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The heat of summer both sharpened and dulled Mercymorn. She was all blunt edges and razor tongue, and of course, it grated in all the wrong ways on Augustine. She picked her way delicately through their little apartment, crossing the living room with a neatly-folded stack of towels held out in front of her. Some sort of bizarre offering.
“Darling,” she started, the pet name dripping off her tongue like an epithet, “the air conditioner’s gone out again.”
They had an ancient window unit in the living room, which was more than enough for their three-bedroom if they flung the windows open on all but the hottest days. This was a problem only during the summer when their underlying tensions and long-suffering aggravations ran high and fights between each other broke out near-hourly.
“I’m aware, my sweet,” Augustine said, looking up from his book. He was always reading something. Mercymorn hated that he refused to borrow books from the public library, which was just three blocks’ walk away, and instead bought every book he wanted to read. “The air conditioner’s been out for days. Why are you reminding me?”
“Because you said you’d fix it.”
Augustine laid a ribbon bookmark inside his book and closed it with a snap. “I never said I’d fix it. I said I’d take a look. And,” he cast his eyes meaningfully toward the grimy little thing stuffed into the window, curtains flung on either side, “I’m looking.”
Mercy’s upper lip twitched, a shadow of a scowl. “It’s a hundred degrees in this apartment.” She had scraped her hair back into her usual bun, but eschewed her usual sweater set and pearls, even kicking off her shoes. She wore only her gauzy little high-necked pale pink tank top shell, tucked into a knee-length A-line skirt. Sweat glistened around her brow and upper lip. Rarely, if ever, did her husband see more of her than an errant shoulder, a calf without pantyhose, a clavicle. And even then - by accident only.
Where she was all tight, rounded curves, he was all edges. Augustine sprawled out on the horrid floral couch they had picked up together at the thrift store, then hauled, panting and cursing at one another, into the ancient freight elevator to their fifth-floor apartment. This was before the elevator had gone out and they had to make the sweaty, squabbling trek up the stairs in the back. The landlord did not return their calls. At least the building was rent-controlled, which was the major reason they stayed. Six hundred dollars was unheard of for New York, and where would they go, anyway? Another apartment, in another city, together? Or she would go. And he would follow.
“It’s a hundred degrees outside.” Augustine had unbuttoned his shirt almost to the waist and rolled his sleeves up, intentionally taking up three times as much space as he needed. Mercymorn glared at him, as level as she could muster. “Lighten up, Joy.”
The old nickname. How it stung. A needle at their younger, wilder selves, before they had settled for a courthouse ceremony where Mercymorn refused to wear white and Augustine refused to wear anything but, where their witnesses were two strangers who they had paid to pretend to be friends fresh off the street, where they promptly signed their marriage certificate and then drove straight from New York City to Utah and came back again, bickering the whole way. Some honeymoon.
“If you aren’t going to fix the air conditioner, I’m going to the bodega,” Mercy huffed. “We need eggs.”
“Pick up a bottle of wine while you’re at it. White, if you can manage it.” Augustine flicked a wrist at her. “And something for dinner. It’s too hot to cook.”
“I’m not your errand girl,” she said.
Augustine inclined his eyebrows in a way that meant he deeply disagreed.
Mercymorn bubbled with barely-contained resentment, but decided it was too hot to start another fight, and settled for a bone-tired, withering glance in his direction before finding her purse and her shoes.
On the walk down to the bodega on the corner of their block, she let herself think about their youth. The shimmering parties, the way they had been reckless and champagne-splashed once, blurry, and how Augustine had made his way in and out of half the young men’s beds in the city, though Mercy had only ever warmed one other’s. Cristabel.
Mercy and Augustine had met through Cristabel, and through Alfred, Augustine’s brother, who had attended college together. While Alfred and Cristabel spoke at length about their classes, Mercy and Augustine began to trade barbs, each out-witting the other. Bottomless mimosas at midday brunches, familiarity, though they were halfway strangers, and the confident knowledge that these days would be forgotten in the shifting sands of youth.
Augustine had moved in with his brother after a series of bad-luck decisions that he never spoke of, only to mention a man named John and wild lies about why he could never return to the West Coast. Cristabel and Alfred shared the apartment at the time. After a while, Mercymorn moved into the spare bedroom. She worked at her desk job and provided a steady income for all four of them, Cristabel and Alfred’s part-time student jobs supplementing Augustine's dispassion for working, but miraculous ability to produce money when it came down to the wire, failed. Perhaps he had been independently wealthy, but that didn’t explain why Alfred worked. Perhaps he was an elaborate con man running an embezzlement scheme. But that didn’t explain why he lived in a three-bedroom with his brother and two lesbians.
