The Carpenter's Wife Read online

  And even though they were in Bolivia now, the land of his dreams, there were still nights when Carlos left only to come home early in the morning, usually soused. Rumor had that he spent his new wealth on various girlfriends. In time his wife came to know some of them personally.

  After three years and two more babies, she had enough, having gone as far as love could go. She decided to leave him.

  Her parents secretly wired her the money, and in April of 2002 she told Carlos she was going to town, left his fly-infested business, and flew back to Europe with her three children, where she took up residence in Schweinfurt, living off social help, which came forth amply since she was a “single” mother of three dependent children. Then somehow the struggling woman got in contact with Tom Stark’s church and began to attend faithfully.

  In counseling her, Tom had chided her for showing too much of herself to Carlos too early. Relationships growing solely out of physical attraction were doomed, he said. Maria agreed. She had known but had misjudged the power of her beauty, had underestimated the elemental forces it could unleash. Now she suffered because of it.

  Tom and Romy helped her get back on her feet, and, all things considered, she was doing all right after a while.

  Then, in April of 2003, Carlos suddenly stood on her doorstep. Shocked, she admitted him in, and their reunion was glorious and filled with passion—for about a week. Then they fell back into their routine of constant bickering, which led to volcanic outbursts of temperament and a pile of broken dishes every so often.

  Like today.

  Carlos and Maria still had many problems, and Tom wasn’t able to solve all of them that night, even though he sat up with them until one in the morning.

  Soft light spilled out of the bathroom on the second floor, exorcizing the fear of the kids who slept in rooms with open doors. Sneaking down the hallway, Tom heard crickets chirp through a tilted window. The door to his and Romy’s bedroom stood slightly ajar. He entered, trying to keep creaking noises to a minimum. She lay on the left side of the bed, her lids quivering. A wrinkled sheet covered her.

  In one corner a fan hummed, swirling the muggy air about. The window hung wide open with the massive outside shades lowered only halfway, but no breeze stirred the curtain. The room with its slanted ceiling remained charged with the heat of the day. But the temperature wasn’t much lower in any other room in the house.

  Tom glanced at his wife once more. She was dead to the world. That was okay. He closed the door and it got dark. What could he expect? It was almost two at night. Tomorrow would be another day.

  Undressing, he thought of the evening.

  The talk had gone well; they had made up within just five hours. Not bad for passionate people.

  Stark laid down and stretched out, suppressing the urge to reach over. Instead, he pulled his own white sheet up to his chin and looked forward to the morning. The kids would be in school.

  Maybe she’d bring up some coffee...

  …and herself…

  10

  Monday, 7 July 2003, Morning, 79°F/26°C

  A brief rattling crash!

  Tom started and sat up, his eyes blinking.

  Darkness.

  Silence…

  His lids became heavy; consciousness faded. He sank back, sighed, and hugged the pillow.

  A second later he was gone again.

  Stark awoke in pitch blackness to the sound of the humming fan. The shades were down all the way now, blocking all light. He rubbed his eyes and glanced over to the flat clock on his nightstand, but its dial stood obscured by a book. Still, the line glowing under the door revealed that dawn had broken.

  The shades…

  The rattle!

  She had gotten up to darken the room; she had…

  Cautiously, his fingers went toward his wife.

  She wasn’t there, just her wrinkled sheet.

  Bummer.

  Tom swung his legs off the bed, reached over, and shoved the book away from the clock. A ghostly glow filled the room.

  8:49.

  Eight forty-nine! He stared at the green digits in disbelief. Almost nine o’clock! The kids had left more than an hour ago.

  Quickly, he got up, switched off the fan, and rolled up the heavy plastic shades.

  Sunlight poured through the open window and flayed his skin as he squinted into the sky. An amber haze lined the horizon. The day outside was as cloudless and dusty and dry as they all had been since May.

