Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf Page B

blanket on the sofa with Calli sitting by, patting her shoulder. I couldn’t get Calli to talk to me. She just looked up at me with her big, brown eyes and sat there as the ambulance carried her mother away.
    I asked Ben where his father was, and he couldn’t say for sure, but guessed that he was probably at Behnke’s, a bar downtown. I debated just phoning over there and talking to Griff, but decided a face-to-face conversation would be more effective. I asked a neighbor to come over and watch the kids and I went over to Behnke’s.
    I saw Griff through a smoky haze, sitting at the bar next to a bunch of his old high-school friends. His friends were laughing and talking, reminiscing, I’m sure, about the good old days, about the only thing that group had going for them. Griff was uncharacteristically quiet, slamming back shots, nodding and smiling once in a while at what someone said. I walked over to him, and he glanced up at me. He didn’t look surprised to see me. I felt the eyes of all the patrons of Behnke’s on me, watching what would happen next. My history with Toni was no secret in Willow Creek. I waited for Griff’s usual sarcastic greeting. “Deputy Sheriff,” he’d say in a pompous wise-ass voice that made it sound like he was addressing a king or head of state. But he just looked expectantly up at me and a hush fell over his cronies next to him.
    “Go outside for a minute, Griff?” I asked politely.
    “Gotta warrant, Deputy Sheriff?” Roger, his idiot sidekick, asked, laughing hysterically.
    “You can talk to me here, Louis,” Griff said mildly and then downed another shot. “Can I buy you a drink?”
    “No thanks, I’m on duty,” I replied, and for some reason his friends thought that was funny, too, and collapsed in laughter.
    I leaned in close to him. “It’s about Toni, Griff,” I said in a low voice, not wanting these jokers to hear.
    Griff stood up. I’m a good four inches taller than Griff, buthe’s broad and built like a weight lifter. I had no doubt that he could beat the shit out of me, just like he did when I was nineteen and had come from college to try to get Toni to come back to me. I had gone to her house, where she still lived with her dad, who seemed to have aged decades since Toni’s mother died. I took one look at Toni’s face that night and knew something was irreparably broken between the two of us. We could never go back to the way it was. At the time, I didn’t want to stay in Willow Creek and Toni didn’t want to leave. My mom had remarried earlier that year and moved back to Chicago with my brother and sister. I loved college, loved Iowa City, and wanted Toni to come back with me. There wasn’t really anything left for her in Willow Creek, I thought. But she said no, with regret, I think. Said she was seeing Griff Clark and was doing just fine. That she couldn’t leave her father alone, he’d lost too much already. Then she crossed her arms over her chest like she always did when she made a decision and it was final. I leaned in to kiss her goodbye, but she dropped her chin at the last second and my lips landed on her nose.
    Griff waited until I had driven away. He waited until I had driven forty miles and stopped for gas. He waited until I was just about ready to get back in my car after paying the clerk and then he came out from the shadows and sucker punched me in the stomach and while I was bent over, he kicked me in the balls. “Stay away from Toni, asshole,” he hissed at me. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. “We’re getting married,” he slurred before one boulderlike first crunched into my face. Those three words hurt more than the punch. A few months later, I heard through a friend that Toni andGriff had gotten married. And it wasn’t all that many months later when I heard about Ben. It didn’t take a genius to do the math. I should have tried harder. I shouldn’t have let her go.
    “Let’s go,” Griff said, the yeasty smell of