The kitchen in our little house on the edge of town always smelled like burnt toast and damp boots, but that Tuesday afternoon it smelled entirely like sulfur and pure, unfiltered wrath. Brenda stood right beside the grease-spattered stove with her face so bright red it looked like she had spent six hours lying flat out under a July sun without a drop of sunscreen. Her breath came in short, jagged little wheezes, the kind she usually reserved for when the snowblower jammed up against a frozen patch of gravel in the middle of January.
I knew better than to move an inch. I had my boots half-laced, my jacket bunched up in my left hand like a shield, and my eyes fixed firmly on the linoleum floor where a stray piece of shredded lettuce had been sitting untouched since Sunday.
“You think I’m stupid,” she said, and her voice didn’t even sound like her own anymore. It had that thin, wire-tight rattle to it that told me every single circuit in her head had crossed at once. “You actually, honestly think I was born yesterday, Arthur.”
“Brenda, honey, let’s just talk about this for two seconds,” I said, backing up another half-step until my shoulder blades hit the heavy wooden frame of the pantry door.
“Don’t you honey me,” she snapped.
Before I could get another syllable past my teeth, her hand shot out toward the counter with the kind of greasy, terrifying speed I had only ever seen from a startled snapping turtle down by the creek.
Her fingers closed around the handle of that old heavy cast-iron skillet we had hauled around three different rental houses since the Carter administration. It was the big one, the heavy black iron monster we used for frying up lake perch on Friday nights, and she didn’t even hesitate for a fraction of a second to weigh it in her palm. She just hauled back and let fly with a grunt that came right up from the soles of her mud-caked garden shoes.
The sound it made when it connected with the side of my skull wasn’t a dull thud like you hear in the picture shows; it was a sharp, hollow crack like someone splitting a dry cedar shingle with a heavy maul. My knees simply turned to water underneath me, and the next thing I knew, my cheek was pressed hard against the cold, greasy squares of the kitchen floor while my ears rang like church bells after a double-shift wedding.
I stayed right there on my stomach for a long, quiet minute, staring at a crumb of dried cornbread near the baseboard, listening to my own breathing echo off the cupboards.
“Why did you do that?!” I yelled, my voice sounding thin and small even to my own ears as I reached up to feel a lump growing behind my ear that felt roughly the size of a goose egg.
Brenda stood right over me with the heavy skillet still clutched in her right hand, her chest heaving up and down so hard I thought her flannel shirt buttons were going to pop off and ricochet off the toaster. She pointed her free finger straight down at my nose like she was jabbing a loaded pistol at a stray dog. “That is for the piece of paper I found in your pocket yesterday when I was doing the wash! It had the name Mary Lou written on it in ink!”
My brain felt like a bowl of cold oatmeal sloshing around inside my skull, but even through the fog of getting half-concussed by our own cookware, survival instinct kicked in with the force of a mule kick. I didn’t have time to invent a whole life story, so I grabbed the very first thing that floated up from the bottom of my memory while I stared at the frayed hem of her jeans.
“Oh my god, honey, you are crazy!” I groaned, rolling over onto my side and clutching my head with both hands while I squinted up at her through watering eyes. “Mary Lou is the name of the racehorse that I bet on at the casino last week down off the highway!”
She froze. The skillet hovered about six inches above my forehead for a second while she turned that over in her head, her eyebrows drawing down together as she tried to match my frantic expression up against the memory of every dollar we didn’t have sitting in our joint checking account. I could see the wheels grinding behind her eyes, slow and heavy like an old tractor engine on a frosty morning.
“A horse?” she asked, her voice dropping down an octave into that dangerous, skeptical register that usually meant she was about to start checking the oil in her own car instead of letting me touch it.
“Yes, a horse!” I lied, laying it on thick with every ounce of theatrical pain I could muster up while I rubbed the swelling spot behind my ear. “A four-legged animal that runs around a dirt track, Brenda! You think I’m running around behind your back with someone named Mary Lou? Look at me! I can barely run to the mailbox without pulling a hamstring!”
She stared down at me for another long, agonizing five seconds, breathing out a long, hot sigh that smelled faintly of stale Folgers coffee. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she lowered the cast-iron skillet back down onto the counter with a heavy clunk that made the salt shaker jump. The fierce, burning red in her cheeks began to fade back into her usual pale complexion, leaving her looking suddenly tired and a little foolish standing there in the middle of the kitchen with a weapon in her hand.
“Well,” she muttered, wiping her palms down the front of her jeans as if she had just finished gutting a mess of bluegills. “You should have told me that before you left the slip in your trousers, Arthur. You know how my nerves are since my sister had that operation.”
“I know, I know,” I gasped, rolling clumsily onto my hands and knees before hauling myself up by grabbing onto the edge of the kitchen table. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”
She let out a short, breathy puff of air that might have been a laugh if she had any humor left in her, then she reached out and grabbed my elbow, helping me steady myself as I wobbled on my feet like a calf trying to stand up in a muddy barnyard. She even gave me a quick, awkward hug, patting my back two times with a heavy, flat hand before turning around to put the skillet back in its proper place under the sink. The fight was over, or at least that was what I told myself while I stood there pressing a frozen bag of corn peas against the side of my head.
Three full days went by after that afternoon in the kitchen, and for seventy-two hours, our little house was about as peaceful as a church on a Monday morning. We ate our supper in near-total silence, watched our regular programs on the little console television in the front room without so much as an cross word, and went to bed at nine o’clock sharp with our backs turned to each other in the double mattress. I figured I had pulled off the greatest save of my natural life. I had dodged a bullet, or rather, I had dodged a twelve-inch piece of seasoned cast iron by inventing a fictitious greyhound of a mare that didn’t exist anywhere outside of my desperate imagination.
