Ash Wednesday by Chet Williamson, Neil Jackson Page A

would not respond, or would walk out of the room without speaking.
    The week after he'd returned home he told them at the dinner table that he'd gotten a job that day at the Universal Shoe plant. They had not even known he was applying. "What kind of job, Brad?" his father asked.
    Brad put down his knife and fork. "I stand in front of a machine. I push a button, and two metal plates come together in front of me. Hot liquid plastic pours into a mold, and in twenty seconds the plates come apart. There in front of me are two plastic soles and heels. I put them in a box, rip out what's left in the feed tube, and push the button again."
    "A . . . machine operator," his father ventured.
    "That's right. It's a job I think I'm going to like very much." He picked up his knife and fork and turned his attention back to his meat loaf, not saying a word for the rest of the meal.
    Brad started working at Universal three days later, and with his first paycheck he made a security deposit on an apartment in the Shady Dell complex, a cluster of twelve newly built pseudocolonial buildings on the outskirts of town, each housing eight families. The rent for the one-bedroom unit was $175 a month, a third of what he took home from Universal.
    The wedding took place in the second week of June, a justice of the peace presiding, and only the parents of the bride and groom in attendance. Bonnie was disappointed but uncomplaining. That fall, when she delightedly discovered she was pregnant, she quit her job at Allied Pressing after Brad assured her they could manage on his salary alone. Frank Donald Meyers was born the following May, a healthy eight-pound boy who resembled Bonnie far more than he did Brad. Brad began to work double shifts whenever he could to pay for the extra expenses the baby incurred. The extra work paid off in another way, for in early 1974 he was made assistant foreman. Mr. Rider, Universal's owner, liked the no-nonsense way in which Bradley Meyers handled himself. While the other workers seemed to use any excuse to indulge in horseplay, Brad was serious-minded, refusing to join in the pranks, choosing instead to keep working.
    Bonnie became pregnant again in late 1974, and Linda Marie followed Frank the next summer. The apartment quickly became cramped, and Brad made a fifteen-percent down payment on a six-year-old house on Sundale Road, a middle-income development. He had had no trouble saving the $5,000, as he spent money on nothing but his family. He had quit smoking, did not drink, had no hobbies and no apparent vices. No longer did he go hunting with his father, as he often had before he was drafted. He came home, played with Frank until it was the boy's bedtime, then sat in front of the television until 11:00, when he would switch it off. He never watched the news, and he seldom laughed at any of the sitcoms. When he talked to Bonnie, it was about trivial things, and when he made love to her, he was curiously detached, almost clinical. She was not and had never been a bright girl, but slowly it began to dawn on her that something was wrong with the marriage. Yet she was incapable of dealing with abstractions, and so could not solve or even define the problems. Brad did not beat her, as some of her friends were beaten by their husbands. He seldom lost his temper, never came home drunk or spent money foolishly. It was just that sometimes, after a late night feeding, when she slipped back into bed beside Brad, she thought she was next to a stranger. And sometimes then, in the middle of the night, she would almost but not quite remember what he had told her that day in the clearing. But just as she was about to think of it, to really remember what he had said, she would fall asleep, or think about something she would have to do the next day, or worry if she was pregnant again, and the memory would slide into the dark.
    She continued to be unaware of the condition of her marriage, even for a long time after Brad began to change.