The Ends of a Sentence
Jon sat down at the kitchen table, finally ready to kill his wife. It had taken him two years to work up to this point, which on the surface seemed a long time, but he’d been married to her over forty years and had had nothing but time to study her the last fifteen since he’d retired. In perspective, two years was hardly anything at all.
But during that short spell of time he’d been able to formulate exactly why it was he wanted her dead. It wasn’t that she’d had the affair. Martha had never told him, but he’d known her well enough to figure it out for himself. He’d seen the signs. Jon had had his own affair or two. It wasn’t that he suspected the boys weren’t his. They’d turned away from him even before leaving the house.
It was that now, after all these years, she was going to leave him.
Martha set his glass next to his bowl. If she had her way, it would be the last time she’d ever do that.
“Do you know how much I love you?” he said to her.
She turned and stared at him quizzically.
“Well, of course I know you love me,” she said.
“No. I said do you know how much I love you.”
She leaned against the sink and folded her arms, fixing him with a stare.
“No,” she said coolly, a slight smile playing across her face. “How much?”
“So much that you are as much a part of me as me. I know you, Martha. I know everything you’ll do.”
She chuckled. “And what am I going to do?”
He wanted to tell her what he knew she was planning, but that could wait.
“I can tell you you used too much salt in the soup.” He dipped his spoon and slurped a mouthful. “Exactly.”
“Aw phooey, you always say I use too much salt. You know it even before you taste it.”
“Right. You’ve been doing it for years.” Jon nodded. “You’ve been doing a lot of things for years.”
She stood and let her arms drop to her sides.
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just that we’ve been married, what, forty-two years now? You get to know a person after a while. You can predict them, know them in a way they may not even know themselves.”
“Oh really? Well, what am I thinking now?”
“Now? Oh, any number of things, I’d guess. Mainly of which, what exactly your husband is up to.”
“Well, you don’t have to be a mindreader for that one.”
“It’s not mindreading. And it’s not a joke, either.” Jon pushed back the bowl and picked up his glass of water to take a long drink. “I know you.”
“I see you just feel like being cryptic today. Well, I’ve got things to do.”
Jon smiled. Martha shook her head. He took a folded sheet of paper out of his shirt pocket.
“Honey, could you read this?”
She stood and stared. He could tell he’d upset her, but he merely held out the small scrap of paper until she came over and snatched it from between his fingers.
She stood back and unfolded it.
“‘I’ve got things to do.’ Jon, what is this?”
“That’s what you just said.”
“I just—oh, Jon, if you going to claim you know me so well you’ll have to do better than an expression I use all the time.”
“Point taken.” Jon shrugged, the smile still on his face. Her eyes danced all over him.
“Eat your soup. What are you up to?”
“Nothing. Not really.”
“I’m meeting Lois for bridge soon. I need to get cleaned up.”
Bridge meant she was going to see him.
That was the only thing he didn’t know. Who the man was intending to take his wife away. It tore at him just as if someone were slowly tearing his arm off. Confronting her on it would do no good. Either she would deny it and they would descend into an argument or she would simply admit and defy him to do anything about it. Both options would tear her further away.
So killing her was the only way he could keep them together. After she was gone he would follow shortly after—he had something waiting in the basement for that. But first, her.
“I don’t want you to go to bridge. Stay here with me.”
“And what will you do with me?” she asked. “Take me dancing? Write me poetry? Sing to me?”
Jon looked sheepish, she knew he couldn’t do any of those things. It had been so long since he’d tried anything like that, but wasn’t love supposed to be beyond all that? They still had intimacy which he thought was pretty good considering his sixty-seven years. He knew she’d say something like that, but he didn’t have any defense for it.
“That’s what I thought.” Martha’s voice shook him out of his thoughts. “I’ll be gone about three hours and when I come back we can snuggle together and watch TV like you like. We can watch whatever you want.”