Maybe it was his lack of ambition to get a real job. It suited him fine to sit around the house and bury himself in books, and he didn’t have any real pressing needs to take care of. Not like Cristabel - going to school for social work, eyes burning bright every time she talked about her class, or Alfred, the future college professor, as dedicated to the students he TA’d for as his clerical job in the college’s front office. Not even like Mercymorn, little accountant in a mid-sized firm. Augustine called himself a writer, but really did little writing, choosing instead to scribble illegible notes into the marginalia of the books he bought. Mercymorn supposed it was, at least, something to keep him busy. In those days her view of him had been indulgent.
It was as if she had been sitting on the beach suntanning herself before the rays turned harsh and her skin burned. Cris’ lips on her neck. Cris’ fingers in her hair, tenderly putting it in a French braid after combing it out. Mercymorn always wore those braids down the back of her head until they fell out and she had to wash her hair, but Cristabel was always there to rebraid it fresh.
How easily they could go out in public together, two men and two women, and how simple it was for all four of them to slide into a booth at a diner and, Alfred and Cristabel’s laughter echoing, sit for three hours. Back then it was easy to ignore the small ways Augustine grated on her. When she weighed Cristabel’s affection in the palm of her hand, everything else was as light as fire.
Then the accident. The one where Cristabel should not have been driving, or maybe Alfred shouldn’t have been, or, more likely, neither of them. Coming home late from their university, likely on their way to surprise Mercy & Augustine. Neither survived, though the brown bag full of groceries in the back seat was untouched. Augustine had rushed to the scene, taken the bus, as quickly as he could. Both Alfred and Cristabel were dead by the time they had been pulled from the wreckage, long before the hospital. The task of identifying the bodies was left to Augustine. Mercymorn had come later, as soon as she could beg off from work.
Two awful days later, she had gotten the car from the impound lot and opened the bag, tomatoes rotting whole on the vine, burst open, the thick stench of onions and garlic gone off in the heat. She assumed that Cristabel was hurrying home to surprise her with homemade pasta sauce. A big family dinner.
Often, she thought about the evening they could have had, and the life that could have come after. Instead, there was a long slog of paperwork, and bills, and an empty double funeral in a small room where no one came. Cristabel’s family did not contact them, and Alfred and Augustine only had one another.
Six months later, she married Augustine. It was the only thing left to do. They took over the lease and stayed there for twenty-five years, rent-controlled and fussy, descending into middle age with a whimper instead of a bang.
And now she was headed down to the bodega for their nightly bottle of wine (liter-and-a-half, none of the smaller bottles would do anymore), and eggs, and a hot bag of crispy falafel. They were more than regulars - well, Mercy was, Augustine hardly left the apartment - and the man behind the grill knew when he saw her that she was going to order thirty falafels, a medium tub of hummus with olives, and grab a bag of bread. He also told her, a note of pride in his voice, that he had remembered to stock the kind of wine they liked.
Maybe it would be a two-bottle night after all. She could use the exercise, carrying it up the steps of their building.
Sweat-slick and cruising, twenty minutes later, she burst into their apartment and promptly tripped over Augustine’s shoes on the front carpet.
“How many times have I told you that you need to put your shoes in the closet? On the nice shoe rack I got for us both?”
“The nice shoe rack you got is covered with your shoes.” He didn’t move a muscle, and she dumped the groceries on the counter.
“There’s room for yours as well.” A pointless argument. Augustine didn’t dignify it with a response. Mercy pulled one of the two bottles of wine out of the drooping paper bag and uncorked it.
“Don’t do that, you have to let the wine breathe,” he said, pushing her hands away from the bottle as she stood on her tiptoes to get a glass from the top shelf of the cabinet. Augustine took pleasure in putting the wine glasses in increasingly creative places that Mercy couldn’t reach, and Mercy took pleasure in retrieving them herself.
“It’s ten-dollar-wine. And it’s a white.”
”You have to let the wine breathe.”
At least the falafels were still crispy. She dumped the bag out onto the big plate, the one that was supposed to be used for Thanksgiving dinners and crumpled the paper.
“Put something on the TV,” Mercy ordered, waiting for the wine to breathe and using chopsticks to pick up a falafel and dip it into hummus, ever fastidious.
The old CRT TV flickered to life - old enough that it could legally be drinking the wine with them - and the familiar sounds of Frasier’s ending theme filled their little living room. Onscreen, Frasier argued with Martin about Eddie and the chair to canned laughter. It filtered over the tinny speakers. The heat in the apartment refused to break.
After four falafels, Mercymorn got up to pour herself a glass of wine. She plunked two ice cubes into a wide-bottomed wine glass and filled it far too full. Then, thoughtfully, she poured Augustine the same amount sans ice cubes.
