Free The Winter Girl by Matt Marinovich

sleeves were too long. You can tell a lot about a marriage by the gifts couples give each other. I was always reminded of how little she knew about what I wanted, what little I knew of what she really desired.
    “I’ve got the store credit receipt in my wallet,” I said, watching her sadly fold up the sleeves of the coat. She looked expensively homeless.
    Store credit receipt,
I thought to myself. Three words that would really cut the distance that was stretching between us. But yet there was a receipt in my wallet, and I had bought her a coat on sale at the Bloomingdale’s in Hampton Bays. And in some parallel universe they hang husbands for that. Briefly, I felt awful. But then my gift had been a thin leather belt that she finally confessed she had found at half price in the ladies’ section.
    “You bought me a woman’s belt?” I said, threading it through the loops in my jeans and fastening the shiny rectangular buckle.
    “It’s plated,” she said, a little defensively, still hovering near me in that overlarge coat with its green dangling price tag. “I’ve got the receipt for that too.”
    “It’s perfect,” I said, facing the large mirror in the entrance hall and pulling up my shirt so that I could see the silver buckle, winking at me in the lamplight. “I want to be buried wearing it, actually.”
    “I’ll try to remember that,” she said.
    I gave her a quick thank-you kiss on the cheek.
    “I should check on the turkey,” she said.
    —
    A t around eight in the evening on Christmas Day, I sat deep in Victor’s overstuffed sofa, staring at yet another bottle of ancient liquor I had rescued from his cabinet. It was a bottle of Cutty Sark I held in my hands, and every so often I’d set it down on the floor and try to twist off the cap of the wretched half-empty bottle.
    “You don’t need two signatures to empty a joint account,” I said. I twisted with all my might again and the cap finally came loose from the neck of the green bottle. I grabbed the glass on the side table and filled it halfway, trying not to notice three brown particles that floated to the top.
    Elise and I had been talking about the bank papers we’d found next door, and whether Mr. or Mrs. Swain could have emptied the mutual account.
    “How do you know?”
    I couldn’t tell her exactly how I knew, because it would have ruined our dinner. After the miscarriage, we’d had a fight about money that had grown so serious I spent a week at a friend’s house in Manhattan, researching divorce in New York State and getting to know terms like
wasteful disbursement of assets.
    “First of all,” I said. “Let’s just say he empties the account.”
    The Cutty Sark wasn’t awful. I fished one of the dusty particles off my tongue and flicked it onto the rug.
    “Or she empties it,” Elise said.
    “Maybe she blew
him
away.”
    Elise shrugged and popped back into the kitchen, and I continued to pore over the bank statement. For all I knew, he’d blown himself away after some financial turmoil. Maybe he was a real-estate tycoon in Atlanta and this was his second home. Maybe the property next door had been foreclosed on. The only thing I felt I knew for sure at that point was that the house hadn’t been lived in for a couple of years. I could tell by the layer of dust on the counters, the shrunken onion, the backdated bank statements. If I’d succeeded in burning it down, I would have probably done everyone a favor.
    “Something awful happened there,” I said. “It’s not like there were just a few drops of blood.”
    Elise didn’t say anything. I knew she didn’t like being reminded of the blood. The careful way someone had stretched a clean blanket over the caked fluid, as if it were a temporary fix and they were coming back. But by making a decision not to call the police immediately, we had implicated ourselves. It was as simple as that.
    “It has something to do with the Swains,” I heard Elise finally say. “That’s