  Stark turned around and grabbed new underwear, a T-shirt, and fresh jeans from the middle part of the Schrank, the big wardrobe lining the wall opposite the bed. Then he wandered into the bathroom across the hallway. The blinds in the kids’ rooms were still down too; Sarah’s room even had the lights on. He switched them off as he passed by.

  The cold shower felt good.

  When he arrived in the kitchen downstairs, he found a glass with orange juice on the counter. Next to it sat a round blue thermos full of fresh brew, and an empty coffee cup. There was also a note. He stared down at the small slip of yellow paper bearing his wife’s handwriting: “Gone shopping.”

  Gone shopping…

  Gone shopping…! The muscles in his jaw were pulsing.

  He gulped down the lukewarm juice, poured himself a liberal cup of coffee, and took the cordless phone lying around on the window sill. He waddled over into his office.

  After settling into an easy chair he cast a fleeting glance at a few verses in his New Testament while sipping his coffee. Then he switched on his laptop, found Rainer Weiss’s number, and punched it into the phone’s number pad.

  Abe Lincoln’s melancholy voice came on. “Weiss?” He sang the word.

  “Abe—Rainer… Hi. How are you this morning?”

  The man on the other end of the line relaxed. “Well hello there, Tom.”

  “Listen,” Stark said. “I said I’d call you yesterday, just to say I got home and all—”

  “Renate asked you to do that, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t get around to it last night.”

  “Never mind. Did you get home all right?”

  “No problem there.” He fell silent.

  Weiss didn’t have to be a genius. He said warily, “Did you look at the faucet?”

  Stark swallowed. “No. I’ll look at it in a minute.”

  “Your wife will appreciate it if you—”

  “She’s not here.”

  Abe Lincoln hesitated. “She’s not…?”

  “No.”

  “Did… I mean… she leave you…?”

  Tom laughed, but his heart wasn’t in it. “No, we’re not that far gone. She’s shopping.”

  “Sorry.” Weiss sounded embarrassed. “I guess it was a bit rash of me to talk like that.”

  “You’re okay, Rainer.” Tom laughed again.

  Weiss’s voice became emphatic, “You’ve got to listen to her, Tom. You’ve got to listen. Listening is one of the most powerful and positive things anybody can do to his fellow man. Listen, and you’ll win a friend every time. Don’t say much today, just listen and pick up what she’s trying to tell you. Suppress the urge to reply, let the little brook babble… and fix the faucet.”

  “I’ll do that before lunch today,” Stark said soberly.

  “Then everything is said,” Weiss replied. “For now.”

  “Talk to you later.”

  They hung up.

  At Marktkauf shopping center south of downtown, Romy was pushing her loaded grocery cart through the automatic sliding doors out in to the shimmering heat of the parking lot, steering it toward the silver 735 Beamer, when a kid, maybe ten or twelve, materialized beside her and followed her. He wore an orange T-shirt, grungy corduroy pants, and Converse tennis shoes. His shock of black hair overgrown, he seemed to have time-warped out of the Seventies.

  “Kosovo,” he said after a while. His firm voice revealed that he was used interact as an equal with adults. “I’m Kosovo refugee.”

&nb
sp; “I see.” Romy smiled, her eyes unsteady. She pressed on.

  They walked side by side, perhaps a yard between them.

  “Help me,” said the kid, studying her out of crafty gray eyes.

  “I don’t think I can help you,” she said.

  He pointed at the cart. “Give me something.”

  “I can’t do that.” She unlocked the trunk, her eyes on the kid’s hands.

  “Why not?”

  “I need it all myself,” she said. “That’s why I went to the store and bought it.”

  “Come on, lady,” he said impatiently, speaking as one who had a right to make demands. “Your car. You rich.”

  “Not really.” Romy began to stow her stuff in the BMW’s cavernous trunk.

  “What do you mean?” He lunged out, shoving the cart. “Of course you are rich. Look your car. Your buggy is full.”

  She exhaled. “I can give you an apple?”

  He drew his lips up as if he’d sucked on a lemon.

  She shrugged. “Then I can’t help you.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I-I can’t.”

