The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 Read online

  I smoothed a few strands of her hair with my finger, asked if she ever thought about leaving her husband. She closed her eyes and said, “No. Besides, suggesting divorce to a married woman you’ve been sleeping with for a couple months is like proposing to a single girl on the third date. I read that in Cosmo. Don’t you read Cosmo?”

  “Missed that issue,” I said.

  She touched my stomach, brought her face close to mine. “Anyway,” she said. “I’m happy the way things are. How can I be unhappy when I can come over here and spend the weekend in bed with you?”

  I knew she was stroking my ego, trying to change the subject, but it was working. I liked her. She was funny, and it was still new enough to be romantic. We’d met at the National Gallery. We were both crazy about Barnett Newman. She was nothing like Stacy, my ex-girlfriend. She wasn’t broke, didn’t work in a bar, didn’t stay out drinking all night, so when she said spending the weekend in bed with me was enough to keep her happy, I thought to hell with it and kissed her.

  Then someone knocked on the door.

  “Company?” Peyton asked.

  I shook my head, and whoever it was knocked again, louder this time—the way people knock when they’re not going away—so I got out of bed and pulled on my jeans. Peyton sat up, looking concerned, holding the sheet over her chest with one hand, and I crept to the door, but when I looked through the peephole there was nobody there.

  “Who is it?” Peyton whispered.

  “Nobody,” I said, and opened up to take a look around.

  Stacy had been standing there out of sight, though, leaning against the wall to the side of the door, and before I could stop her she walked right in and started talking like it was perfectly natural for her to show up unannounced. “You would not believe the night I had,” she said. “My boss is a cretin.”

  She made it all the way to the dining table before she saw Peyton, stopped for a second, then said “Hi” like it was no big deal and went into the kitchen. It was just an alcove, really, a tight white space carved into the wall. “You got anything to eat?” she asked. “I’m starving.”

  “Who’s that?” Peyton asked, still whispering.

  “Stacy,” I said.

  “The crazy one?”

  Stacy poked her head out of the kitchen. “I’m not deaf,” she said. “And I’m not crazy.”

  Peyton didn’t say anything.

  “Did he tell you I was crazy?” Stacy asked.

  “Not in so many words,” Peyton said.

  Stacy ducked back into the kitchen, started opening cabinets, banging around. “All you got is pasta,” she said, then raised her voice, calling out to Peyton. “All he ever has is pasta.”

  Peyton got out of bed, the sheet still covering her, then picked up her clothes and disappeared into the bathroom.

  I stood in the entrance to the kitchen, looking at Stacy. She didn’t look at me. She stood at the sink, filling a pot with water. She was wearing black jeans and a tight little T-shirt. The black beret, the dyed red hair in pigtails. I loved the pigtails, the little-girl thing. Lollipop, lollipop.

  “Peyton’s a looker,” she said, hefting the pot of water from the sink to the stove. “You didn’t tell me she was so pretty.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Making pasta.”

  I didn’t get a chance to tell her what was wrong with that answer before Peyton came out of the bathroom. She’d put her tan skirt back on, the cream-colored silk blouse. Usually it was just pretty, but now it seemed out of place. I was in jeans, Stacy was in jeans, and Peyton looked like she was going to a job interview. I mean, she’d come over that way, so there was nothing deliberate about it, and she probably would have preferred to be in jeans, too, but it was still weird, like an assertion of class. Not money, but style.

  She took a seat at the dining table, where she had a clear view of Stacy, still in the kitchen. I walked over to her, put my hand on the back of her chair, and she looked up at me over her shoulder. I smiled. She didn’t.

  “You know your faucet’s leaking?” Stacy asked.

  “Hadn’t noticed,” I said.

  “It’s like Chinese water torture.” She raised her voice again, like she had to shout to be heard above the din of a few drops of water. “You guys want some pasta?”

  “I’m all set,” Peyton told her.

  “Stacy,” I said. “You need to go home.”

