A Job You Mostly Won't Know How to Do

by Pete Fromm

“Forward. Backward.” She shrugs. “Past? Present? Hell, future?”

  She stares at him so long he has to turn to her. Is startled senseless by her tears.

  She swipes at them. As if caught. “I can’t stand watching you creep out to your shop anymore.”

  Taz wipes off the beard. First one side. The other. Like shaving.

  “For christ’s sake.” She drops to her knees beside the tub. “Lean forward,” she says.

  He sits up. “El.”

  She pushes him forward. Starts rubbing his shoulders. Fingers digging deep. His muscles a knotted mess. “Do you even know what you’re doing to yourself? I mean, how long would you have stayed out there? What are you going to build? An ark?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got to come back,” she says. “Wherever you are, you’ve got to leave it behind.” One hand leaves his shoulders. An emptiness. The other goes still as she swipes again at her face. “And I was even thinking maybe I should get in there with you,” she says. “My great big, stupid plan. Like some, I don’t know, human sacrifice. Like you and me screwing everything up would solve anything. Bring you back from the dead. Jesus, I should have brought candles. Drawn pentagrams.”

  “El, it’s going to—”

  “You just shut up. Please. I don’t want to hear one word from you.”

  She starts again, both hands, but then gives him a shove. Gets up quick. “God. I have to go. I won’t get there till dark thirty as it is.”

  “You can go in the morning,” he says.

  “What, at four? Great plan.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “So we all three die flying off some cliff?” She picks the bowl off the chair. “I can’t even believe I’m in here. I mean, you’re in the bathtub. I’m the babysitter. Is it catching? What you’ve got?”

  “We can—”

  She shoves the bowl at him. “Here. Just eat your chili.”

  “Chili?” he says.

  “You got it. All No Biggie.”

  She leaves the door open. The draft sweeping in when she opens the front door.

  Marn, all awe, but sounding hurt somehow, sad, says, You made your Muppet cry.

  He shivers. Listens to Midge, still bouncing, telling some sort of story. To nobody.

  DAY 437

  Over the next week he works with Midge. Tries to get across the distinctions between Mama and Elmo, as if she’s coming back. He makes no progress whatsoever. She knows Mo. She always wants Mo. He’s not sure if it means more, or Elmo. Both, maybe. More Elmo. Mo’ ’Mo.

  Avoiding Alisha, he finishes the cabinets, waits for Rudy to get back from Nevada, does what he can on his own.

  He’s still out in the shop when Rudy finally calls, still road bleary, asks if he needs a hand.

  “Kinda been waiting,” Taz says. “It’ll be for more than a couple of days.”

  “Perfect.”

  “You want to come over? First thing tomorrow? We could use both trucks.”

  “Why don’t we get together, discuss this over a beer? I’m flat desiccated.”

  Taz spins a square on the surface of the workbench. “Man, Rude, that’s sounds good, but, you know, I’m wiped, I’ve got to go in, let Alisha go home, feed Midge—”

  “Dude,” Rudy says. “Just come on in. We’ll talk about it.”

  Taz leans over, pushes open the shop door, looks across the yard to his house. Sees Rudy waving from the kitchen window, phone pressed to his ear, beer raised in the other hand.

  “What the—”

  “Just you know, being neighborly, getting acquainted.” He grins and slips his phone into his pocket, tips his beer toward Taz.

  DAY 438

  First thing next morning, Rudy backs in toward the shop, nipping the garbage cans. Like any day.

  Taz stands aside, waits for him to swing the door open.

  Rudy steps down, cradling his coffee mug. “Too nice a day for work,” he starts. “We should be out fishing. Teaching the little shaver a solid roll cast.”

  Used to it, Taz just follows him to the shop, saying, “Mm-hmm,” and they pull up the overhead door and Rudy whistles. “Things of beauty, Davis,” he says. “Things of beauty.” They could have been taking trash to the dump. He always says that. He takes a pull on his mug.

  “Speaking of things of beauty,” Taz says. “Alisha?”