He let her go upstairs and get cleaned up, letting his mind roam while she was out of the room. If he let her go to him then she would be that much further gone from him, that much more not his, the tear that much deeper. He felt it like a pain in his neck as real the socks on his feet or the seat of the chair beneath him. Jon wondered if he would have this same resolve now if he were in front of the man stealing his wife.
“Well, I’m going,” she said once she came back downstairs. “Stay awake if you can, but if not I’ll see you for breakfast.”
“Martha?”
“Yes?” She turned to him.
“Would you look beneath the fishbowl on the mantle?”
“I need to go, Jon. Later.”
“Martha, please. It’ll take just a moment.” She sighed, made a show of dropping her head and stalked over to the mantle.
She slipped a scrap of paper from beneath the fishbowl. She looked at it, crumpled it up, uncrumpled it and looked at her husband.
“Jon, what’s the meaning of this?”
“What does it read?”
“You know what it reads. How did you—”
“I told you. I know you. I love you.”
“And this is the way you show me how much you love me?”
“In a way, yes.”
She walked back over to him. “All right, so you got me piqued. How did you know I’d say that when I got to the door?”
“It’s easy by now. I’d say it was about twenty years ago or so when I started to notice your patterns. You know, how you react in certain situations. The things you do, the things you say. After so many years I realized it became… repetitive.”
“Are you saying after all these years that your wife is boring?”
“No-no, anything but. I’ve always been fascinated by you, Martha. I suspect that’s why I’m even able to pick up on these kinds of things.” Jon put a hand on her hip and tried to draw her in. She held still.
“You’re mad,” he said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. I can tell by the way your eyebrows smush together like that and the way you fix your mouth. I knew you would be.”
“Okay, now I am mad. You’re saying you planned all this to upset me?”
“No. I didn’t want to upset you. It was kind of unavoidable.”
“What was ‘unavoidable’? Jon, what are you up to?”
He smirked, but didn’t find any humor in what he was about to do. Jon stood and walked over to the cabinet over the refrigerator. Inside he’d left a notebook last night.
He turned to the first page and began reading to his wife. Martha’s mouth dropped open as she listened in horror to him recount everything they’d both said and done since he’d entered the kitchen until now.
“Give me that!” She snatched it out of his hands and began leafing through the pages. “How long did it take you… to do this?” she asked once she was done.
“I couldn’t sleep last night. I came down and started writing. I guess… an hour or so?”
“Is there something wrong with you? With your brain?”
He laughed. “No. Why would you ask that? Martha, don’t you know how much I love you?”
She looked at him like he’d just walked off a spaceship.
“Don’t come near me,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s what you were about to say. You were thinking it.”
“I said no such thing!” Martha slid a foot back, the notebook slipping from her fingers.
“I know. I said you were thinking it.”
“Jon, stop.”
“You’re scaring me,” they said together.
She put her hand to her mouth and Jon mirrored her. He took out his pen and pad from his shirt pocket and began scribbling.
“I can’t—I can’t—” she began.
He tore off the tiny sheet of paper and held it up for Martha to see.
‘I can’t, I can’t,’ Martha babbled backing away from her husband.
She turned and fled upstairs, crying uncontrollably.
“Martha!” he called out to her. Jon knew, but couldn’t bear to follow to see what was about to happen. A second later he heard her slip, hit her face on the stairs and tumble back down.
By the time Martha reached the bottom step she was dead. After a minute or two, he pushed himself over to her, to see what he’d done.
Those blank eyes stared at him.
Jon would have liked to have thought if he could have expressed in words how much he loved her it would have made a difference. But he knew that she was just as set in her way as he was in his and there was nothing that could have been done to stop what she was going to do. He pulled himself out of his chair, kneeling with her, stroking her hair and arranging her arms and legs so she’d be comfortable. Jon kissed every corner of her face, over and over, trying to commit the dimensions of skin to memory with his lips, allowing himself the briefest of whimpers as he held her.
After a while he got up and went to the basement door. He paused long enough to rub the dull ache at his neck. It was already receding. Jon looked at the notebook on the floor before going down.
There was so much more he would have liked to have written in there.
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