By the third evening, I was feeling downright relaxed, sitting in my old green armchair with my socks off and my toes stretched out toward the little electric heater we kept plugged in by the baseboard. Brenda was sitting over on the worn-out tweed sofa across the room, knitting something lumpy and gray out of scratchy wool she had bought on clearance down at the dry goods store in town. The television was playing some black-and-white detective show where the actors talked in low, gravelly whispers that mostly just served as background noise while the wind rattled the loose pane of glass in the front window.
I remember looking over at her and thinking how simple women really were once you learned how to feed them the right answers to their questions. A little quick thinking, a well-placed lie about a racetrack three counties over, and everything went right back to the dull, steady routine of our marriage. I even reached down to scratch my ankle without a care in the world, completely forgetting that every action has an equal and opposite reaction waiting around the corner to bite you right where you sit.
The grandfather clock in the hallway was just about ready to chime the half-hour when the black landline telephone sitting on the side table between our chairs let out a sharp, ear-splitting ring that made us both jump half out of our seats. It wasn’t the polite little electronic chirp phones make nowadays; it was the old bell-and-hammer kind of ring that sounded like a fire alarm going off inside a tin shed.
Brenda stopped her knitting needles mid-stitch, her fingers freezing in place while the wool yarn dangled down toward the rug like a dead worm. The phone rang a second time, loud and demanding, cutting right through the low murmur of the television announcer’s voice.
“I’ll get it,” I said quickly, starting to lean forward out of the armchair with my hand already reaching out toward the receiver to cut the thing off before whoever was on the other end could start blabbing about local business.
“Sit down, Arthur,” she said. Her voice didn’t have the red-faced fury of three days ago; it was flat, cold, and entirely devoid of any human warmth whatsoever.
She didn’t raise her voice, and she didn’t rush. She just laid her knitting down on the sofa cushion with an agonizingly slow, deliberate care, folding the gray yarn over the top of the needles as if she were tucking a baby into a crib for the night. Then she stood up from the sofa with her joints popping softly in the quiet room and walked past my chair without even turning her head to look at my face.
I didn’t hear her footsteps behind me because the carpet was thick enough to swallow the sound, but I heard the distinct, heavy scrape of something being lifted out from the narrow space right beside the front coat rack where we kept our golf bag leaning against the wall. It wasn’t an iron or a wedge; it had that long, heavy swing to it that only comes from hauling around a full-sized driver meant for clearing three hundred yards of open fairway.
The next thing that happened took about half a second, but it felt like it played out in slow motion right there under the yellowish glow of the floor lamp.
Brenda stepped around behind my armchair with the big metal head of the golf club cocked back over her right shoulder just like she was lining up a drive on the sixteenth hole at the municipal course. She didn’t shout a warning, and she didn’t ask me another question. She just let out a sharp, clean exhale through her nose and swung that graphite shaft forward with a smooth, practiced arc that caught me squarely across the back of the neck and shoulders with a sickening, hollow thwack.
My head snapped forward so hard my chin slammed right into my chest, and the room went instantly black before I even had time to figure out which way was up.
When I finally started crawling back up out of the dark two hours later, the first thing I noticed was that my tongue felt like a piece of old saddle leather left out in the sun to dry. The electric heater was still humming softly by the wall, but the television had been turned off, leaving the house dead silent except for the low, rhythmic ticking of the hallway clock. I was lying flat on my back on the threadbare living room rug, staring straight up at the popcorn ceiling while a dull, throbbing pain hammered away at the base of my skull like a pneumatic drill on a county road.
I reached a trembling hand up to the back of my head and my fingers immediately sank into a lump that felt roughly the size of a baseball wrapped in wet gauze. I groaned, rolling my head over toward the side table where the telephone sat innocently on its cradle, looking like nothing more than a harmless piece of black plastic.
Brenda was sitting back down in her usual spot on the sofa, her glasses perched on the bridge of her nose while she picked right back up with her gray knitting as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred since breakfast on Tuesday morning. She didn’t look angry anymore, and she didn’t look like she was about to jump up for another swing; she just looked terribly, terrifyingly calm, the way she looked every time she balanced the checkbook and found out we were twenty dollars short on the electric bill.
I propped myself up on one elbow, wincing as a sharp spike of pain shot down through my shoulder blades, and stared at her through watery, uncomprehending eyes. My chest was heaving, my throat was raw, and my entire world had narrowed down to the size of that lump on the back of my head.
“What… what was that for?!” I choked out, my voice coming out as a pathetic, cracked whisper that sounded like a crow with a mouthful of gravel.
Brenda didn’t even look up from her knitting needles, her fingers moving back and forth with a steady, rhythmic click-clack that made my teeth ache. She just turned a row of gray yarn over with her thumb, smoothed it down flat against her knee, and spoke without looking at me at all.
“That was for lying to me about the phone call,” she said quietly, her voice as smooth and even as pond ice in January. “Mary Lou called while you were out in the garage checking the snowblower yesterday. She wanted to know if you were still coming over to help her clear out her mother’s attic this weekend, Arthur. And she didn’t sound a bit like a horse to me.”
I sat there on the cold rug with my hand pressed against the back of my throbbing head, staring at the little black telephone while the silence in the room stretched out so long and heavy it felt like it was starting to crack the floorboards beneath us. The lie was gone, the excuse was dead, and the only thing left in the house was the sound of her needles clicking away in the dark.