  She turned to me like I’d insulted her. “I’m just gonna make something to eat real quick,” she said. “Christ. Is that okay with you? Do you know what kind of night I’ve had?”

  I was about to say I didn’t give a fuck what kind of night she’d had, but Peyton spoke first. “Let her stay a minute, Oscar. After all, she’s had a rough night.”

  They smirked at each other, and Stacy said, “Yeah, Oscar. I’ve had a rough night. Let me stay.”

  Peyton looked over her shoulder at me again, sternly this time, like she was a schoolteacher and I’d been caught passing notes. I was already in enough trouble, and she hadn’t even read the thing. I’d have real problems, depending on what it said, and that was up to Stacy. Kicking her out would be as good as telling Peyton I was fucking her, which—in truth—had not been the case for several weeks.

  So I sat down. I told Stacy, “Don’t make a mess.”

  Stacy sat with us at the table while she waited for the water to boil. Peyton reached up, pulled the cord to the light on the ceiling fan, turning it on. I wished she hadn’t.

  “So what’s going on here?” she asked.

  Stacy said, “I had a lousy night at work. I wanted to meet you, anyway.”

  Peyton nodded. I’d told her about Stacy, but more as a thing of the past. She didn’t know we were still talking. At least not that often. “You guys talk a lot?” she asked.

  Stacy winked. “Don’t worry. All he ever talks about is you.”

  Peyton wasn’t buying it, though. She raised her eyebrows.

  “We used to date,” Stacy said. “On and off for years. Relationships like that are hard to let go of, you know? So we’re still friends, but believe me that’s it. I could not be with him like that again.”

  “You’re not exactly helping my cause here,” I told her.

  In the kitchen, the water boiled over. It made a sound like static when it hit the stove. Stacy got up and went in. “You guys sure you don’t want any?” she asked.

  “I’m sure,” Peyton said.

  Stacy opened a box of bowtie pasta and dumped about half of it in the pot. “More for me,” she said, then came back to the table and sat down. “Don’t get me wrong. Oscar’s a sweetheart, but you know how it is.”

  “No,” Peyton said. “I don’t.”

  Stacy shrugged. “Things kind of fizzled out. Like with you and your husband, I guess.”

  “Fizzled out?” I asked.

  “You don’t know anything about my husband,” Peyton said.

  “The passion’s still alive?” Stacy asked.

  Peyton stood up, grabbed her purse and keys. “I’m going home.”

  “Peyton,” I said. “Wait a minute, will ya?”

  I got up to follow her, but she was already out the door.

  I looked at Stacy. “Fizzle-fizzle,” she said.

  The parking lot was full. All different kinds of cars, circles of light from the lampposts reflected in dazzling white on their hoods. The lot itself had been repaved in sections over the course of the past few months, and the colors reminded me of something out of a children’s book; the blacktop too black, the yellow stripes too yellow.

  Peyton didn’t look back on the way to her car. She got in without saying anything to me. I leaned down by the driver’s side door. She started the engine, sat there for a second, then rolled down the window. “Why did you start something with me if you still had something going with her?” she asked.

  I started to say something but she cut me off, said “Never mind” and nearly ran over my foot backing o
ut of her space. She didn’t check behind her. Tires squealed and a black SUV smashed into the back of the car. It pushed her front end into the Chrysler parked next to her, the one right behind me. My legs would have been broken if I’d been standing a few inches to the left.

  Car alarms went off all over the place. Peyton’s car. The SUV. The Chrysler. The lady who’d been driving the SUV got out, started cursing and hollering. “What the fuck were you thinking?” All that. She was short, stocky. Gray hair. A white sweatshirt with a Christmas tree on it in the middle of June.

  I looked all around, at the lights coming on in the windows up and down the building, at the clouds moving too quickly across the moon, taking it all in, standing firmly in the moment for the first time all night.

