What You Have Left Read online

  “I didn’t know this morning.”

  “Liar.” Holly leaned in and sniffed. “Have you been drinking?”

  “No,” he said, “I’ve been working. Somebody’s got to pay the bills.”

  Lyle caught Holly’s wrist the first time she tried to slap him, but the second time, he shut his eyes and took it. For a moment they stood there as if some delicate artifact had dropped and shattered on the sidewalk between them. Lyle touched a finger to his cheek.

  “What would you think,” he said, “about me going back to work for my dad?”

  Holly had read enough of Lyle’s master’s thesis to get the gist of it. He argued that compromise and mismanagement during the construction of the South Carolina statehouse had given rise to a building that did lasting damage to the state’s self-esteem. When the original architect, John R. Niernsee, had drawn up plans in the 1850s, he had big things in mind. The capitol would be a fireproof repository for state records, built using only marble, iron, and granite; it would be crowned with a glorious 180-foot tower modeled on the Tennessee statehouse. But along came the war and Sherman, followed by a depression that nearly halted construction. After Niernsee died, the new architect ended up installing wooden floors and walls and substituting the less expensive dome for Niernsee’s tower. It was, by all accounts, a half-assed job. A Washington architect hired to inspect the finished product declared it “a parody upon the science of architecture, an insult to the fame of John R. Niernsee, and a disgrace to the state of South Carolina.”

  Now Holly was sitting at a window in the Capitol Café, gazing across the street at the statehouse and listening to Lyle tell her that if he ever took another crack at his thesis, he’d do it differently. Compromise wasn’t always a weakness, he said; sometimes it was a strength. “They got the thing built, didn’t they?”

  It was ninety-one degrees outside, and they’d come to the café under the pretense of cooling off, having a glass of iced tea, but really they just needed a quiet place where they could apologize to each other. Once they’d taken back the things they wished they hadn’t said, Lyle told Holly he’d been thinking about quitting the statehouse all spring. As he began rambling about his thesis and the virtues of compromise, something clicked, and Holly finally understood his crusade against the video poker business: you fight the thing that pulls you hardest.

  Lyle’s father had been asking him to come back ever since he quit, and though Holly knew he was sick of being in debt, she still couldn’t believe his change of heart. Was he doing it for her, because he thought it was what she wanted? Was it what she wanted? Yes, sure, there had definitely been times when she’d resented Lyle for quitting Gandy, when she’d wanted to ask him where he got off being so holier than thou. Plenty of people had day jobs they weren’t proud of. So what? You did what you had to do. But now that she’d gone behind his back and lost their savings, it wasn’t so easy to wish him into doing what made her life easier. The thought of him coming home miserable from Gandy every night wrung her insides.

  “There’s a difference between compromising and selling out,” Holly said. “I don’t want you working for your father.”

  “Since when do you have something against video poker?”

  Behind him, three Pots-O-Gold stood along the back wall. “I don’t,” she said, “but we’re talking about you, not me.”

  “He’ll pay me three times what I was making at the statehouse,” Lyle said. “I thought you’d be happy.”

  “You know what made me happy? Watching you burn that flag.” It was half true, now that she considered it, but it was also true she had no political qualms about her father-in-law’s line of work, because if people were dumb enough to put all their money into a poker machine—herself included—well, that was natural selection; that was how the world maintained its quota of poor people. And somebody had to get rich off it, right?

  Lyle couldn’t help smiling. “I figured as long as I was quitting, why not?” He ordered another iced tea and then, cocking his head toward the video-poker machines, stood up and motioned for Holly to bring the bag of money and join him.

  “So how do you play?” Lyle said.

  The question caught Holly flat-footed, but Lyle didn’t notice. He was reading the rules, slipping five quarters into the slot. It was a multi-game Pot-O-Gold. He could take his pick from keno, bingo, blackjack, Shamrock Sevens, or Pieces of Eight Criss Cross, but he didn’t hesitate in choosing five-card draw, Holly’s bread and butter. That’s when it hit her: he already knew all about her gambling. He was giving her a chance to come clean.

