Guess So!

“Hey! ‘S Bucky, t’you. Bucky, Buck.”

“I ain’t goin’ by Buck. What are you doing here, John? Fuck are you doin’, beating down the door in the middle of the goddamn night?”

Marge creeps down another few steps silently, just enough to peek around the corner. Gale’s blocking most of her view but he’s clicked on the front light and when she gets a glance over his shoulder she has to press her fingers to her mouth to keep from saying something, anything, that would draw attention.

“Jus’ tryin’ to get to bed, that’s all,” John slurs. “Don’ want any trouble, honest.” He raises his hands to his shoulders, swaying surrender.

“This ain’t your house.”

“What?” John squints through bruised lids already swelling almost shut, and when he tilts his head back to look up at the house he nearly goes sprawling on his back before he rights himself.

“Oh Jesus. Fuck. Sorry, Buck, ‘m sorry,” he sighs. His bottom lip is swollen around an ugly split, dried blood streaking down his chin. “‘M goin’, didn’t mean to keep y’up. Sorry. Christ.”

Marge takes the last couple of steps necessary to slip up behind Gale, her hand on his back, to stand with him as they watch John stumble back to the sidewalk and over to his own front door, muttering to himself the whole way. He fumbles his keys, metal jingling at his feet. Gale stalks past her, back into the house. Marge stands there in the doorway, heart slowing and her arms around her waist to hold her robe shut, and watches John squat down to pick up the keys only to just tip back, back, and fall the last few inches to thud down on his bottom right there on the porch, slumped like a puppet with its strings cut. He kicks at his door, just once, and then looks for all the world like he doesn’t plan to move again. 

She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just shut the door against the cold chilling her bare legs, go back to bed now that they know there’s nothing to be afraid of. They haven’t seen much of John lately, not even enough for the occasional hello, certainly not enough to be able to call each other friends, but she still can’t help but notice that he doesn’t seem to really…do anything. He doesn’t go anywhere on the weekends, he doesn’t see anyone during the week. He goes to work, he comes home, and no one even stops by to say hello. No one checks in, and with no little guilt she realizes that’s including her.

Marge steps out and crosses the pavement on bare feet, climbs the couple of steps up to John’s porch to step carefully over one leg splayed out wide. 

“Oh. Hey. Mrs Cleven,” John slurs, trying to sit up. “Hey, sorry, don’t be scared of me Marge, ‘kay? Please. Didn’t mean to, just..y’know? Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” she promises, reaching down to pluck his keys from his lax grip. His knuckles are split, already bruising by what she can see from the light off their porch next door. The house key is easy to pick out from amongst the others; she unlocks the front door and feels along the wall for a switch, wincing a little in guilty sympathy when John swears at the sudden flood of light, bloodied and bruised hands flying up to shield his eyes.

“Hey, you got in!” he crows, abruptly grinning, pain apparently forgotten. He lunges to his feet and Marge has to duck aside to keep from being bowled over as he barrels inside, catching himself with a little oof of displaced air on the post at the base of the stairs. “Jesus, real angel you are Marge, coulda just slept on the porch you know,” he tells her, big hands gesturing as he rambles. “Here, lemme have the keys, go on back home to your fella, don’t let him go to sleep alone okay? You take care of him, doncha? He takes care of you? ‘S the way should be, they promised.”

Marge passes John his keys, holding them out until his wide swings finally end with his palm wrapped hot and tight around them. “You okay, Bucky?” she can’t help but ask. This close he smells so much like a distillery she wants to sneeze just to clear her nose, and she can just barely make out a broken vessel in one of his swollen eyes, crimson bleeding across the white.

“I’m good, Marge, always good! Come on now, get goin’, your fella’s all alone over there, come on.”

Marge doesn’t have much of a choice but to let John chivvy her back out onto the porch, though she can’t help but notice that even drunk off his ass he doesn’t touch her to do it, just crowds close and gestures in the direction he thinks she should go. She goes, and he closes the door behind her with exaggerated care, as if being gentle with his own door should make up for nearly kicking theirs down.

Gale’s waiting for her in the front hallway when she steps back inside, her bare feet cold enough now to make her whole body shiver.

“You get him inside okay?”

“Yeah,” she breathes, rubbing her hands briskly over her arms. “Just didn’t want him sleepin’ outside in this weather, looked like he was planning to.”

Gale nods, reaches out for her to pull her into a hug that squeezes the breath out of her. Marge goes easily, happily, and stands there with him until she’s warmed back up and Gale’s yawning against her hair, finally ready to try sleeping. They go to bed. Gale holds her close, and Marge nods off again thinking of John falling asleep alone.

