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.I Married Joan.You Bet Your Life.Edward R.Murrow chain-smoking on Person to Person.The picture screen fell to a grayish haze and grew darker.Then the white dot was gone and the screen turned black as death.“I am sixty years old now,” Pearl said again, as though it were the latest answer to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.***One of the adult shoes belonging to Junior pressed down on the accelerator as he flew down Beacon Street and swung into his wide driveway.He saw the curtain flutter gently in the window.Birdlike.Thelma.Junior walked around the back end of the car after he parked it.It was the longest route to the house, but even a few extra feet would give him added time to think.His eye spied a sticker on the rear bumper that one of the kids had pasted there during the family’s spring vacation.I WISH I WERE IN FLORIDA, it stated.“Ain’t that the truth,” Junior thought, as he saw the curtain go limp in the window.Inside, Thelma popped a Valium into her small mouth, and it disappeared down her throat in a wash of ginger ale.She hurried across the room and flopped onto the sofa in front of the evening news.She straightened her dress and waited.Junior stopped to pet the family’s miniature collie on the front steps.More time to think.Thelma glanced out nervously and saw her husband’s head bobbing up and down outside the window.“There, boy,” she heard him say.“Good dog.”“That’s me,” Thelma thought.“A good dog.”Junior came in and closed the door softly.“Whew.What a day!” he said.He threw his suit jacket on the sofa and leaned over to lightly kiss the top of Thelma’s head.“And how was your day?”“The same,” said Thelma.“Nothing new.” He heard the thin layer of ice forming among the words, molding them into a cold sentence.What now? He moved nervously to the bar and poured himself a gin and tonic.“Where’s the kids?” he asked.This would be okay.There was no trap in this sentence waiting to snap shut.Something had riled her, to be sure, so he must step the way soldiers do to avoid live mines.He was good at this.Very good.He’d had plenty of qualified training.He dabbed a napkin at the bottom of his glass.If it hadn’t been for the funeral home, he might have tried his hand at drama.His confidence pushed the words out again.“I said, where’s the kids?”“Where’s Monique Tessier?” Thelma asked suddenly and Junior’s glass slid a full inch down, out of his hand.He caught the bottom of it with his other hand, but Thelma had already seen the damage caused by her remark.“Who?” Junior asked.The Muse had abandoned him, the bitch.Now his feet hurt, as if he were wearing shoes that were too small.Mama, his subconscious mind all but shouted.His clothes began to shrink, to hurt him, an embalmed suit of skin.“Monique Tessier,” Thelma said again, and turned to look at him.He had grown even more portly, this man she had married.He had grown chins, and unusual habits, and away from her.She took a Polaroid picture from beneath the sofa cushion and handed it to him.“Look familiar?” she asked.Calm.Beneficent.This surprised her.Wasn’t she usually flighty, illogical, overly emotional? This must be, then, the new her.She must have grown already from the news of this nasty business.In truth, she had forgotten the day’s handful of Valiums.Junior took the picture and gazed at it.Polaroids.How he hated them.What ever happened to the old-fashioned way of processing film? How nice it would have been if Thelma had had to drop her film off at the mall for three days.Or send it to Boston.Or Hong Kong.It would have given him days to think.Yes, there they were, him leaning on the door of Monique’s old Buick, just about to give her a little good-bye peck.His lips were moving with words.What had they been? Oh, yes.You’ll see.Things will get better, honey.That’s what he had been foolishly saying just as the blasted Polaroid had snapped and frozen his guilt forever.Bronzed it.Things will get better.Sure, but for whom, that’s what he hadn’t asked himself.“Is that,” Thelma asked, “or is that not Monique Tessier?”Junior struggled for an answer.He pondered heavily, as if to be of help to Thelma in her identification of the culprit, to ingratiate himself, to fling himself into her side of the ring.His eyebrows knitted with disgust.He wanted to say, “What’s she doing away from her desk? She’s supposed to be working! Me and the old man will need to look into this tomorrow.”“Ah,” was all he said
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