  “Friend-zoned. Big time. She’s got things she needs to work through.”

  “God,” Taz says. “Who doesn’t?”

  “Exactly what I told her. I said, ‘Man, look at Taz, you know?’ But, I’m going African wild dog, run her to ground. Persistence, you know?”

  Taz says, “Your only hope.”

  “Cold, man,” Rudy says. “Fricking Antarctica. But the Rude does persist.” He thumps a cabinet with the side of his fist. “This one?”

  Taz looks, says, “The long one first,” and they load Rudy’s truck. He pulls out to the street and Taz backs in. “Should have used your trailer,” Taz says.

  “I meant to ask you about that. Last night.” Rudy smiles. “Forgot.”

  “Yeah, well, you were kind of preoccupied. The whole wild dog thing.”

  Taz dodges inside to say good-bye to Midge and Alisha, and Rudy follows, saying his own good-byes.

  Midge waves like a madman still. Shouts, “Bye-bye!”

  Back out on the porch, he tells Rudy the address but Rudy says, “Really? I’ll forget it before I’ve pulled out of here. You know that. I’ll just follow. Same as ever.”

  And he does, across the Bitterroot, already winter low, then up the creek, climbing Blue Mountain. Air too rarified for mere mortals. Taz pulls into the circle drive, the fresh asphalt gleaming, and Rudy slides in beside him, backs up to the door. He climbs out, looks around, grinning. “S’pose they’ve spent a winter here yet?”

  He always says that, amazed at the rich, their whims.

  “No idea,” Taz says. “No interest beyond the check.” He always says that, too, but it’s never quite true. He makes everything as if it were for his house, his and Marnie’s, something he can’t help, something they argued about. “We can’t afford you building pianos,” a line she’d stolen from what little he’d told her of his father, bulling through every job at light speed. “Goddamn it, Taz, we’re not building pianos!” Though his father would have built a piano the same way. With a chainsaw. An auger. A maul.

  “At some point,” Marn told him, “you have to consider, you know, profit?” She spoke as if he were twelve, while he stood mixing rottenstone with mineral oil, his buffing slurry, leaning down to catch the reflection, make sure the gleam was even. A rolltop the customer had to have, had to have him make, to match the wainscot he’d put into the den, the raised-panel walnut. A piece of Victorian England on a Montana mountainside. “You’re not a furniture maker,” she said, but he’d only looked down at the desk, worked the top half up, half down. “Looks like furniture to me,” he said.

  “Aargh.” She slapped her forehead. “It is furniture. That’s not what I mean and you know it. It’s weeks of work, you and your hand-sawed dovetails. Your fricking hand-rubbed finish.” She tried to ease up, to smile, even reaching out, taking his arm, giving it a little shake. “Save all this goodness for us, Taz. These clowns? They’ll never know the difference.”

  “They’re paying thousands,” he said.

  “Which works out to about a month at seventy-five cents an hour for someone who usually shops at IKEA.”

  “What?” he said. “You want me to be like—who?” He groped for a name of a hack she’d know. “Taylor?”

  “Taylor’s not living in a half-demoed fixer-upper,” she said right back, and though he saw the blink of her surprise, knowing she’d gone too far, he said, “Maybe you should go live with him then.”

  Her jaw tightened, eyes narrowed. “Maybe,” she said. You couldn’t back her down with a bulldozer.

  She turned back inside, the bills still in her hand, and he went back
to his polishing, but her last jab hung with him, got him wondering if, for the buyers, all his work was only darker stuff in their vacation home, a contrast for the paint. His desk a place to let the junk mail stack up. That IKEA would have done it for them just the same.

  That night he’d come in, hoping, but she still sat surrounded by bills, her glasses on, blew some hair back up off her forehead, shook her head. “Your desk has put us back in the hole. Jesus, we can barely pay for all that walnut. Eyed burl, of course.”

  “I’ll ask them for more.”

  “They don’t give more, Taz. How do you think they got rich to begin with?”