--//--

Gale relaxes in increments so slow she only sees them because she’s looking for them, but slow progress is still progress. He keeps filling out as he eats good meals, three times a day under her watchful eye. He goes to the doctor and gets a clean bill, and with that comes Marge’s promise that she won’t make him go again unless they’re both sure he’s dying. He gets along well at work, makes a few friends that Marge meets as well when they’re out in town together running errands of a weekend, or when they’re invited around a couple of houses for Friday evening dinners; Gale doesn’t care for the first dinner and doesn’t seem likely to change his mind after the second so they quickly quit accepting the invitations, but a few of the folks they meet at them are nice enough to keep in casual touch with Marge even after Gale makes them scarce. They’re surface-level acquaintances and are unlikely to ever become more, but Marge knows beggars can’t be choosers and she’ll choose fluff without substance over anything deeper she might develop with their catty neighbors any day.

The weather turns truly bitter towards the middle of the month and Gale starts spending practically all of his free time sitting so close to the fireplace Marge is worried a single stray spark will set him alight, but knowing what little she does of his time in the prison camps she doesn’t have the heart to ask him to move further back. He spends a lot of time reading and the rest of his time staring at (or maybe through) his pictures she’d insisted be put up on the mantle with the bits of his uniform they’d had framed, but he’s always quick to turn away and answer her when she comes in to talk, or to kiss, and these days every fresh greeting between them comes with a ghost of the smiles he used to give her when they were courting, before everything. Even those wan smiles are better than when he’d come home and couldn’t seem to smile for anything at all except on special occasions, and she loves him for every single one of them.

“Saw you out talkin’ to John this morning,” she tells him, perched on the arm of his chair in front of the fire, her elbow resting on the back cushion so she can play with his hair and he can hold her steady, his arm sturdy around her hips.

“Mhm.”

“He on break from school for the holiday?”

“Mhm. ‘Til Monday.”

Marge hums, plays with Gale’s hair some more. He relaxes into her, head tilting to rest on her ribs as he stretches his feet closer to the fire.

“Momma called, said her and daddy are gonna be here tomorrow afternoon, wanna beat the weather. Oughta check the guest linens are still fresh,” she muses. Gale hums, nuzzles her ribs, the side of her breast.

“Packed ‘em in lavender like always, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then I’m sure they’re fine.”

Marge sighs and takes the roundabout admonishment to relax without argument. She leans heavier against the back of the chair and curls up smaller, with her feet in Gale’s lap to get comfortable. He keeps nuzzling into her and Marge smiles, strokes her fingers through his hair he still keeps cropped as close as the day he’d shipped out.

It’s not hard to guess where his mind’s going when he starts getting affectionate like this but she lets him get there in his own time, lets him savor her as much as he could ever want. He’s so careful with her, gentle stroking hands leaving heat trailing under her skin in their wake, steady breathing, deliberate kisses he seems to place just so, right where she likes them best. She knows better than to ask if they should go upstairs for this, knows better than to expect them to make love the normal way — the way all her girlfriends back in Florida and Wyoming told her she should. For that matter, she knows better even than to expect it to be like that one time she’d managed to talk him into making love to her before he’d shipped out. Things are different, Gale’s different, but then so is Marge, and she’s also pretty sure they’re happier together than a lot of those girls were with their fellas who pawed and groped and put their girls on their backs just to take their own pleasure hard and fast and give nothing back at the end. Doing things different seems pretty good from where Marge is sitting, all things considered.

When they finally get where he’s going, she winds up straddling Gale’s lap sitting on his hand, big and warm and moving just right in between her thighs to take her apart at the seams, and all thoughts of linens and rationed holiday menus and everything else that isn’t her husband’s touch flies right out of her head.

Gale spends the entire evening taking her apart until she’s begging him to let her breathe, let her recover. She laughs when she tries to stand only to find her knees have completely given up on her, and Gale smiles when he carries her upstairs to bed. He helps her clean up enough to sleep, tucks her under the covers, and goes back downstairs to bank the fire, turn off the lights. She’s nearly asleep when he comes back, and tonight’s apparently a good night because he lays down under the covers with her and falls asleep almost instantly once he’s got her in his arms the way he likes.

It makes it all the more heartbreaking when her parents arrive the next afternoon and he goes silent, and cold, and the look in his eyes is like he’s just stepped off that train again, fresh off his tour. Her mother needles them at every opportunity for any hint of children coming now that she doesn’t have to content herself with doing it in writing only to find those parts of the letters going ignored. Her father barely even looks at Gale except once to ask him about his work down at the plant, then again, though it’s more like half a glance from the corner of his eye, to tell him he needs to do better keeping up with raking up the leaves in the yard.

