by Pete Fromm
She goes into the kitchen, sets plates and silverware for both of them. “I kept thinking of you and Midge alone here last night. So, you know, I just figured I’d bring the tradition over, get Midge started off right. Later I can draw hand turkeys with her.”
Taz stands watching her dish it out, asking what he wants, holding her fork or spoon over every dish, loading her own plate at the same time. Finally she pulls back a chair, and says, “Bon appétit!”
“I wasn’t alone,” Taz says. “Midge was here, too.”
She picks up a little potato, a shred of turkey, tilting it toward him like a toast. “Got me there.”
Two weeks later, he’s still shaking his head over it, can’t quite get past exactly how nice it had been, though at first he’d hardly known what to do. Just sat there, listening to her tell about her life in Idaho, her asking how he’d learned to do all this wood stuff, coaxing a few stories out of him, his life chasing his dad around half-finished log palaces.
She came back the next day, and the next, working through the whole weekend, and then the weekend after that too, but today he’s got an install. A couple of trips in the truck. Which Midge loves. Watching from the car seat while he carries the cabinets. Then some level work. Some screws. He’ll bring their mobile bridge, a blanket for her. He’ll have to bring the nail gun, though, the compressor. That damn roar. He packs extra hose so he can shut the compressor in another room.
She should have a day off. Good god, she’s earned it.
He looks at his phone. Holds it in his hand. She’ll come if he calls. He knows that. Bring her homework over. Probably cook something. Have it ready for when he gets home. After having it out with Rudy, going shopping, she’d stood in front of the fridge and stared, finally asked, “What’s all this?” He told her and, fridge still hanging open, she’d looked back over her shoulder at him. “Um, maybe you should just give me the cash, and I’ll do the shopping.” She’d taken off as soon as he opened the wallet, took Midge with her, said, “Girl, we’ve got some skills to catch you up on.” That night she’d left a pot of chili. Her specialty she called it, No-Biggie-Chili. He had no idea how to stop her.
Now he opens the fridge door, pulls out the formula bottles he keeps ready. “Midge,” he calls, “we’re going to work!”
He puts the bag together, gets her into the car seat. “Heigh ho, heigh ho,” he sings, and she grins like it’s a vacation.
She cranes her neck. Kicks. Does her squawk. Maybe because she’s seen so few, new places excite her. Even an empty house. Just like her mother. They’d walked together through so many. Junkers mostly, the only thing they could try to afford. Fixer-uppers that would send the most hardened flippers screaming for the exits. Though now and then they’d walk through a showcase. Touring behind the realtor, Marnie whispering, “Okay, we don’t have to rewire, just paint over the new paint, tear out the new carpet, sandblast the bricks. Who on earth even paints brick?” In the kitchen, the realtor stepping aside with a flourish at this knockout blow, she’d whispered, “What is it about stainless? And, granite? People really want rock counters? You think we’re going to spend the rest of our lives wiping baby prints off all this stainless?” All this, years before any shadow of Midge had taken shape, had left Taz breathless.
Taz sets Midge on the screwed-down Durock, the tile guys just waiting for him to finish. Terra cotta, Taz guessed. Big squares. Glazed. Definitely granite up top. Stainless in the gaps for the dishwasher, the fridge. The cherry so obvious. Marnie’d hurl.
“Okay,” he says, looking at Midge craning in her seat, the belt holding her tight. “I’ve got to go get the cabs. I’ll be right back.”
He walks backward to the door, bumping into the wall, the door’s uncased rough opening. Monday’s work.
She watches, and as soon as he turns the corner, he dashes. He’d backed up straight to the door, the landscapers no farther than empty black pipe jutting from the broken ground. He’d already undone all the straps, had pulled the lower units to the tailgate’s end, all with Midge watching.
No screaming yet, he grabs the smaller cabinet, shoulders the nailing strip, and teeters in, careful, slow, unable to afford any gouges in the new walls, the flawless paint. He calls, “Where’s Daddy?” and when he turns around the doorway, he raises his face over the cabinet. “Peekaboo!”
