The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' Read Free

He squinted down at me, puzzled. I cut the engine. That’s when I saw it, in the seat well on the passenger’s side: the pipe wrench I’d borrowed from Chuck Wagner to tighten our leaky hallway radiator valve. It wasn’t premeditated. I’d meant to return that wrench for a week or more. But suddenly its being there seemed just and right. There was a fire in my head.
    Six weeks after that moment, in a darkened classroom at Ocean-side Community College, I would learn via an anger management class video about the cardiology, neurology, and endocrinology of rage—about how, as I reached for that wrench, my hypothalamus was instant-messaging my adrenal glands to secrete cortisol and adrenaline. How stored fat was dumping into my bloodstream for an energy turbocharge. How my heart was pumping overtime, sending a surge of blood to my muscles and lungs in preparation for what that instructional video called “the evolutionary miracle of fight-or-flight.” That morning, I saw Hay and took the former option.
    Took out his windshield. Took the wrench to his stacks of not-yet-installed Andersen windows. When he came flying at me, I took aswing at his head that, thank God, didn’t connect. He head-butted me, knocked me backward, gave me a cracked rib and a busted lip, a bruised tailbone.
    They arrested me that afternoon. Hay got a restraining order. Maureen got me out of the house and would not let me take the dogs. We all got lawyers. Mine, Lena LoVecchio, was a friend of my Aunt Lolly’s. Her manner was brusque, her hairstyle a shellacked mullet. There were two framed posters on the wall behind her desk: the UConn women’s basketball team with their championship trophy and Kramer from
Seinfeld.
    “How come he gets to screw my wife
and
be the victim?” I asked Lena.
    “It’s all about the wrench,” she said.
    I tried to explain to Lena how I’d reached the point where there was nothing between me and the pain of my wife’s betrayal. She kept nodding, sad-eyed, her fingers stretching a rubber band. When I stopped talking, she said, “I’m your attorney, Caelum. Not your therapist.”
    Pending disposition of the case, I took a mandatory unpaid leave of absence from teaching. Took Aunt Lolly up on her offer to have me come stay at the family farm with her and her don’t-ask-don’t-tell companion, Hennie. (It was April, and my aunt was as practical as she was sympathetic; I got room, board, and laundry service in exchange for plowing and manure spreading.) I took the deal the lawyers hammered out. In exchange for two hundred hours of community service, completion of the anger management class, and restitution on all that broken glass out at the Hays’ hacienda, I got the assault and damage charges reduced to misdemeanors. That meant probation instead of prison and a shot at qualifying for “accelerated rehabilitation.” It would be the judge’s call. If I got it and behaved myself for a year, my criminal record would be wiped clean and I could teach again. My case was on the docket for August the first.
    I missed school—the kids, the daily grind. Had Melanie DeCarlo gotten into one of her dream schools? Had Mike Jacaruso gotten thatsoccer scholarship? When the Wildcats made it to the semifinals in basketball, I drove up to their big game against Wethersfield. Made the mistake of sitting in the Three Rivers section. I left at the half, though. I couldn’t take the fact that, although everyone was packed in tight on those bleachers, I had room on either side of me. Couldn’t take the whispering, the swiveling heads:
that’s that teacher who
…
    The community service piece was punishment by acute tedium. I’d have been okay with a soup kitchen or group home assignment, but they gave me data entry at the DMV—six mind-numbing hours every Saturday for thirty-three weeks.
    Hey, you think those Motor Vehicle employees are charmers when you’re in line? You should feel the love when you’re one of their community