By the end of dinner Marge is so worn out trying to keep her parents’ attention off Gale so he can keep to himself that her knees and hands tremble with wrung out exhaustion of an entirely different kind to the night before, and if it were possible to sink right into bed in the next moment she would do it without a moment’s hesitation. Gale helps her wash up despite her father grumbling that that’s woman’s work, and she’s glad for the chance to lean against him just for a minute where they stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the sink.

It startles her when he clears his throat and speaks up, voice a little rusty with how little he’s been using it all day. “Think I oughta check on things next door for a minute.”

Marge blinks out of her thoughts and glances up at him, but his gaze is fixed on the window behind the sink. It takes a bit of squinting to find what he’s looking at, the kitchen lights at her back only making it harder to pick out whatever he’s spotted in the dim lamplight outside, but when she finally sees what he does her heart sinks right down to her nicest shoes pinching her toes too tight and rubbing little tender spots on the backs of her ankles.

“Name’s John Egan,” the guy introduces himself a week later when they’ve finished hauling everything in and they can finally settle enough to meet the neighbors properly, “but everybody calls me Bucky, and I like it better that way.”

“Gale Cleven, my wife Marjorie.”

“Just Marge though,” she smiles, sweet balance to Gale’s newly stern, unsmiling affect. “I like it better that way.”

John smiles at her then, so much more real than whatever he’d done last time, and when he shakes her hand his own is big and warm and calloused kind of like Gale’s are, a hand used to hard work.

“Pleasure to meet you properly, Marge. Gale.”

John shakes Gale’s hand too and seems about to say something else but Gale’s already pulling away to take the couple of steps down to the pavement so they can continue on their little meet-and-greet tour around the block. John offers a nod full of understanding to her apologetic little grimace, and he just watches with his hands in his pockets and one shoulder leaned up against the side of the doorframe his shoulders nearly fill as Marge joins Gale down on the sidewalk to tuck her hand into his elbow, and on they go.

—//—

“Oh lord no, I wouldn’t go anywhere near that man if we weren’t neighbors, and even at that I don’t talk to ‘im unless I’ve got Artie with me.”

Marge hides the urge to frown in the motion of crossing one ankle behind the other and taking a careful sip of her too-bitter coffee.

“Sad but true,” another of the ladies sighs, and maybe Marge is being unfair but she thinks the pout that goes with the sentiment looks more than a little put-on. “Just somethin’ off ‘bout him! You know, Cal and I think he’s gotta have someone he’s threatened or something up at the school what got him the job - don’t know how he’d get it otherwise, man’s not right in the head.”

“Ain’t that the truth. What’s he teaching again, Bonnie?”

Mousy little Bonnie Turner, sitting beside Marge, clears her throat and holds a hand in front of her mouth to finish chewing the minuscule bite of a ginger snap she’d just taken. “Woodshop, I think,” she says when her mouth’s clear. “Somethin’ handy, anyway.”

“They gave him sharp tools to brandish around those kids?“ Henrietta Smith scoffs from her throne at the top of the room. “First sign of trouble I’m going to write to principal Perry myself and let him know what’s what. They oughta know what they’re dealin’ with, hiring a man like that to teach. How’s he been to you and your fella so far, Marjorie?”

“Nothin’ but nice,” she says, and it’s the pure truth but it still earns her a couple of scoffs that put her back up. “I mean it! He’s been fine. Maybe a little quiet, but everything seems alright.”

“You’re still new,” Henrietta tuts, and the rest of the ladies she’s holding court with titter as well (except for Bonnie next to her, who just looks like she wishes they’d change the subject). “Just wait ‘til he gets it in his head that someone’s done him wrong, or ‘til he’s got nothing better to do but make trouble for everyone else, like he did this summer. A man always reveals his nature eventually, and Major John Egan’s nature is mean.”

Marge leaves not too long after that, excusing herself with the reason that she needs to get home and start dinner for Gale. She’d hoped for nicer neighbors here than the ones they’d left behind, but it seems folks are the same no matter where you go — nosy busybodies who sit around and do nothing but judge their neighbors and gossip, all mean-spirited and nasty. She shudders and has half a mind to do something silly like take a shower to see if she can scrub off the grimy feeling that little ‘afternoon tea’ left her with down in her soul. She pauses on the sidewalk outside John’s house with half a mind to march right up there and talk to him for a bit just to show those clucking hens what for; it’s quiet though, he must still be up at the school, so Marge goes on into her own home, still only half-unpacked.