Midge does her belly laugh. Like he’s a magician.
Maybe this could work.
He pulls out his tape, makes space for the door trim—all waiting in his shop, cut, sanded, stained, polyurethaned—and pushes and nudges the cabinet into place. He unrolls the plans across the top. Dishwasher next. The stubbed-out plumbing, the sink unit. The last easy one.
He plays peekaboo back to the doorway, hustles back with the sink unit. She laughs again, never weary of his one-trick act. He picks up the seat, swings her. No way he is going to be able to carry the uppers in himself. Even the long lower for the opposite wall.
Touring Midge through the house, he pulls out his phone, dials Rudy. He’ll come up, Taz knows, help haul in the long unit, go back for the uppers, help hold them up while he sets them. He’ll fight to pay him. Somehow, in the dark of the night, Taz had pictured himself doing this alone, elaborate blocking systems, temporary nailing strips. Maybe it was possible, in dreams.
Rudy’s phone goes straight to voicemail. But Taz hears an engine’s growl, the slam of a door, and he’s putting his phone back into his pocket when Marko walks in.
“Figured you could do with some heavy lifting.”
He stops when he sees Midge, who smiles at this new person. Marko rubs his jaw, unshaven, and Taz wonders what he’s given up today. Hunting? Sleeping in? Some shopping with his wife? A list of honey-dos?
“I think I can get it,” he says.
“I think what you’re going to need to get is a hard hat,” Marko says, trying to smile. “A really, really small one.”
They walk back to the truck, each take one end of the first upper, start in. “A baby on-site. My insurance guy,” Marko says, grunting it up the porch steps.
DAY 129
Rudy comes up the next day, back from the Columbia River wind farms. “The geese,” he says. “It’s like pâté everywhere.”
“Like you’d know pâté.”
“I know it now,” Rudy says, holding the other end of an upper unit, adjusting till the level zeros. Taz shoots in a nail, shuffling across to Rudy’s end, shooting in another. “Barely hanging,” he says through the screws pinched between his lips. He sets down the nailer, rechecks the level, picks up the screw gun. He drives screws into each of his pre-marks, steps back, says, “You can let go.”
Rudy steps back beside him. “Damn,” he says. “I do good work.”
Taz’s smile falters. Marnie, every single step of the house, the demolition even, she’d stepped back and said the same thing. Trimming out the door casings. Hanging the picture rail. At the first ultrasound, the underwater thumping of that tiny heart, she’d smiled up at him, “Damn, I do good work.”
“Next?” Rudy says.
Marnie rubbing her hands over the first visible bump. Her eyes widening at a kick Taz had seen from the other end of the couch. The mess of water in the bed. Damn, I do good work.
“Earth to Davis,” Rudy says.
“Um,” he says. “Just door hanging now. Thanks, Rude. I got it from here.”
Rudy follows him out to the truck, grabs a door himself. As they’re carrying them in, he says, “So, Midge strapping on the tool belt. Elmo on vacation or something?”
Taz sets his door on the cardboard he’d brought in for it. “Her first day off since you left town.”
“Slave driver. But, no complaints?”
Taz says, “Who doesn’t like a day off?”
“Soooo,” Rudy says, not quite making eye contact. “Maybe I could keep the kid busy? You know, just till you get this place wrapped.”
Taz looks between Rudy and Midge. She’s wearing out, rubbing at her
eyes with the back of her wrist, a chub of forearm, as close as she can get to a fist. “Yeah,” he says. “You guys could maybe go break out the rods, get working on her casting.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
Taz looks at him, his wool shirt, his Osprey ball cap, wings of hair curling over the edges. “She might eat,” he says. “But mostly, I think she’s just going to fall asleep.”
“Can I pick her up?” Rudy asks.
“Of course you can pick her up. Just not by the head or foot or anything.”
“Got it,” Rudy says. “So, you mind if, there’s this new girl working the Club, and, well, I was thinking if the Midge and I—”
“Maybe you could just walk her around outside a little.”
Rudy gives a low, sad whistle. “Such low ambitions. You got a blanket for her?”
