Fitting Ends by Dan Chaon Page A

standing on the doorstep in only a towel, her hands tented over her head to shield herself from the rain. I imagined I heard her shouting something after me.
    Afterwards, when I thought of what I’d done, I felt trembly with embarrassment and confusion. What if she’d recognized the car? What if she’d seen me? I’d never really known Rhonda that well, not enough to think of her as a friend, anyway. I’d talked to her at family gatherings, and we’d seemed to hit it off. There was a kind of cynical edge in what she said, and I secretly relished her dry comments about our in-laws, the loose, almost bored posture as she sat, listening to them talk. I remembered the Thanksgiving afternoon when she sipped casually from a pint bottle of peach schnapps after dinner, reclining in the living room, watching sports while the rest of the women washed dishes. I was the one who sat next to her. But the vague camaraderie between us was not enough to justify my behavior. It might even give Rhonda the idea that I was after her, a married man eager to prey on a woman rumored to be “loose.”
    It had been six months since Rhonda left my wife’s brother, Kent, and their two-year-old daughter. She’d run off with a drug dealer, so people said. Rhonda and Kent had been living in Virginia at the time. Kent had just been discharged from the navy, where he’d learned a trade—some kind of mechanics, I gathered—and he was looking for a job when she went off. My mother-in-law claimed the man she’d run off with was both a pimp and a cocaine addict, and had gotten Rhonda hooked on something. In any case, Kent came home to Nebraska with his little girl, and I gave him a job at the motel I run—the motel I inherited from my father. My mother-in-law cared for the child while he was at work.
    Kent got a few letters from Rhonda, but he didn’t let anyone know what they said. And then, after several months, Rhonda appeared in St. Bonaventure. My mother-in-law imagined that the man had beaten her up and dumped her somewhere along their travels, a journey she’d followed through the postmarks on the letters—Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Baltimore. She talked of these cities as if they were distant constellations.
    Ever since Rhonda returned, my mother-in-law had been imagining that Rhonda wanted Kent back. “He’d have to be out of his mind,” she murmured when Kent was out of the room.
    It wasn’t that I approved of what Rhonda had done, of course. But I wasn’t sure that I blamed her, either. I wanted to know her side of the story.
    When I got home, my sister, Joan, was there. She had come to cook us dinner. We had planned to go out dancing for my birthday that night, but by the afternoon we decided to postpone until some other time. The baby was colicky, and our two-year-old, Joshua, hadn’t taken well to his change in status. Recently, he’d begun to wake up in the middle of the night, too, calling for us jealously. So Joan said she was going to come over and fix us a steak.
    My sister is six years older than I. My mother had two miscarriages in between us, and perhaps that had hardened Joan to the idea of siblings. In any case, we’d never been close as children; not, in fact, until after our parents had passed away and Joan had divorced. There wasn’t any real reason for her to stay in St. Bonaventure besides me, I guess.
    Joan looked at me shrewdly when I came in. She often seemed to loom over people, though she wasn’t exactly tall—just, as she put it, big-boned. “Where were you?” she said. “I’ve been here for nearly an hour.”
    â€œI was driving,” I told her, and she nodded. She was big on the notion of “private time.” Everyone in our family had been, in individual ways, a bit of a loner. Still, I couldn’t picture her following someone for no reason, or peeping into their