In the end she decides that only his ring can answer to the charges. Only his wedding band, the one she had picked out with her mother back in Akron so many years ago, at the jewelry store on Wicker Street that her second cousin’s father owned. This alone would be able to do the trick. So now she’ll have to wait. Wait for him to return. Or return the call, at least, the one she’d already placed to his cell phone. Then wait longer still, for him to turn back around on the freeway, maybe down near the exit to the outlet mall or even later, where the traffic bottlenecks near the Sacred Heart Hospital. Maybe even there. She’s looked through the pockets and cracks and crannies of the thing earlier, to see what else might be found. It doesn’t surface very often, you see, this wallet of his. He keeps it deep within his pocket at all times, even in his bathing suit, which looks peculiar but she never says a word about it. That’s what had made her curious about it, after all. Its absence. But that’s the case with anything, isn’t it? When you know something is there, has been for so long, and then for some reason it simply goes away, well, you can’t help but notice. You realize when it disappears. A bird on your lawn, a friend from church, an ice-cream flavor down at the Baskin-Robbins. Your husband’s love. When these things go and you still desire them, you tend to notice. And this was the case with his wallet.

In the old days, those heady prechildren days of possibility, his billfold would spend the night on their chest of drawers. Always in the same spot, always placed there before bed. A ritual. But slowly, within the last six years or so, the wallet had disappeared, burrowed down into the man’s trousers, never to see the light of day. Not around her, anyway. And this—not at first, no, not that—had finally led her to this very moment, this haunted hunting through his things. The lowest place she could imagine ever finding herself. Pawing through his drawers, digging through his sport coats looking for a clue. Some clue to this hopeless place that her heart has rented out for the summer. At the corner of despair and desperation. Just across the tracks from damnation. You know the place, or if you don’t, you’ve heard of it. This is where the journey of her married life has led her—crouched down on a wooden toilet seat and searching through her husband’s belongings.