from me in college, any old thing. As if tending a version of her grave, I had stacked and labeled everything in a tidy fashion, going so far as to place a small hand-woven rug Stacey had been fond of and half a dozen scented candles in this metal cage. The carefully drawn block letters from my Magic Marker on the boxes - STACEY’S SWEATERS, STACEY’S BATHROOM TRINKETS, STACEY’S JACKETS (SPRING) - now seemed to mock me, the me I was back when I had seemed to mock me, the me I was back when I had decided establishing this shrine was healthier than a drop off at Good Will. Someone should have taken me aside last summer and stamped FRAGILE on my forehead.
Problem: there was only one box labeled STACEY’S SHOES. I pulled it down and inspected the top. The packaging tape was still intact. The cardboard around it had not been ripped or tampered with. But there had been three boxes of her shoes. Stacey was no Imelda, but she liked her shoes. Which meant that two were missing. Someone had been in here.
‘Hey,’ I said to the dust. ‘It wasn’t me.’
I put the box on top of the others, scanned everything once more and turned away and reached up to drag the metal door down. But I paused, forgetting something. I lowered my arms and turned. I tried to remember what was in each box. How much of her remained, and what I had thrown out or given away. I was drawn to one of the boxes in the right corner, a smaller carton with a blue band of rubber packing tape around the base. Without knowing why, I kneeled and began edging it out from under the stack. It scraped across the concrete floor and popped free, leaving the heavy pillar of boxes above it to canter and tumble down at odd angles. I pulled it to the center of the bay and crouched, peeled off the tape and opened the box.
Inside were three shoeboxes but no shoes, and I remembered
Olivia thought I had gotten drunk and buried my wife’s shoes and then, in some form of daze last night, when I was sober, dug them up?
I had not. Would not, could not, never would.
But did I know this for sure?
In my hand was the check I had made out for one hundred dollars. In the upper left corner, above my address, it said JAMES HASTINGS & STACEY HASTINGS. We still had a joint checking account. A psychologist might suggest this was further evidence that I was holding on to her.
But digging holes in the yard. What kind of sleepwalking would this require?
Someone else was messing with me, and, when I found out who, they would regret it. I ripped the check into pieces anyway, making sure the first tear went between our names.
11
Ever since Stacey died, I was terrible with keys, sunglasses, remote controls. Anything pocket-sized and losable, I lost it. Which is why I had no way of knowing if someone had broken into my storage locker at the Self-Store-It Center, where I had installed a junior high kid’s combination lock on my unit instead of the kind that you can blast with a shotgun. Those babies come with two little brass keys, and I would have lost them. The combo lock was still there, though - locked. There were no signs of forced entry, but someone with scintillatingly brilliant powers of deduction just might have figured it out. It was the date of our wedding, for one. For another, there was a card taped to the floor of my desk’s center drawer which read, in large red felt tip, STORAGE LOCKER COMBO. And below that: 09-04-04
I opened the lock, put it in my back pocket and slid the metal door up. I saw nothing out of place, but this didn’t stop my stomach from clenching, my skin breaking out in the same nervous itch. I was a junkie in the presence of my favorite fix.
Stacey’s things.
I had stacked the boxes along the walls, leaving a slot in the middle so that I would not have to empty the whole damn lot just to find one of her old mixed CDs, a photo of us at the lake house, the rugby shirt she had stolen from me in college, any old thing. As if tending a version of her grave, I had stacked and labeled everything in a tidy fashion, going so far as to place a small hand-woven rug Stacey had been fond of and half a dozen scented candles in this metal cage. The carefully drawn block letters from my Magic Marker on the boxes - STACEY’S SWEATERS, STACEY’S BATHROOM TRINKETS, STACEY’S JACKETS (SPRING) - now seemed to mock me, the me I was back when I had seemed to mock me, the me I was back when I had decided establishing this shrine was healthier than a drop off at Good Will. Someone should have taken me aside last summer and stamped FRAGILE on my forehead.
Problem: there was only one box labeled STACEY’S SHOES. I pulled it down and inspected the top. The packaging tape was still intact. The cardboard around it had not been ripped or tampered with. But there had been three boxes of her shoes. Stacey was no Imelda, but she liked her shoes. Which meant that two were missing. Someone had been in here.
‘Hey,’ I said to the dust. ‘It wasn’t me.’
I put the box on top of the others, scanned everything once more and turned away and reached up to drag the metal door down. But I paused, forgetting something. I lowered my arms and turned. I tried to remember what was in each box. How much of her remained, and what I had thrown out or given away. I was drawn to one of the boxes in the right corner, a smaller carton with a blue band of rubber packing tape around the base. Without knowing why, I kneeled and began edging it out from under the stack. It scraped across the concrete floor and popped free, leaving the heavy pillar of boxes above it to canter and tumble down at odd angles. I pulled it to the center of the bay and crouched, peeled off the tape and opened the box.
Inside were three shoeboxes but no shoes, and I remembered
Similar Books
