Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

50. Saturday Morning

Saturday Morning

I spend the morning moving around the kitchen, trying to remember what I used to do with myself on a Saturday before our lives collapsed. I cooked and cleaned and did the laundry, I helped the men on the farm. If I surprised them at the dairy, Frank was always thrilled, his whole face lighting up with pleasure. Such a small and easy thing, I wish I had done it more often.

I half expected to see Nina again today, but she has stayed away from the farm. I have betrayed all of them. Nina, who said the first time she met me: “Can I be you when I grow up, Beth?” I had everything back then, a husband I was in love with, the sweetest, funniest child ever to walk the earth, two hundred acres of blood, sweat, and tears that was also our private paradise. I felt so lucky. For so many years, I felt lucky.

I know I will never forgive myself for what I have done to Frank, the man who gave me all of that. But today it is Jimmy I am most worried about. It’s never been quite right, the way he reacts—or rather overreacts—to sudden change. Or how he depends upon Frank, even now as a married man who will soon have children of his own. When Jimmy becomes a father, will he still behave like a child when things go wrong? Will he stamp his feet, will he fight his own child, locked into a playground dispute until Nina intervenes?

I can’t stop thinking about how lost Jimmy looked. How Frank held him in his arms like a child. Frank always understood instinctively what happened to Jimmy when their mother died. How he got stuck, unable to mature. He never blamed him when Jimmy resorted to alcohol and occasional violence, anesthetizing his pain in the only way he knew. David used to get so angry with Jimmy, but Frank never did.

I hate myself for the way my family is unraveling, but I see now it was inevitable for both me and Gabriel; that, at some point, we’d find our way back to one another. Our story was incomplete, it still is. There were too many questions, too many pieces that didn’t fit. Too much unresolved longing. A lust that was always there in the background, simmering, even as the years passed. One strike of the match, that was all it took. If Bobby had lived, I would have continued in my little enclave of good fortune. But Bobby died. Everything fell apart. And then, soon enough, Gabriel appeared.

I am too pent up to sit down for long. I make a cup of tea that cools untouched, half-heartedly scrub at some overalls waiting for me on the scrubbing board but soon abandon them, assailed by thoughts I have no control over. How much longer will I be doing Frank’s and Jimmy’s washing? Or cooking the evening meal? Or helping them out on the farm? Is this the end of the life we built together, not just me and Frank, but Jimmy, too, over so many years?

I walk around the ground floor of the farmhouse—just one big room really—the kitchen and a little corridor leading to the stairs. In a windowsill opposite the staircase I spy our wedding photo, the only one we have, covered in dust since the last time I looked. There were no photographers at our wedding, no guests other than my parents and David, Jimmy, and Eleanor.

It was perfect. Just Frank and I staring at each other in shock as we uttered those iconic “I dos” with only our families to bear witness. Afterward, my father took us all for lunch at the County Hotel in Shaftesbury. We ate roast beef and drank little thimbles of sherry and Frank and I were beside ourselves, the formalities over, us a brand-new man and wife. We couldn’t believe we’d pulled it off so effortlessly. If my mother had wished for a different kind of wedding—me in a flouncy dress with a veil and train, all their friends invited to a party afterward—she did not say. My parents had taken to Frank almost instantly. Partly, I think, because they’d hated seeing me hurt by Gabriel, but mostly because Frank turned out to be everything they wanted in a son-in-law—he was kind, funny, self-sufficient. And they trusted him.

I take the photograph in its dusty wooden frame into the kitchen, wipe it with a damp cloth. Look at the pair of us for a long time. We look preposterously young it seems to me now, little more than children.