“It’s under her. Everything’s all right there.”
Rudy picks her up, Midge startled for a second, then pulling at his cap. He yanks it off, puts it on her head. It slops down over her ears, her eyes. He tips it back, says, “There you are!”
She laughs, throws the cap on the floor. Points immediately for him to pick it up. He puts it on his head, tips so she can throw it back to the floor.
He gets the cap and the blanket, wraps her up. “Okay,” he says, “outside. Time to let Uncle Rude show you the wilderness.”
DAY 130
Ceiling fan–watching with Midge, Taz stands at the first sound of Elmo’s run up the porch. He’d left the door open for her, and calls for her to come in before she knocks, before she can reach for the screen.
She pulls it back, and before she’s even in, he says, “We did it. She’s getting her union card next week. You should have seen her, all weekend she—”
Elmo stands there. “Why didn’t you call?” she says.
Taz blinks. “I think Rudy’s in love,” he says, his voice faltering as it registers, her look, like an old balloon, no longer quite afloat. “I, because . . .”
Elmo doesn’t even give him a look, just steps around him. Hearing her voice, Midge has lifted her head, pushed her chest off the floor, craning. Elmo bends and scoops her off the blanket, lifts her high above her head, lowers her to her face. Midge laughs, squirms, grabs at the thick rope of her braid.
“I would have watched her,” she says.
“But, it was Saturday.”
She lets Midge tug at her braid. “I’ve done Saturdays before. Like, the last two.”
“That’s why . . . I was giving you a break.”
“Busy as you’ve been, I was hoping it’d be me and Midge all weekend.”
“But—”
“And I could have pulled a Rude. I could have watched her and helped with the cabinets.”
Taz says, “But it was just for the lifting. The heavy stuff.”
“Oh, please,” Elmo says. “I can lift things.” Holding Midge against her chest, face out to the world, Elmo curls an arm, flexes, nothing visible through her sweatshirt.
“Wow,” Taz says, “Serious guns.”
She shoots him a look. “Rudy?”
“But you should have seen him, he—”
“I know he’s your friend and everything, but, well, you can’t pretend he knows Midge from a hole in the ground.”
Taz looks at the floor. “He’s known Midge since before she was born,” he says.
She does the slightest flinch. “I’ll see you at one, okay? A quarter to. I’ve got a test. You can’t be late.”
“I won’t be late.” Taz walks around her, to the door. “I’m sorry, El. I just thought, you know, that you’ve got your own life, and maybe I was . . .”
She waves him out the door, says, “Next time, just call.”
He stops on the walk, turns toward where she stands in the doorway, holding Midge to watch him leave. Exactly how he’d pictured years of his life. The leaving and coming home. The two of them there for him to come home to. Waiting for him to come home. When she lifts Midge’s hand, waving bye-bye, he can barely take a step, barely stand.
Taz makes it back home on time, but still she flies out the door. “Test,” she says. “She just ate. She’s asleep.” He watches her run, her courier pack slapping her hip.
He steps into Midge’s room, sits on his little bed, looks through the rails of the crib.
She sucks her thumb in her sleep.
And the next time he’s got an install, Elmo doesn’t say a word, just looks at him until he asks if she wants to come along. Before he’s picked up a tool, she’s gathering Midge’s stuff as if she’s been doing it for years. And she can do the lifting, even hold the level, call for him to shoot. She loves it, acts like it’s a vacation. A job.
The time after that, he calls Rudy to watch Midge while he puts in more cabinets, but when Rudy pulls up, sees Elmo helping load the cabinets, all four of them go up. Marko’d die, but Rudy acts like it’s a picnic, brings bags of burgers, and they eat sitting on the subfloor in the kitchen, leaning back against Taz’s new cabinets.
“What’re we going to call us?” Rudy asks, his mouth full.
Taz waits for him to swallow.
“You know,” Rudy says. “For the website. Your business cards.”
Taz wonders if he’d hit his head. “What?” he says.
Without missing a beat, Elmo says, “Tazmo and Rude. It’s a natural.”
