Free The Far End of Happy by Kathryn Craft Page B

“You need to talk to someone. I know you want it to be me, but it can’t be.”
    Ronnie found the listing. She picked up the wall phone to dial. Jeff tore the receiver from her, then ripped the phone from the wall.
    A hole gaped from the sheetrock they had so lovingly hung. Ronnie sank to the floor beneath it. Jeff crossed to the opposite side of the kitchen and did the same. Their backs against the oak cupboards they’d installed when Andrew was a baby.
    They stared at each other for several minutes, Ronnie held hostage by choices she’d made when Jeff had seemed a different man. It had already been a long day, and as she sat there, the rush from its surprise ending began to wane.
    “We’re at a stalemate,” she finally said. “Guess I’ll have to watch you all night because I will not have the boys tripping over your dead body on their way to the bus stop tomorrow.”
    Ronnie sat with him for another fifteen minutes or so, not talking. At least he’s not drinking. Yet as the minutes dragged on, she saw the futility in this approach. She’d never be able to stay awake all night. How long could she guard Jeff? For the rest of their lives?
    “Never mind.” Ronnie stood. “I’m going to bed.”
    Ronnie washed her face and brushed her teeth but didn’t undress. Who was she kidding? No matter how exhausted she was, she’d never be able to relax into sleep with the threat of violence in the air. Her mind raced. She needed to get Jeff help, but how? She reached for the bedroom phone, but it wasn’t in its cradle. After looking all over the second floor, she found it where she had no doubt left it—on the sitting room bed. She tried to turn it on. Dead. Her cell phone was plugged in to charge at the store, where she left it every night. Why bother bringing it inside this fortress, where thick stone walls obscured a signal?
    If only she could keep Jeff from drinking. Keep him talking. Distract him some way until she thought up a plan. Wondering what he was doing now, she slipped off her shoes and tiptoed down the stairs—but before she reached the kitchen, she heard the freezer drawer slide open and ice clunk against the side of a plastic mug. Then the front door. Jeff must have taken his drink to the porch so he could smoke.
    She had to act fast. Holding her breath as she passed the kitchen window, just feet away from where Jeff probably sat, she descended again.
    From her basement office, she called her therapist. Anita also worked at the Women in Crisis Center in Reading; she’d know what to do. Ronnie quickly apologized for the late hour—it was just past eleven thirty—and explained what was happening. Anita told her to hang up and call 911 and say that Jeff had threatened suicide and that she’d seen a note with his burial wishes detailed. “The note is important. Don’t forget,” she said.
    Ronnie had been up since five a.m. With this flow and ebb of late-night adrenaline added on to weeks of turmoil, her vision was starting to blur with exhaustion. She anticipated the relief as she handed Jeff over to authorities better equipped to deal with the situation.
    “Call now, Ronnie, and don’t leave him alone until someone arrives.”
    What would she do if Jeff pulled a gun, fight him for it? She called the police and gave the prompted report. To head back up the stairs, she had to summon meager scraps of courage and pretend the rest. She hated to admit that she was afraid of the man who had been her lover for more than a decade. She recalled her brother Teddy’s words when she’d told him she was divorcing Jeff: “My god, Ronnie, we’ve known that family our whole lives. You’d think you’d know him by now.”
    You’d think.
    Ronnie forced a casual air as she walked onto the porch in her stocking feet and flopped onto the squashed cushions of the rusting glider beside Jeff’s chair. The way his eyes lit up for a moment, as they always had when she walked into a room, ignited a small explosion