  “You could bomb Kosovo.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “NATO bombed Kosovo, Germany is NATO. And now I am refugee!” He was becoming loud. “I am Albanian, not Serb. Milosevic Serb. Germany bomb my house. You help me now!”

  “I can’t help you. I’m not from here—I’m not even German.”

  He threw back his head. “What are you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What are you? Srpska?”

  She hesitated, swallowing nervously. “I—I…”

  “Eye-eye…?” he mimicked her.

  She shadowed her eyes, looking at him, blinking rapidly. “American?”

  His eyes widened. He pointed his finger at her and shouted, “America! America bomb! Give me now! Give me. I take this.” His tanned hands seized a stuffed brown paper bag.

  “Don’t!” She grabbed the bag and held on to it. Her throat tightened; she racked her brain for something to say. But words didn’t come.

  A tug of war ensued; they pulled until the kid won, kicking the buggy and hurling epithets at her. She clutched the cart’s metal. He hadn’t run away, she noticed, amazed. He just stood, bag in hand.

  Why didn’t he run? Did he want more?

  Was she such a push-over?

  “Give this back!” She gestured helplessly. Her eyes searched the lot for a possible rescuer, but there was none. This was Monday morning, a smart time to shop. There were few cars and even fewer people walking around.

  “Not!” he screamed. “Not! You hear me? You should give me more, American.” He cussed again. “You hear me?”

  “Give the bag back,” she said, her voice quivering. “I’m sure the state takes good care of you, if you’re a refugee. You don’t need this. Give it back now.”

  “Not!” yelled the kid and plastered her with insults.

  Her eyes glanced skyward. “Seems, we both don’t belong here.”

  But he didn’t hear her. “I am Albanian refugee! NATO bombed. Now my mother is dead, my father is dead! All gone. My brother, my sister dead, all dead! Your fault!”

  Suddenly she noticed a rusty Audi 100 from the last millennium. It was full of gesturing people and sat in a lot nearby. The Audi’s doors flew open and four men bolted out, scrambling over to her, yakking loudly. Two boys spilled from the front seat.

  Romy froze.

  The kid turned to see.

  The approaching men were thin, sinewy, with narrow eyes and Slavic-looking features. One wore a blue Adidas jogging suit with white stripes.

  The kid dropped the bag and dashed away. The boys from the Audi took up the chase; they were almost on top of him.

  Then she found herself surrounded by four gabbing, gesticulating men in ill-fitting clothes, who smiled and flashed golden teeth at her, and flooded her with a torrent of words she didn’t understand.

  Serbs.

  High-pitched screams drifted over as the duo from the Audi caught the Albanian, threw him down, and thrashed him with flying fists.

  Romy quickly closed the trunk and edged around the left fender.

  “Our territory,” the one in the jump suit said and grinned.

  Once she sat down and closed the door, she locked the car from the inside. The motor wailed and the quartet stepped out of her way. She drove off.

  The Adidas-man bent down and picked up her crumpled shopping bag. He handed it to one of the others.

  He shrugged. Mondays were meager; you took what you got.

  It was 12:23 when she came home, and he was almost done.

  Tom had driven to Globus hardware store in Schweinfurt’s harbor and had bought the most sophisticated kitchen faucet he could find—in his price range. Then he got busy installing the ornery thing. The old, chalk-encrusted tap lay on the table, its thin pipes sticking out like the legs of an oversized insect.

  “You were right,” he said when she walked in and put two grocery bags on the table. He moved his head out from under the sink. “It wasn’t the pipe. It was the faucet. But look at this.”

  He stood and flipped up the handle on the new tap. Water shot forth. “Good, huh?”

  Then he swiveled left and the flow decreased noticeably. The water began to steam. “Hot pipe’s somewhat clogged up. Can’t do anything about that. But hey!” He turned the tap on and off in rapid succession. “Better than it was before.”

  He cast a probing glance at her.

  She stood by the table and said, “Nice,” her tone indefinable. It was certainly not joyful. Neither did it convey gratitude or even relief. It wasn’t hostile either; her reaction was… opaque.