  He dealt himself a hand. “These things are rigged, you know. The state doesn’t regulate them.”

  Holly braced herself and began wending her way toward a confession. “That’s why you have to find a loose one,” she said. “Usually a new machine is best, especially if it’s in some place that doesn’t already have poker. They’ll set the game so it’s easy to win, to attract players, then later they’ll switch it back.”

  Lyle paused in mid-draw. “Where’d you learn all that?”

  And now Holly could tell from the look on his face that she’d been wrong. The possibility that she played poker had never crossed his mind. And further, she understood that she might not have to tell him at all: If he did go work for his father, they’d be rich; they’d never miss the money.

  “You know that video parlor on Bluff Road?” she said. “Every once in a while, I like to stop in for a few hands.”

  “No kidding.” Lyle studied her for a moment, and then he began to laugh, as if she’d just played some astounding trick on him and he couldn’t help being impressed.

  The next day—Holly’s first as a reformed gambler and Lyle’s first without a job—she flipped from one news broadcast to the next during breakfast, trying not to think about Fortunes and the jackpots everybody else was winning, trying instead to find a report about the flag so she could show Lyle he’d done something that mattered. After a while, she gave up and turned off the TV. Her heart wasn’t in it. “Are you going to call your father?”

  “In a while,” he said, sliding the newspaper across the table. “Look at this.” Sure enough, The State had come through—sort of. There was a story about Lyle on the front page of section B, but they didn’t mention his name, and they didn’t even speculate about why he’d burned the flag. The construction bosses were treating the whole episode as run-of-the-mill vandalism. The unidentified worker wasn’t fired for desecrating the flag; he was fired for being in an area where he wasn’t allowed, destroying property, and burning material on site. “It wouldn’t have mattered to us if he had burned a two-by-four,” the project manager was quoted as saying.

  Holly said, “Shouldn’t you go find a reporter or something? Tell your side of the story?”

  “I wasn’t trying to get on TV. Anyhow, they said they wouldn’t file charges if I kept my mouth shut.”

  “For God’s sake, Lyle, it’s not like you robbed a bank.”

  Lyle took both of Holly’s hands in his, just like he’d done the day he asked her to marry him, the day of her grandfather’s funeral. Some people might have called it bad timing, but Lyle called it his way of balancing things out. That’s what love was, he’d said—two people finding ways to balance each other against all the grief life slings your way.

  “I know you’re trying to make me feel better,” he said, “but stop.” He went out onto the porch in his bathrobe, carrying the two antique liquor bottles he’d brought home Wednesday. He’d already rinsed them, and now, settling on the steps, he went to work running a brush inside each one, loosening the last bits of dirt. Holly stood watching him at the window. The rest of his collection sat on a shelf in the den. They’d cleaned each piece—a section of the original copper cladding from the dome’s cupola, a small pickax, two antique keys, a chunk of Tennessee marble, six roofing nails, one musket ball. She’d had her eye on an old oak display cabinet at the antique mall, thinking it would make a nice birth
day gift for Lyle, but even before she’d figured a way to pay for it, he’d suggested they skip birthday presents this year to save money.

  Holly arrived at the statehouse a little after one o’clock. She’d told Lyle she was going to the antique mall. She hadn’t told him she intended to ask Beatty to rehire him. Lyle would have called it loyalty, maybe even love, but Holly knew, deep down, that she was only trying to make herself feel better. It occurred to her after breakfast, as she’d turned from the window and surveyed their living room—the three-thousand-dollar Italian leather sofa, the matching two-thousand-dollar chair, the space in between still waiting for a coffee table. Her not confessing to Lyle wasn’t just about wanting to avoid his hurt and her shame. If she told him she’d lost their savings, it would confirm his worst fears about video poker. His own wife. And what if it scared him so badly that he changed his mind about working for his father? Holly wanted Lyle to be happy, and she certainly didn’t want him to take the job on her account, but if he really was prepared to do it, she wasn’t prepared to stop him.