  It took a couple hours to get everything sorted, the police reports and the tow trucks. An ambulance. Stacy heard the commotion and came out, started flirting with one of the cops. He was a young guy. Thin, with close-cropped hair. He looked like one of those army kids I’d seen on TV, the nineteen-year-olds patrolling Baghdad, getting blown to bits by car bombs and guys with grenades strapped to their chests. There was another cop questioning me, and he had to repeat every question because I kept looking over his shoulder at Stacy, chatting that kid up like she was going to get his number right there. If they’d been in a bar I wouldn’t have put it past her to take him home, just to piss me off.

  Peyton leaned against the side of the ambulance with her arms folded, the gray-headed lady inside, presumably on a gurney with a big collar on her neck, keeping it straight. She’d calmed down. She stopped yelling when they started giving her painkillers.

  After a while the ambulance left, along with the cops, and the cars were towed away. It was just the three of us standing out there at four-thirty in the morning. The sky had cleared, no more clouds, just the moon, and it was too bright to see the stars.

  “I’m calling George,” Peyton said.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked.

  “You got a better plan?”

  I’d been wanting her to tell him, but not like this. “You can stay here,” I told her. “Stacy’ll go home.”

  “Not unless you give me a ride,” Stacy said. “I took the bus here from Pentagon Station. It’s too late to catch one now. The Metro’s closed, too.”

  “I’ll just call George,” Peyton said. “I want to get out of here.”

  I raised my voice more than I meant to when I asked, “Can’t you spare me the drama? The last thing I need tonight is your fucking husband over here. He’s gonna freak out, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Oh, grow up,” she said. “You think he doesn’t know about you?”

  “You told him?”

  “I told him I wanted something on the side before I even met you,” she said. “It’s not like he hasn’t had his share. I told you he didn’t know because it made you feel good. You were getting such a kick out of being the bad boy.”

  “He loves that shit,” Stacy said.

  Peyton took out her cell phone and dialed. George must have answered on the first ring, because it wasn’t more than a second before she was talking to him. “Hey hon,” she said, her tone matter of fact, like she was going to ask him to pick her up at work, not her lover’s apartment. “I need you to come get me.”

  I could hear him talking on the other end, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “It was fun for a while,” she told him. “But things went south. He’s got a girlfriend.”

  George laughed. He was loud enough for me to hear him when he said, “You’ve got kind of a boyfriend yourself.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Peyton said. “Listen, though. I want to get out of here.”

  Stacy gave me a satisfied grin, like she’d won a bet, and George lowered his voice again. “No, honey,” Peyton said. “There’s a little problem with the car. I’ll tell you about it when you get here, okay?”

  Then she was giving him directions.

  When she hung up, we went back upstairs, sat at my table again. The faucet was still leaking, a steady drip. “God, that’s annoying,” Peyton said. She went to the kitchen, turned the water on and off, trying to make it stop.

  It wasn’t long before George showed up. He knocked and Peyton answered, bag in hand. She was obviously disappointed when he came inside instead of taking her away, and I was shocked. Not because he came in. Because he was about five-two and maybe fifty years old, with a big gut and tight gray curls. Cheap blue slacks. His name embroidered in red on his shirt pocket. There were grease stains all over.

  “Working late?” Peyton asked.

  “We got this old Mustang,” he said. “The transmission’s kaput. I’m having fun with it.”

  I stood up and he extended his hand. “You must be Oscar.”

  I looked at his hand.

  “Oh,” he said, “sorry,” then went to the bathroom, left the door open while he washed the oil off. “I’ve always liked these little studio apartments,” he said. “Great for a bachelor.” Then he came back out and offered his hand again. We shook. “Nice to meet you,” he said. “Peyton told me a little about you.”

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She said you like the modern art. I never could understand that stuff myself. Looks like a bunch of scribble to me.” He turned to his wife. “What happened to the car?”

  “I wrecked the car,” she said.

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you on the way home.”

  “Come on, now, Peyton,” he said. “There’s no reason to get prickly.”

  “Yeah, Peyton,” Stacy said. “Lighten up.”

  “You’re the girlfriend?” George asked.

  “Yup.”

  “She used to be,” I said.

