Sunday fiction: Sugar

By Jim Noonan

So it was no surprise that morning as he looked over his day planner that he felt no alarm at the course his penciled notes charted:

1). Shop for groceries
2). Pick up dry cleaning
3). Kill Rose

**

Often the death of an extraordinary person is presaged by events that, if one is sensitive or intuitive enough to read, can forewarn and perhaps forestall the inevitable. But Charlie Adams wasn’t an extraordinary person. He was ordinary in nearly every measure of his life.

Still, where he lacked sensitivity or intuition, Charlie had an ability to organize and when he had set his mind to a thing, a single-mindedness of purpose. So it was no surprise that morning as he looked over his day planner that he felt no alarm at the course his penciled notes charted:

1). Shop for groceries
2). Pick up dry cleaning
3). Kill Rose

Charlie waited until he heard his wife in the shower, then went to the kitchen, emptied the sugar bowl into the trash, and carefully refilled it from the Ziploc baggy. He left the house and drove to a diner to wait. As he drove, he passed the parking lot where late one night a figure had materialized from behind a dumpster.

“You looking for this?” the figure croaked, his face hidden deep within the shadow of a hooded sweatshirt. He held out a Ziploc sandwich bag.

Charlie was surprised by the bag’s weight. “Looks like sugar.”

“And a hell of a lot sweeter. Especially for your purposes.” The shadow growled, “You said a thousand?”

Charlie handed him an enveloped stuffed with twenties. “This won’t leave a trace?”

The shadow laughed a brittle cough, “Trust me, I’m a fuckin’ chemist. It’ll look like a heart attack.”

“You sure?” Charlie asked, but the man was gone.

At the diner, Charlie poked at his breakfast with a fork. He knew Rose would be beginning her day exactly like she did every day. Once showered, she would dress in the clothes she had laid out the night before, the purple satin heels, the black slacks and white top, the bracelets and rings arrayed on the dresser. She would stand before her mirror and pronounce herself “Perfect.” In the kitchen she would pour a single cup of coffee, carefully ladling in four spoonfuls of sugar from the bowl on the counter. She would sit reading her paper until the coffee was cool enough to down in a gulp. Then she would leave for her errands. Charlie shuddered at the inevitable routine of it.

He waited until noon then returned to the house. In the kitchen, a fresh, cellophane-wrapped plate of cookies sat on the table. A note card taped to it announced in Rose’s brutish handwriting:

Don’t even THINK about eating these. They’re for my bridge club tonight – Rose.

Charlie laughed and brushed the note aside. He reached for the sugar bowl but stopped, suddenly afraid to touch it. He remembered a different sugar bowl, a fine porcelain bowl his mother had given him on their wedding day, its hand-painted roses, gentle round base, and delicate handles. He remembered the morning a few weeks after their wedding when he heard Rose screaming in the kitchen and ran to see what was wrong. She pointed at the bowl, her face distorted in a wild grin. “There’s no goddamn sugar in this bowl. How am I supposed to have my coffee?”

“Sorry,” he said as he pulled a bag of sugar from the cabinet and quickly shoveled four spoonfuls into her cup.

She shrieked, “You put that sugar in my coffee?”

Charlie looked at her bewildered. “Sugar is sugar. It’s okay…”

“That sugar came from the bag. The sugar for my coffee has to come from the bowl. Do you understand?”

“What’s the difference?” he muttered. There was a flash of her hand and an explosion of porcelain against the refrigerator.

“That’s the difference!” she shouted. “Now clean this goddamn mess up.”

Then she said something Charlie would hear again and again throughout their marriage. He could hear it in his head now as clearly as if she were in the room, “Cheer up, Charlie. You didn’t expect to get a rose without a few thorns, did you?”

***

A few hours later when the phone rang, Charlie was in his recliner, a half-empty plate of cookies in his lap. He didn’t hear Roses’ voice squawking from the answering machine, “Put sugar on your grocery list, asshole. We’re out. Couldn’t even enjoy a cup of coffee this morning. Had to use what was left in the bowl for my cookies. And you know how much I hate doing that.”

**

Jim Noonan studied creative writing at the State University of New York—Binghamton, haunted by the ghost of John Gardner.  His stories come to him like vapor coalescing—magically, of their own volition. He is learning to be still and listen. And he’s appreciating a new audience with Castlemaine Independent.