  So now she stood in front of the statehouse looking around for Beatty, all the while knowing full well it was pointless. They’d never take Lyle back. But she needed to be able to tell herself that she’d tried, that she’d done something, even if it was a lying-to-herself something that was really nothing.

  She found a couple of workers from Beatty’s crew eating lunch beneath a palmetto tree at the edge of the statehouse grounds. They told her Beatty had called in sick. Sick of losing was more like it. She drove back to Fortunes, refusing to think about the two fifties Lyle had given her for groceries, telling herself she wouldn’t look at the jackpots, would not so much as sit at a machine. When she walked in, Billy Pecan was reheating a pot of coffee at the front counter. “Holly,” he said, surprised. “I had to let somebody have your machine. It was getting late—”

  “That’s okay, Billy.” She went down the hallway, checking each narrow room. Most of the regulars were there, including Timothy Covey, who was too busy dribbling Skoal into a Dixie cup to notice her. A few players did glance up, but, as usual, nobody said hello. They all pretended not to see each other, the way you’d act if you bumped into your pastor at a topless joint out in Cayce.

  In the corner room, two pigtailed Girl Scouts were up on tiptoes playing Shamrock Sevens, coaxing a tinny Irish jig from the machine. Beatty was sitting beside them at Holly’s Pot-O-Gold. Judging from his ashtray, he’d been there awhile.

  “Oh, hey there, Holly, you want in here?” He’d just slid a twenty into the machine and dealt himself another hand of blackjack.

  “Beatty, I need to talk to you.”

  “Not about Lyle, I hope.”

  “I think you should give him another chance.”

  “Shoot!” Beatty was busted with a twenty-two.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Now, sugar, I know, I know, I know. But I can’t do it. Not my decision.”

  “He was only standing up for what he believes in.”

  “Please, Holly,” Beatty said. “Look who you’re talking to.” He held up his hands, like maybe she’d never noticed the color of his skin. “You think I like that flag? But you don’t see me burning it.”

  “Beatty,” she said, “does your wife know you spend all day in here?”

  Beatty drummed his fingers on his knee. His ring was missing again. “Look here,” he said, “if that job was so important to Lyle, he wouldn’t have done what he did. Simple as that. Nobody was twisting his arm. Anyway, he made out pretty good. Must have been, what, four hundred bucks in the kitty?”

  “In the kitty ?”

  “You know—his take.”

  “You mean he was taking bets on burning the flag?”

  Beatty turned back to the screen and drew a hand down his face, as if he wished he could erase his own mouth. “Gambling husband’s better than a drinking husband,” he said. “Anyhow, nobody thought he’d go through with it.”

  Holly found her way outside to the pay phone and lit a cigarette. So that’s what burning the flag had been about— money. Or maybe it had been about principle, and the money was just gravy. What mattered was that Lyle hadn’t been straight with her, but she couldn’t manage to get worked up about that considering she hadn’t been straight with him, either. Somehow they’d managed to balance things out. As she dug into her pocket for a quarter, she imagined him back at the house, shuffling around in his slippers and feeling ashamed for letting her think better of him than he deserved.

  When he answered the phone, she told him she was at the video parlor on Bluff Road. She told him she’d been there every morning for months, during which time she’d lost several thousand dollars. “And I wasn’t even going to tell you. Or I was maybe going to tell you, but only because I was scared you’d find out anyway, but now Beatty—did I mention Beatty’s here?—he just said you burned the flag for money.”

  “My father’s on the other line,” Lyle said. “Can you hold on?”

  “I want you to take the job. I just didn’t want you to take it because of me.”

  “I know,” he said. “Anyhow, I start on Monday. Now, don’t hang up.” He clicked over to finish the conversation with his father. When he came back, he told Holly to stay put. “I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said. “We’ll celebrate.”

  Lyle arrived at Fortunes carrying the bag of cash he’d won from his coworkers. “We’re either going to get back your money or go broke trying,” he said. They found a pair of vacant machines in a room where two white-haired women sat sharing a bowl of peppermints. Lyle surprised Holly by handing each of the women a ten-dollar bill. “What goes around comes around,” he said.

