Death Wish: Prologue 

Prologue

Mary Alice Monroe rubbed a heart-shaped hunk of angelite between her thumb and index finger as she stared out at the crystalline whiteness of the falling snow.  Each flake descended in an artful melody covering the ugly and the beautiful without distinction like an act of grace and forgiveness.  Despite the serenity of that moment, dark thoughts obsessed her.  Fantasies of Hank’s death ran on an endless loop.

She imagined him walking in on a hold-up at the convenience store where he always stopped to grab a cup of coffee and a pastry on the way to a job site.  The robber turned, startled and fired without thinking.  Hank’s blood flew everywhere as he dropped lifeless to the floor.  And Mary Alice remained standing, staring in the window—the hapless widow.

Her dominant fantasy on this day, though, revolved around the weather. The snowflakes started falling before dawn on top of the previous night’s chilly rain that formed a barrier of ice on the pavement.  Since Hank’s early morning departure, no one had attempted the steep hill of the road in front of their house leaving an illusion of perfection as far as she could see from the front door.  The muddy ruts Hank left in the yard when he drove home drunk last month were gone.  White blankets covered the gray dormant tree branches and turned winter-naked shrubs into snowy sculptures.

And yet, Hank insisted on going up the mountain, greedy for the check payable at the completion of the current phase of construction and paranoid that if he missed the meeting, he’d never receive the money.

She imagined him driving home, hitting a treacherous sheet of ice that grabbed and pulled the wheels of his truck.  Instinctively, he turned the steering wheel in the opposite direction and then remembered to turn with the slide, but it was too late.  All four tires left the road and the vehicle’s creep over the rocky soil turned into a roll, gaining speed with every rotation of the axle.

He raced downhill backward and the driver’s side of the truck smashed into a tree preventing him from making an emergency escape out the door.  The back two wheels dropped over the precipice with the drive shaft balanced on a protruding boulder.  For a moment Hank thought his life was spared.  Then, the rear end dropped like a see saw, raising up the front and launching the truck into a somersault before plunging eighty feet below.  The truck came to rest on the roof of the cab with Hank’s lifeless body hanging upside down restrained only by the seat belt.

“Aaaah,” she sighed as a smile curled her lips.  “If only it were true.”  She rolled the thought of Hank’s death around in her mouth.  It tasted as sweet and thick as honey.

There were so many ways he could end up at the bottom of the mountain.  A sloppy swerve to miss a deer.  Another driver losing control in bad road conditions and slamming head-on into Hank’s truck.  A heart attack in the middle of a bad curve.  Just thinking about it made her feel as warm as if the sun were shining through glass directly on her skin, toasting her body from head to toe.

Living with him was a life she didn’t want.  But she had to admit that her own bad choices got her there.  She was so desperate to get out of her childhood home that she embraced the first guy that showed any serious interest.  Instead of attending college as she’d planned, she dropped out of high school when she got pregnant and married Hank.  She was shocked when her new husband informed her that he had arranged for an abortion.  When he said she’d have to raise the child on her own if she decided not to go through with it, she acquiesced.

From that day onward, she made scores of faulty decisions, going along to get along with Hank.  She stood on the sidelines and watched as he destroyed all her dreams.  She knew it wasn’t fair to blame him for everything wrong in her life.  She’d enabled him after all.  She’d accepted all his criticism as if it were the gospel truth.  She’d absorbed his control into her skin like osmosis.  He chased away all her friends, now his friends were all she had.  Her lifelong desire for a family?  According to Hank, she wasn’t fit to be a mother.  He said, “You can’t take proper care of a husband, and children are far more demanding.”  For the longest time, she kept trying to please him, to prove him wrong.  But nothing was good enough.  Nothing would ever be enough.  Now, the only dream that remained in her heart was that Hank would drop dead.

She left her idle musings behind as Hank’s truck descended the hill, desecrating the purity of the white covering on the road.  She scurried to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on dinner.  Before she could get anything on the table, the back door slapped open, stopping only after it banged into the wall.

“Where’s my supper?” he said.

“Putting it on the table right now, Hank.”

“About time,” he muttered.

She opened her mouth to respond then slapped it shut.  If she reminded him that if she’d put everything on the table when he said he’d be home, it would all be cold by now.  She held her peace, loaded the table and took a seat.

“Where’s my beer?  What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m getting it, Hank,” She said in response to the first question.  She knew better than to answer the second. She was too tense to eat now and just watched him shoveling down forkfuls of meat loaf, mashed potatoes and green beans into his mouth.  He set down his fork and took a long swallow of beer.  “What the hell did you do with yourself all day?  You sure didn’t mop the floor.  It’s a mess.”

“Well, I made this dinner that you’re eating and…”

“It sure didn’t take you long to throw this slop together.”

Teeth clenched tight, Mary Alice said, “If it’s slop, Hank, why are you eating it?” She knew she’d made a mistake but it was too late to take back her words.

“You avoiding my question?  Did you spend the whole day lazing around reading another book?”

“No, Hank, I didn’t.”

“All you want to do is read, read, read.  The floor needs mopping, the tables need dusting and I bet you haven’t made the bed yet.  None of your responsibilities matter to you.  You just stick your nose in a book and forget it all.”

For a moment, she thought about his reaction if she said that she’d spent the day thinking about the many different ways he could die, before responding to his criticism.   “As I said, I didn’t spend my day reading.  The books I lazed around with today were your business books.  I did the fourth quarter financials, the payroll tax and started on the annual report.”

“You sound resentful, Mary Alice.  That business pays our bills and puts food on the table.  You’re a damned bookkeeper.  Seems to me you’d be glad to do the paperwork for our family business instead of slaving away for someone else.”

“If I slaved away for someone else, I’d get a check at the end of the damn week.”  She knew she was in trouble even before he rose from the chair.  She could smell his rage. She tried to jerk back from his hand but all that did was disrupt the balance of the chair.  It fell over with her in it.

She wanted to jump up on his back and gouge his eyes out.  She knew, though, if she tried, he’d not stop until she ended up in the emergency room again lying to nurses and doctors.  Instead, she laid there, breathing in and out, trying to subdue her anger and calm the storm of rage that made her body shake.

“Oh, for god’s sake woman.  Get your lazy ass off the floor.  You’ve got a kitchen to clean up.”

He threw his napkin at her face, obscuring her view.  She couldn’t see but she could still hear his footsteps going down the hall, the basement door creaking open and his boots descending the stairwell.  When she knew he was completely out of sight, Mary Alice dared to get up—furious with him and disgusted with herself.