The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 by Otto Penzler Page B

too late, that she had no special knack for mothering. It wasn’t that she felt a particular animosity toward her children, but rather against motherhood itself. At first she was ashamed of this epiphany, but after a few years, she no longer tried to deny it. She didn’t confess it to others, certainly not to Blue or the children. People tended to harbor a grudge against mothers who seemed to dislike their own, even though, from what she could tell, it was a common enough occurrence. To acknowledge her feelings, to herself at least, eased her conscience a little and rekindled the sense of disciplined observation and fidelity to truth, no matter how unpleasant, that had made her want to pursue a life in journalism. The effort to be kind and compassionate also demanded from her a rigorous testing of her spirit that was, she felt, not unlike prayer, even though she didn’t consider herself a religious woman.
    Loretta believed she would have adapted just fine to this situation if matters had not taken a turn for the worse in the eighth year of her marriage, when a minuscule filament of hot steel wedged itself in Blue’s left eye. The accident ironically had not taken place at work, so Charnelle Steel claimed no responsibility. Nearly blind in that eye, Blue returned, after surgery and a month and a half of recuperation, to work, but his disposition soured with the disfigurement, the now endless medical bills, and the bad luck of getting an injury that, if he’d been more fortunate, could have resulted in a handsome settlement and perhaps a semi-comfortable life of early retirement.
    Most mornings he left for work by five and didn’t return until six-thirty or seven, later if he happened to stop off at the Armory for drinks and to shoot a little pool, at which he was deceptively skilled, despite his bad eye. When he arrived home on these nights to the house that never seemed to stay clean or uncluttered, the dust growing like moss on the furniture, he often felt the walls squeezing him, a claustrophobic bitterness puddling like acid in his stomach. His wife had grown too thin, with a hostile little smirk nestled in the corners of her mouth, though she wasn’t even thirty yet. She’d always been smart, and perhaps that was the real problem. He’d wooed her away from college. He knew she held against him the life he’d provided for them. But that had been as much her fault as his, if fault was to be found. It seemed unjust the way her lips drew tight like a purse string, the way she seemed to hold him responsible for her regrets, without ever acknowledging that he was the one with the goddamn bad eye, who had to work seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week, relegated to the shitty welding jobs rather than the custom work he’d been trained and paid well to do, and still
could
do if just given half a chance. Entering the house, he often felt as if he’d been lit on fire, as if his whole body was a breeding ground for army ants, a feeling exacerbated by the holes in his shirt and little blisters and pockmarks beneath the holes where the torches had burned and reburned his forearms and neck and wrists.
    Loretta understood how his predicament might embitter him, but it didn’t seem right that he’d sometimes take it out on her and the children, shouting for them to
shut up, shut up, just for holy chrissakes shut the fuck up,
and after the injury, occasionally and then more routinely striking Loretta, once even with his brown leather belt, the buckle of which left a puncture in her hip that had become infected and never completely healed. A blistered scab chafed under the elastic waistband of her slip.
    After these incidents, he would leave, setting out for the Armory or, in lonelier moods, on long drives to the nearby lakes or to the Waskalanti Creek, where he’d get out, take off his shoes and socks, cuff his jeans, and wade into the cold running water, the smooth pebbles