He looks from one to the other, sees them smile, his new company. His dad would laugh himself sick, and Taz can’t help smiling himself.
DAY 135
The school winter break hits without a word of warning, just Elmo coming in, telling him she’ll be gone the next week, that she’s got to go home just to prove she’s still alive. “Put in my appearance, you know. Let them know I haven’t dropped off the edge of the earth. Gone all Here Be Monsters.”
Taz says, “Sure. Of course.”
“Sorry about Tazmo and Rude.”
“What?”
“Your new company?”
He smiles. They’d been out all of three times.
“Rudy will be here, though, right? Back from wherever?”
“Yeah, we’ll be good.” He’s got no more idea when Rudy will reappear than he ever does. But he can call Marko if he has to, have him hold off whoever. He can’t, right then, remember his schedules.
But the next morning, alone in the place, he can’t quite bring himself to shuffle out back to the shop. He sips his coffee, counts only one more missed Skype from Down Under, and when Midge wakes up he loads her into the truck, tells her he’s got a surprise for her, and she loves the ride as long as she always does, most of the way out of town, before she drops off, out cold, missing everything.
She even sleeps through the dirt road, even when Taz pulls over at the one towering ponderosa, the final bank of chokecherries, the berries long since picked away by the birds, the bears maybe. He wonders if he and Marnie had made the road themselves. Or if it had been a turnaround, the scrub wall hiding the water, their beach.
Instead of undoing the seat belt, he just undoes the car seat’s chest belt, leaves the seat behind, buckled into the truck. “Swim time,” he says. He should have been out here every day. Marnie would have been.
He holds Midge tight, safe from the lash of the willows. Edges around to their hole. Stops at the sparkle of ice edging the rocks. Only reaching out an inch or less, and thin, like glass, but still, ice.
He stands staring. Looks back at the leafless willows. Up to the empty cottonwoods. Notices, at last, the carpet of dying gold and red under his boots. He looks at his watch. Studies the digital date. “December?” he says.
He goes back to the truck. Hauls the baby pack out of the bed. Left on his porch one morning. Not even a note.
He yanks off the tag, figures out the straps. Hoists her up. As soon as he’s back to the river, she kicks against his shoulders like she’s doing sprints, leans so far over toward the water she nearly topples him. She shrieks her whoop of ecstasy. Taz bites hi
s lips shut. She is Marn.
Only then, with her all loaded up, does he remember the emergency fly rod, tucked behind the truck seat in its half-smashed aluminum case. He bends in, flips the seat forward, twisting to keep from bashing Midge against the truck, and just manages to grab the rod, the reel and little fly box tucked into a Chivas Regal bag he’d found.
“You aren’t going to believe this place, Midge,” he says. “Mom’s fave of all time. And you’re about to see your first-ever brook trout. Maybe we’ll warm up with a cutthroat or two.”
Going past the swimming hole, Taz hikes upstream for the canyon. Breathing hard, he keeps up a monologue to Midge, all the times he and Marnie had been up here, camping under the stars, how many times he and Midge will make it themselves. He still can’t help but smile over her kicking and squawking and reaching, as if the river is something she needs to be in, as if it’s something she’ll get to take home with her. She loves the dance and dart of it, he guesses, the glimmer and flash, and when he can, he stands in it, her feet pounding his sides as the water works through his boots, the cold stabbing into his bones.
At the cliff face, he stops, wonders. Midge still on his back, he sets up the rod, ties on something simple, easy to see, a humpy, as if Midge will follow the action. It’s not an ideal setup for December, and with his first backcast he realizes, holy shit, that she’s right there, on his back, craning around, that one low cast will sling the hook right past her head, and he shoots the line out and lets it fall on the water, wondering if he’s ever had a dumber idea in his life, hears Marn say, Scads of them, but one cutthroat can’t let it go, and he smiles, pulling it in. He squats beside the water and holds the six inches of surprised trout up over his shoulder for Midge to see. She grabs at it, hauling it toward her open mouth, and Taz pulls back, saying, “I was just showing it to you.” Behind him Marnie laughs, barely getting out, Sweet pea, let Daddy cook it first!