  “Hey,” Tom said with downcast eyes, taking a few leisurely steps toward her. But then he didn’t touch her. Instead, he leaned on the counter. “I heard a joke at the conference in Munich.” He giggled. “What’s the first thing a missionary does when he—?”

  “Wait,” she interrupted, suddenly all action. “I’ve got frozen stuff in the car. Let me bring it in real quick before you go on.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  Two minutes later they were done.

  She put the last bag on the counter. “Now, what did you want to say?”

  “Right.” Tom swallowed. “What’s the first thing a missionary does when he comes home from the field?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He makes love to his wife.”

  She glared at him. “I see.”

  “And the second?”

  “Second what?”

  “The second thing he does when he comes home.”

  She shrugged.

  “Sets down his suitcase.”

  She sighed. “I can tell you had a good time in your park.” She began to unpack her grocery baskets.

  “Oh, Romy… Relax, will you.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You just had a week’s vacation; I didn’t. I’ve—”

  “I wasn’t on vacation, for crying out loud.”

  “You were—”

  The door bell rang and the noise of clamoring children drifted in through the angled window. The kids were coming home from school.

  Romy went into the hallway and pressed the buzzer to let them in.

  “Mooom!”

  Ben burst in with his backpack still on. Right behind him appeared Raphael, the son of Gina and Ralph Delors. His cocky green eyes peered over Ben’s shoulder at Romy.

  “Mom, nobody’s home at Raff’s place. He doesn’t have anywhere to go. Can he eat lunch with us?” Ben had red cheeks and was out of breath. He looked up at her.

  “Sure,” Romy replied. It wasn’t the first time this happened. She turned toward her neighbor’s son, “This morning, did your mom say where she was going? Do you have an idea why she’s late?”

  “She probably has to work some more,” he said. “Overtime. That happens sometimes.” Raphael was playing cute with his voice. “Either on
the first day of the week that happens, or on the last.”

  “And your Oma isn’t home?” Raphael and his grandparents lived side by side.

  “Don’t know where she is, either.”

  “Okay, kids,” Romy said. “Go play outside—and take Sarah with you. I’ll call you in a half hour, when lunch is ready.”

  “Yeeeh!” The kids turned around and clambered away.

  “I’ll be in the garden house,” Tom said, gathering his tools. “I’ll have an eye on them.”

  She opened the fridge.

  Harsh sunlight filtered through the canopy of a young apple tree outside the window, mottling the wall, casting patterns into the little room, ever-changing and always the same. Tom sat on a straightback chair by a small table and tapped away on his laptop. The door stood open; he could hear the shouts of the boys kicking the ball and Sarah’s intermittent shrieks. Coco had vanished. She probably lay in some cool room in the basement. It opened onto the little plaza by the garage.

  Grace, he thought, scrolling through his Bible program, casually working on his Wednesday night message. Today was Monday, theoretically his day off, but Tom did what he liked on all days of the week. Grace comes in many disguises; sometimes it’s not obvious. He stared at the screen of his ‘96 Dell Latitude and wrinkled his forehead. Everything that brings you closer to God is grace.

  Grace.

  He desperately needed some.

  So did his wife. She still hadn’t—

  Suddenly all three kids shouted, anxiously.

  He raised his head—when the right half of the window darkened. Then the pane burst, exploding in his face, showering Tom Stark, the laptop, and the Harley, indeed the whole room, with a spray of splinters that clattered across the table and onto the floor.

  The ball bounced a few times, shedding its energy; then it rolled quietly into a corner.

  Outside, the patter of running feet.

  “It wasn’t me!” Ben stood in the entrance, breathing heavily, his silhouette black against the sun-drenched backdrop. “Raff shot it in.”

  “Uh-uh.” Raphael’s round face appeared. His head swiveled from side to side. “Ben did it. I didn’t do it.”

  Sarah edged her way in, scared and afraid. “Daddy…” she sobbed.