  “Used to be, used to be.” He was still jovial, a regular Santa Claus. “You’re a darling,” he told her. “I love the little-girl look.”

  Stacy made a kissy face.

  George made a face like he smelled something.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  He shushed me. “You hear that? What is that?” He stood there a minute, then followed his ears to the kitchen. “You know you got a leaky faucet?”

  Peyton dropped her purse, slumped her shoulders and looked at the ceiling in surrender. “He knows,” she sighed.

  I walked over to the kitchen. George knelt down and opened the cabinet under the sink. “We’ve got to have a look at this,” he said.

  “That’s really not necessary,” I told him.

  Peyton raised her voice. “Can we please just get out of here, George?”

  George stuck his head in the cabinet. After a second he said, “This is an easy fix,” pulled his head back out and looked up at me. “You got a toolbox?”

  By that time Peyton was standing beside me in the entrance to the kitchen. “It’ll just take a second,” he told her.

  The sleeve of her blouse brushed lightly against my arm, and I went to the closet to get the toolbox. My mother had given it to me when I moved out of my parents’ house, nearly twenty years before, and I don’t think I’d opened it but once or twice in all that time.

  Wendell Berry

  Nothing Living Lives Alone

  I. FREEDOM

  Andy Catlett was a child of two worlds. At his house down at Hargrave, at the river mouth, going by car was taken for granted. But at his Catlett grandparents’ place, in the summer of 1945 and for yet a few more years, there was not a motor-driven implement or vehicle, except for the elderly automobile owned by Jess Brightleaf and his family, who lived down the creek road on the back of the farm. Andy’s Grandpa Catlett, at eighty-one, less than a year from his death, still rode horseback when he had any distance to go, though now he had to mount from the well-top. The farmwork was still done by the Brightleaf brothers, Jess and Rufus, and by Dick Watson, with teams of mules. They were good mules too, as Grandpa Catlett would have added: mules well conformed and matche
d, well broke to work.

  What he thought of as the town-world of automobiles Andy had known from his first consciousness and was accustomed to, though until the war’s end and a little after, some farm people still drove into Hargrave in horsedrawn wagons and buggies. Every summer one of the last of those, a sweet old woman, as Andy’s mother called her, with her nice grandson always in his Sunday clothes to come to town, drove her horse and buggy through the streets, peddling jams and jellies, vegetables from her garden, and fresh-picked wild berries.

  But with no more deliberate choice than he had invested in the town-world, Andy had given his heart entirely to the older world of what his father, and Andy and his brother Henry also, would always call the “home place” as it was until the great alteration that followed the war. Until then it belonged to the motorless world of stones, streams, and soil, plants and animals, woods and fields, footpaths and wagon tracks, all of it infused still by his grandpa’s still-excitable passion for good land, good livestock, good horses and mules, and good work.

  The town of Hargrave, charmed by its highway and motor connections to everywhere else, thought itself somewhat worldly, but at the home place, with its broad open ridges falling away and steepening to the woods along Bird’s Branch on one side and Catlett’s Fork on the other, Andy felt himself in the presence of the world itself, in the world’s native silence as yet only rarely disturbed by the sound of a machine, its darkness after bedtime unbroken by human light, its daylight as yet unsmudged, its springs and streams still drinkable. It was a creaturely world, substantial and alive. Even the rock ledges of the slopes, even the timbers and planks of the buildings seemed to him to be alive in the vital presence of the place. In those days he simply lived in it and loved it without premonition. Eventually, seeing it as it would become, he would remember with sorrow how it had been.

  From the farmers he was kin to, and from others who were his influences, Andy learned that there was a difference between good and bad work, and that good work was worthy, even that it was expected, even of him. He wanted to work, to work well, to be a good hand, long before he was capable. By the time he became more or less capable of work, he had become capable also of laziness. Because he knew about work, he knew about laziness. Though he could not always resist the temptation to be lazy, he knew that laziness was what it was, and he was embarrassed by it even as he indulged in it.