A Good Husband And Father

Virginia remembered her husband's face: broken veins on the nose, blue eyes like early morning sky through a wet pane and whites the color of elephant ivory, like Virginia's old cameo pendant. He never wanted to leave the country and he let her know he was just doing it for her; let her know how little he wanted to be there but to make her happy he was willing to concede. "Just goes to show how much your husband loves you," he'd recite at her like a scolding school principal, "that he'd do so many things, work hard for so many years, just to make you happy."

And he had worked hard, for so many years, though the children- now in their forties- suspected it was not only to make their mother happy that he did so. It was hardly a secret—from the family or the stool-sitters at his favorite bar—that he wanted to cash in his ticket with a cold million in the bank. So he worked faithfully for the Sears Roebuck Co. for forty-some-odd years, in shipping. Then he came home and worked the farm, with a little help from the kids, twenty acres of "will someone clean the goddam rabbit cages already?" and "who left half a bucket of milk in the stable?"

The farm was his idea, though Virginia was no stranger to cow-milkin' and country preserves herself. Once as a young lady she won the Jackson County blue ribbon for a peach cobbler, and her Daddy had been so proud of her he bought her two rides on the Ferris wheel though he could only afford one. He borrowed the money off one of the parents of his students and never paid him back. Even at 82 she would remember the thrill of the breeze in her hair, the people like miniatures at the natural history museum, tiny, milling around below her. She would remember that she took off her saddle shoes and pretty new white socks and let her bare toes dangle in the thin air, let the skin breathe and cool from the hot day of anticipation and fingers crossed.

Her husband, however, never borrowed money: it was something Virginia respected about him. She also respected that, unlike her happy, stumbling drunk of a father, her husband could hold his liquor, and hold a lot of it. She felt instinctively that there was something manly about being able to drink a lot and still stand up straight, ride a horse, keep dinner down. Her father bore the sheepish look of a young virgin when he'd embarrass himself, as though he were naively unaware of why bartenders, housewives, and music students looked at him the way they did when he tripped, burped, broke things. Her husband, though a bit stoic and cool at times, never embarrassed her.

In their home, it was dinner plates cleared, beds made, indoor voices used at all times. At dinner time, he listened, knife and fork in hand, as the kids gave reports of the school day, of track meets, of marching band practice. He allowed Virginia to request a bit of spending money to get her hair done every week- he couldn't see why she needed to, since she rarely left the farm otherwise, but she appreciated that he was willing to concede; it made her feel womanly, somehow, and part of things, though she couldn't say what things if pressed. Perhaps, too, at dinnertime she would let him know about an item they were running low on: flour, perhaps, or black thread for the sewing machine. Would he mind picking some up the next day before he came home? And with a gracious sigh—for it was the end of a long day—he would agree to retrieve the necessary items. If he had time.

So it was, he said and they both felt, hardly unfair after those many years of hard labor that he got to choose the manner in which he spent his retirement. First, they sold the farm. No use continuing to work yourself to skin and bones when you don't need to, and they didn't need to. Retirement was good in the 80s. Next, he purchased a cabin on the Kenai River in Alaska and relocated. He bought a boat, and fishing gear, and a small cannery. Virginia ran the cannery and he spent days fishing, hunting, having a beer with the local guys. Virginia didn't have any strong opinions either way about the move to Alaska. She had always thought it would be nice to spend their retirement seeing new, exotic places, but what good was travel if only one of them was happy doing it? No, the cabin, and the fish, and the cold all suited her just fine, too. She was fine with it.

Anyway, he did all the work: kept the cannery in fish, maintained a good relationship with the locals, protected their investment from the native groups trying to "reclaim the land." And Virginia kept on like she always had, except, of course, she had it much easier: no kids to worry about, no big farm to work. Having so much less to worry about, it was like she was in retirement, too. He felt proud for being able to provide that for her. For both of them.

And he wasn't unromantic. On their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, he paid for her to have her hair done again (they'd let it go as an expense they couldn't afford on retirement, not to mention the nearest salon was twenty miles down the highway: an unreasonable distance for a frivolous routine) and then had her picture taken. She wore a blouse and necklace he chose for her, and he framed and kept the only copy of the photo. He bought her dinner in town at a fancy restaurant, with tablecloths and lit candles, and gave her flowers.

When she asked for this trip, he thought about it for a few days. He hated the idea of traveling outside the country: if they wanted to travel, they could buy an RV and see the States. He hated the idea of all those foreigners with their needy, starving children—he saw them on TV at night—and their foreign tongues twisting around foreign words. He couldn't trust a man he couldn't understand. He told her all this.

Not to mention, you hear stories, he argued. Stories of honest Americans going overseas and providing their good business to foreign businesses, and what do they get for it? They get kidnapped or shot down. The U.S. Government gets ransom notes for their trouble.

Still, he reasoned, those folks were probably naive, probably not street-wise. He knew better. He could handle a few days in some dirty foreign town. Morocco: wasn't that where Casablanca was? It was, she told him. That had some American businesses in it, surely. He conceded. Virginia looked so hopeful, anyway. He didn't mind. It was only a few days.

