Free Andre Dubus: Selected Stories by Andre Dubus Page B

business; his two older brothers had learned it, so that Strout and Sons trucks going about town, and signs on construction sites, now slashed wounds into Matt Fowler’s life. Then Richard married a young girl and became a bartender, his salary and tips augmented and perhaps sometimes matched by his father, who also posted his bond. So his friends, his enemies (he had those: fist fights or, more often, boys and then young men who had not fought him when they thought they should have), and those who simply knew him by face and name, had a series of images of him which they recalled when they heard of the killing: the high school running back, the young drunk in bars, the oblivious hard-hatted young man eating lunch at a counter, the bartender who could perhaps be called courteous but not more than that: as he tended bar, his dark eyes and dark, wide-jawed face appeared less sullen, near blank.
    One night he beat Frank. Frank was living at home and waiting for September, for graduate school in economics, and working as a lifeguard at Salisbury Beach, where he met Mary Ann Strout, in her first month of separation. She spent most days at the beach with her two sons. Before ten o’clock one night Frank came home; he had driven to the hospital first, and he walked into the living room with stitches over his right eye and both lips bright and swollen.
    ‘I’m all right,’ he said, when Matt and Ruth stood up, and Matt turned off the television, letting Ruth get to him first: the tall, muscled but slender suntanned boy. Frank tried to smile at them but couldn’t because of his lips.
    ‘It was her husband, wasn’t it?’ Ruth said.
    ‘Ex,’ Frank said. ‘He dropped in.’
    Matt gently held Frank’s jaw and turned his face to the light, looked at the stitches, the blood under the white of the eye, the bruised flesh.
    ‘Press charges,’ Matt said.
    ‘No.’
    ‘What’s to stop him from doing it again? Did you hit him at all? Enough so he won’t want to next time?
    ‘I don’t think I touched him.’
    ‘So what are you going to do?’
    ‘Take karate,’ Frank said, and tried again to smile.
    ‘That’s not the problem,’ Ruth said.
    ‘You know you like her,’ Frank said.
    ‘I like a lot of people. What about the boys? Did they see it?’
    ‘They were asleep.’
    ‘Did you leave her alone with him?’
    ‘He left first. She was yelling at him. I believe she had a skillet in her hand.’
    ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Ruth said.
    Matt had been dealing with that too: at the dinner table on evenings when Frank wasn’t home, was eating with Mary Ann; or, on the other nights—and Frank was with her every night—he talked with Ruth while they watched television, or lay in bed with the windows open and he smelled the night air and imagined, with both pride and muted sorrow, Frank in Mary Ann’s arms. Ruth didn’t like it because Mary Ann was in the process of divorce, because she had two children, because she was four years older than Frank, and finally—she told this in bed, where she had during all of their marriage told him of her deepest feelings: of love, of passion, of fears about one of the children, of pain Matt had caused her or she had caused him—she was against it because of what she had heard: that the marriage had gone bad early, and for most of it Richard and Mary Ann had both played around.
    ‘That can’t be true,’ Matt said. ‘Strout wouldn’t have stood for it.’
    ‘Maybe he loves her.’
    ‘He’s too hot-tempered. He couldn’t have taken that.’
    But Matt knew Strout had taken it, for he had heard the stories too. He wondered who had told them to Ruth; and he felt vaguely annoyed and isolated: living with her for thirty-one years and still not knowing what she talked about with her friends. On these summer nights he did not so much argue with her as try to comfort her, but finally there was no difference between the two: she had concrete objections, which he tried to overcome. And in