Some hours later, dinner’s in the oven and she’s sitting at the table working on unwrapping all their photos from their cushions of newspaper scraps when a car passes by, turns into the driveway next door. She hardly feels better than one of those busybodies as she does it, but she stands up to creep over to the window, staying just out of sight with her stomach pressed to the edge of the sink.

John steps out of his car so he can haul up the door to his garage, gets back into the car, she presumes to drive it inside. He sits there, hands on the wheel and his chin on his chest, for a few long minutes marked only by Marge’s breathing and the clock she’d put above the kitchen door ticking away. She has half a mind to go check on him and make sure he’s alright, but before she can decide one way or the other John suddenly jerks upright and her heart lurches when his car does, a few inches forward in a harsh jerk. He slams the brakes, stalls it, starts it again with too harsh motions like he’s angry with it, but then he gets it into the garage without incident anyway.

He hauls the garage shut again behind himself but he doesn’t go in his house. He’s just standing there outside the garage with his hands on his hips, two fingers curved over his belt and the rest of them curled up entirely, tucked into his palms, breathing deep and looking down at his yard, at the grass getting a little long. When he finally gets moving he still doesn’t go inside, and Marge hurries to take a step or two back as he comes towards her — or, it turns out, just towards his side yard and then up and around to the front of his house for a stop at the mailbox. Marge leans forward again, cranes her neck until her forehead is nearly pressed to the glass to keep her eyes on him as he stands there on the sidewalk between their houses, flicking through a few envelopes. One of them he folds in half and tucks into his shirt pocket, but the other two he keeps hold of — and then he’s definitely walking towards her house.

Alice’s warning rings in Marge’s head the same moment a knock on the door cuts through the ticking silence and Marge tells herself she’s being ridiculous. She might need her husband Arthur around to feel safe, but Marge can hold her own just fine – and John hasn’t given her a reason to be afraid of him anyway! She marches to the door, opens it to find John standing on her stoop with two envelopes held carefully between his big hands. He’s got a light scatter of wood shavings in his hair and a layer of sawdust paling his sleeves, and the stern lines of his face soften ever so slightly when she smiles at him.

“Hi Bucky,” she greets, and he softens even further, gently surprised pleasure. “What can I do for ya?”

“Marge,” he replies and touches the front of his hair like he’s used to having a cap there to tip. Gale does it too sometimes and Marge finds it as charming on one as the other. “Seems the postman was in a rush, left me a couple’a letters that aren’t mine.”

John holds out the envelopes between them and Marge hurries to take them. A glance at the first proves it to be from her mother, and the second something more official-looking from-

“Oh!” she chirps, smiling wide.

“Good news?”

“Hope so! We’ve been having an awful time tryin’ to get my name changed since Gale and I tied the knot,” she explains, already ripping into the second envelope with one red lacquered nail, thin paper giving way easily. “Third time’s the charm though, right?”

The documents slide free and she catches the letter that’s come with them, unfolding it eagerly to skim through the apology it contains and then, yes, there it is:

Marjorie Ruth Cleven.

“Well?” John prompts, and when she looks up she finds him smiling, hands in his pockets and eyebrows raised. “Good news?”

“Good news,” she confirms, nodding.

“Well then congratulations, Mrs Cleven.”

And oh that’s lovely. Marge thanks him, cheeks aching with how wide she’s grinning, and John’s smile widens a little more like he doesn’t even notice it. He nods, takes a couple of steps back out of the shade of the porch and into the sunshine.

“I’d better get,” he says. He nods to the letters in her hands, “I’ll let you know if that happens again, might be some confusion down at the post office since you’ve just moved in.”

“Y’ don’t have to do that, John, it’s alright. You can just put anything that’s ours right in the mailbox, no need to trouble yourself.”

John’s smile fades just a little, creasing at the corners as he digs his hands deeper into his pockets.

“Ah yeah, of course. I’ll do that. Have a good evening, Mrs Cleven.”

He’s turned and gone again quicker than Marge can figure out what else to say, though she doesn’t step back inside until he’s unlocked his own front door and gone in.

Gale gets home around six, and the moment he’s kissed her hello Marge shows him the letter just to see one of his rare smiles creep slow as molasses across his face. It makes his hollow cheeks look a little rounder, puts a bit of his old light back in his eyes, sets her heart to aching in the best way just the same as ever.

“Well,” he drawls, tucking an arm around her waist to reel her in tight so he can kiss her forehead, “how ‘bout that. Mrs Marge Cleven.”