When they arrived (in Rabat, not Casablanca, to his disappointment), they checked directly into the air-conditioned, carpeted hotel, but Virginia wanted to go poking through street markets and tents, looking at exotic jewelry, scarves for her daughters, folk toys for the grand kids, maybe even a book of Moroccan stories for the granddaughter who liked to read so much. All he wanted to do was take a nap after a long day, not wander out in the hot crowds. But this was Virginia's trip. They would go.

At the market, people with earthy brown skin barked prices at one another, shouted through hanging chicken carcasses and over sacks full of grains, spices, beads. It was a little like the farmers' market back home, where they'd brought their eggs and fresh milk every Saturday to pull in some extra income, pay for clarinet reeds and track shoes. But this was louder, hotter, full of strange lusts and foreign mystery. Virginia was entranced. He didn't like it.

Before they left the States, the kids gave him a hard time. He'd listened patiently to their calls: "I can't believe you're letting Mom drag you overseas, Dad." "You're actually going to go? That's hard to swallow." He insisted that he would do what he had to do to make their mother happy. He insisted it wouldn't hurt him to go, just once. Virginia felt lucky to have such a good husband, he who was also such a good father. Patient. Loving.

He spotted, through the bazaar, a business, full of men in suits and ties or, like him, shorts and polo shirts, drinking tea, having a smoke together, quieter, in the shade. A fan oscillated, touching its cool air briefly on each gentleman. He could see a bartender mixing a martini, and his throat scratched for something cold and familiar. "C'mon," he said vaguely over his shoulder. Virginia looked up from the gold-plated earrings she was fingering, delicately glinting in the slanting afternoon sun, and after an apologetic glance at the merchant, joined her husband weaving through the crowded passages to the Cafe de Rabat.

At the door, a man put his hand up. "Aucunes femmes permises," he demanded, staring her down. Virginia's shoulders drooped, and her husband looked from the man and back to her curiously. She recognized the words from high school French.

"What did he say to you?" her husband asked. She sighed, then smiled patiently.

"It's a gentlemen's establishment," she explained. She noticed a huddle of women in head scarves and long robes waiting a little way down the wall, sharing a bench, one filing her nails, one chattering in a scolding tone at a toddler-aged girl trying to put dirt in her mouth. "I'll wait out here with the other wives. You go ahead and have a drink."

He nodded and smiled his first smile of the trip. "When in Rome, right?" She smiled back, a tired look passing over her thin-etched wrinkles. "I'll just have a drink or two and be right out again." He went into the cafe, and Virginia sat down at the bench next to a heavy-set woman with a lock of deep auburn hair falling out from under the chador she wore. Virginia smiled pleasantly at her, suddenly aware of her bare arms, her knees showing at the bottom of her shorts. She woman smiled a whisper of a smile back at her, returned to a book she was reading. Virginia tried to see the title of the book, but it was in Arabic. The lilting calligraphic lines of text looked like old-fashioned wallpaper patterns to her, or the delicate embroidery on the hem of a skirt she'd once admired.

The afternoon sun baked on, forcing the shadows of merchant carts to stretch like lean, lazy dogs in the dirt paths between stalls. After she sat still long enough, Virginia could smell the meat from a butcher's stall rotting in the thick heat, could smell the onions and cloves of garlic and strings of peppers decomposing from the rafters where they hung. Women with children hanging off their skirts in ages varying from infancy through adolescence poked through goods, haggled prices, stared hungrily at items they could not afford.

A shout from inside the cafe startled her from her observations, and she stood with the other women to peer just over the window ledge into the cafe. She was transported to her childhood, her father's study window, where the rich scent of his vanilla pipe tobacco drifted out the window and reached her in the garden where she played. There, too, she'd stood with her nose on a windowsill, looking into a place she was not allowed. Aucunes femmes permises. Would it always be true? she wondered idly.

Her eyes focused again on the scene in front of her. A short, stocky white man was pressed against the bar, surrounded by a throng of young local men. One of them had a knife. Her husband was in the middle of it, too, taller and leaner than the rest of them, but somehow weaker and more withered looking than the others, too. He was standing up for the other American, shouting something about those punks leaving a guy in peace to enjoy a drink.

The next movement was so quick, half-hidden by the other customers pressing in as they were, that she almost missed it, but her eyes drifted to the mirror behind the bar where she saw a flash of blade, a sudden shift in the crowd's posture, and her husband crumpled as if in slow motion. She saw and would remember forever his face, the veins in his nose, the fear in his eyes, pale and already grey looking next to the dark mess of alarmed faces around him.

There was a cry as the youth picked his wallet from his pocket and dashed out of the cafe, pursued by the other members of his gang shouting in evil triumph; and another cry as Virginia saw her husband on the ground, his blood trickling between the grouted tiles on the floor, red, and thin, and a little foreign looking in an otherwise pristine establishment. The women around her, in their dark scarves and kohl-rimmed eyes, stopped their chattering and waited for her reaction, but she could only watch his hand, which trembled still on the tiles, beating a tattoo that thumped strangely in her ears like a tribal war drum, or a quickened pulse. Virginia put her hand to her chest, the old gold band still firmly around her ring finger, and inhaled a shaky breath of heat and dirt and spice.