  At first, playing poker alongside Lyle gave Holly the willies, but he kept peppering her with questions about rules and strategies as if this were a perfectly normal way for them to spend an afternoon. He didn’t seem to notice that in the course of the last day, he had become exactly the person he never wanted to be. And only once or twice did Holly accuse herself of cowardice—selfish cowardice—because in fact it didn’t really bother her. All in all, she was feeling pretty good about the way things had turned out. Each time she was hit by a pang—each time her stomach turned over and she felt sure that the giddy glow of their afternoon was about to wear off, that it would all seem hollow and sad— Lyle shoveled another bill into the machine, betraying no doubt or regret. As they began to lose money in earnest, they grinned at the irony of it and made jokes about patronizing the family business, investing in their future. If Lyle was faking it, Holly couldn’t tell. A half hour later, when he hit a seven-hundred-dollar jackpot, she took it as a good omen.

  The electronic cascade of bells had just ended when Covey poked his head in. “This must be the lucky room,” he said. Then he saw Lyle and his smile withered into a frown. He peered around, like maybe he was hoping to find some cousins of his waiting in the wings, and then he was swinging at Lyle. Lyle saw it coming. He stepped aside as Covey’s fist disappeared into the wall with a sickening crack.

  “Fuck.” Covey yanked his hand free in a cloud of plaster dust and together he and Lyle spun past Holly and the white-haired ladies, out into the hallway. Lyle caught Covey in a headlock, but somehow Covey managed to wriggle free. As he crabbed away from Lyle, he sniffled and ran a finger under his nose. That’s when Holly realized he was crying. Tears were coming out of him like a baby. His knuckles were bleeding, but Holly could tell it wasn’t pain making him cry. It was outrage—fury so strong, he couldn’t do anything but cry. The idea of it blew her mind. Even if he did think the flag was more than a dumb piece of cloth—even if he truly bought into all of that blood-of-our-fathers business—still, was it worth it? By now Beatty was hurrying up the hallway from one end and Billy Pecan was coming from the other. As Holly stood there with a handful of money, watching the future vice president of Gandy Amusement close in on Covey, a small part of her wanted to cry, too, but even then, she knew the feeling would pas
s.

  She grabbed Billy Pecan and held him back as Lyle cornered Covey against the change machine. “Show him, Lyle,” she said. “Kick his cracker ass.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  2001

  Lyle

  Some of the other kids are already doing addition, but Claire’s having trouble with basic counting. One, two, three, four, six, five, sixteen, seventeen, eleventeen. Holly is convinced she’s dyslexic. During the parent-teacher conference, Miss Peavy tells them not to worry, Claire’s talking circles around her classmates, the numbers will come. But it’s Holly’s nature to worry. She took up smoking again when she was breast-feeding—maybe that’s what did it. “She’ll count when she’s ready,” Lyle says. “I didn’t count till I was eighteen.”

  He’s thirty-five now, Holly’s thirty, and Claire’s almost four, which means, according to the syndicated columnist in the paper, she’ll soon begin forming permanent memories. “I don’t want her first memory to be Mom sucking a Camel,” Holly says. And on that point, Lyle agrees. They’ve worked hard to keep their habit a secret from Claire, going so far as to never utter the words “cigarette” or “smoke” in her presence. So it spooks them both, the following week, when Claire walks into the kitchen with a crayon dangling from her lip.

  That night, they decide to quit together. Mathematically, it’s a no-brainer. “Subtracting a negative is the same as adding,” Holly says. “Adding is positive.”

  “And positive,” Lyle says, “equals good.”

  Holly picks the day, a Saturday, because they’ll both be home. “I’ll need the moral support,” she says—as if she’s the only one quitting. Lyle lets it slide. She smokes a pack a day compared to his half pack, and she’s been at it since high school whereas he didn’t start until his twenties. Lyle intends to quit cold turkey, so he starts tapering off a week in advance. Holly, meanwhile, stockpiles prescriptions for nicotine gum and patches, asks around for a hypnotist, arranges to take the weekend off work, and starts smoking double time to make up for all the cigarettes she’ll miss out on for the rest of her life.