“A toast,” Augustine said lazily. “To us.”
Mercy’s upper lip twitched. “To us. And to the air conditioner.”
For the first glass, they sipped companionably, the narrow window where they could tolerate one another charitably widening. The yellowed lace curtains fluttered in the sluggish breeze, finally bringing a measure of air into the apartment. The TV crackled the Frasier theme, “...Hey, baby, I hear the blues-a-callin’, tossed salad and scrambled eggs…” and Mercy got up to refill her glass.
The scrunched oval of her mouth had relaxed, and her shoulders lost their tension. She was swaying from foot to foot, bringing the wine bottle with her to the couch and stepping out of her kitten-heel pumps. A few strands of hair had come loose from her tight bun. She had never quite learned how to French-braid her own hair.
“Top us off,” Augustine said lazily, extending the glass to her, holding it by its round bottom and swaying the little bit of skin-warmed wine around the bottom.
“Yes, dear,” she said, only a little bite in her voice.
“Times like this I remember why I married you.” She scoffed, but an echo, not really taking offense. After twenty-five years, getting drunk together, living the same day over and over in frozen amber - you couldn’t fault her for phoning in the occasional biting comment. You couldn't fault him, either, for choosing not to slice as deeply as he could into her. The slump of his shoulders, the way her head tilted back to catch the last rays of sun - it was evident.
“Why did you marry me, Augustine?” Tiredly.
“Your ever-nurturing spirit and boundless sense of humor.”
Not “I loved you,” or “It seemed like the thing to do,” or, the real reason, “There was nothing else left for us.”
There were only so many puckered little faces she could make at him.
“And your health insurance,” he added. “Your stable job.”
“I’d almost prefer you lied to me. Mercymorn and Augustine, romance without end. Boundless love. Oh, how the fairytale princes and princesses would sigh when they thought of us! A three-bedroom apartment and an accounting career! Star-crossed,” she said dryly, the alcohol heavy and unlocking her tongue.
“Things could have been different.”
“No,” she said, face closed off, knuckles white on her wine glass. “They could not, Augustine.”
“If Cristabel and Alfred had lived-”
“Don’t talk to me about them. Don’t ever talk to me about them.” She stood.
“Wait,” he said, catching her hand. “Joy.”
“You don’t even call me by my name.”
“Do you remember our honeymoon?” he asked. The sun had sunk down well below the horizon and cool air was beginning to blow back into the apartment. “The road trip. As far west as we could make it, until the car broke down in Provo and we took the train all the way back here.”
“Of course, I remember. I almost got fired for that.” He let her hand go, but she didn’t move.
“But you didn’t, and we made it back.”
“No thanks to you.” Her spine relaxed, but she didn’t sit again.
“Do you remember what we ate? The strawberries, the chocolates. Not a single real meal the whole time.”
“Mostly because of the vodka.” A small smile on her lips. “Some good it did us.”
“Drunk for two straight weeks. We were just kids,” he said, and unless one knew him better, one would believe he was speaking fondly.
“Where are you going with this?” She looked at her bedroom door half-longingly, then back at him on the couch, feet thrown up on an ottoman.
“Same place as you.”
“You’re drunk, you old fool.”
“And so are you!”
“Come sit. Jeopardy’s coming on.” He patted the cushion next to him. “More wine.”
There was only one thing left to do: Mercymorn uncorked the second bottle of wine, another liter and a half, and brought it wholesale to the squat little coffee table now stained with several decades’ worth of stains. Then she settled on his right side, where the couch cushions were comfortably molded to her form and put her feet up too.
“Use a napkin,” she scolded as he sloshed a little down his front and dabbed at it with his sleeve. “You’re an animal.” He shrugged with one shoulder, wine-slow, and leaned his head to rest on her shoulder.
This was the sum of their marriage, two drunks on their thirty-year-old couch watching Jeopardy,, rehashing the same conversations over and over, but settling into one another at the end of the night.
“Are they going to have Ken Jennings on again?” Augustine half-slurred.
“That was fifteen years ago,” Mercy said, punching the volume button up two or three times. “He’s not coming back on.”
“He might.”
“He won’t.” Her nose twitched.
In the window, the air conditioner announced its screechy resurrection and began to blow chilled air toward them on the couch. Augustine had not fixed it, but something - maybe divine intervention - had given it the power of a sluggish cool breeze. Not enough, not nearly enough, but something.
“Finally,” Mercymorn said, closing her eyes and leaning back. “I’ll sleep comfortably tonight.”
Next to her, her husband’s head lolled heavily on her shoulder, soft snore leaking from his mouth, and she reached over and plucked the wineglass from his hand, dumping its contents into hers before setting it on the table, grabbing the remote, and surfing aimlessly through broadcast channels late into the night.