  “Parents?” he said.

  “Even so, they work to stay that way.”

  Clinging to his hope, he stepped behind her. “We’re going to be fine,” he said. Put a hand on her shoulder. Let it slide down her front, a finger between the buttons.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she said, leaning away, slapping her hand down on the paperwork. “Which aren’t we going to pay this month? The electric or the water? Which do you want less?”

  He pulled his hand back. “I’ll go knock out some footstools,” he said. “Plywood. You and Taylor can sell them at the farmers’ market.”

  “Better make it snappy,” she called out after him.

  Behind him now, Rudy says. “So, this is close enough? They just wanted all this stuff up here in the back of our trucks?”

  Taz looks up at the massive double doors, over to Rudy. Then back at their trucks. “No,” he says, “I suppose they want them inside.”

  “Well, I’m on the clock. Whenever you’re ready.”

  They’re moving in the last of the second truck when Rudy says, “Where do you go?”

  “Go?”

  “When you stall out like that. Like at the front door. Where are you?”

  Taz gets the front end of the upper through the kitchen door, backs up while Rudy swings his end around. “Nowhere,” he says.

  They set the cabinet down in front of the others in the kitchen and Rudy holds up his hands, not quite keeping in a tiny snort. “You don’t have to tell the Rude a thing. I respect that.”

  “Rude,” Taz says. “if you have to know, it’s Marn. That’s where I go.”

  Rudy’s face falls. “That’s cool,” he says, looking nothing at all like he means it.

  They get to work, getting the uppers in first, then start on the lowers. “You talk to her mother at all?” Rudy asks.

  “Been holding off.”

  “For what?”

  “Just trying this out. No Grandma, no Elmo. See if we can make it.”

  “You want to make it that way? Alone?”

  “It was not exactly the plan,” Taz says. “But now . . .” He lets it trail off.

  “You know how many guys she drove wild, when she was at the Club?”

  Taz backs out, stands up, stretches his back. “Rudy, do we have to?”

  “Well?”

  “One, that I can see.”

  “Guilty,” Rudy says. “As charged. But, well, they all kind of do that to me.”

  “So?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Saying what, for christ’s sake?”

  “That I’d be jazzed.”

  “Rudy, you ever consider English? Like maybe as a second language?”

  “Elmo,” he says. “You know, thinking maybe there’s a chance there. I’d be jazzed. Seriously.”

  Taz leans forward, grabs Rudy by the shoulder, leans in close. “Rudy, I know you’re not used to ideas, and once one takes hold, it’s not an easy thing for you to shake, but this time try, okay?”

  “Okay, okay,” Rudy says. “But, man, that’s just a drag.”

  “She was the babysitter, Rudy. Midge’s babysitter.”

  “You’re killing me with the past-tense stuff.”

  “Well, she’s not here anymore, is she?”

  Rudy whistles, slow and sorrowful.

  “Jesus,” Taz says. “You ready to get the drawers, the shelves?”

  “Countertops?”

  “The stone guys got those.”

  They walk through the long hallway, through the foyer, out to the trucks, Taz leading the way.

  “Just one thing,” Rudy says behind him.

  Taz groans.

  “No, for real.”

  “Okay. Spit it out. But if this is about Elmo—” He stops, starts to draw his hammer out of its loop.

  “Well, there is a lot I could say on that subject,” Rudy says, stepping around to get the truck between them. “But, I was just wondering.”

  “Wondering what, Rude?”

  “Tazmo and Rude. Any chance that much might be a real thing?”

  “You’re asking me?” he says, “About the future?” Taz drops his hammer back down. “Hell, Rude, I’ve got no idea about tomorrow, let alone whatever’ll come next.”

  Rudy steps into his truck, leaves the door open. “So, back to the shop? Pick up the next load? That’s all?”

  “It’s about as far as I can get.”

  Reversing the order, Taz follows Rudy down the mountain, no Mo to the Tazmo, no Midge on the installs, not even the car seat in the truck.

  Marnie startles him when she says, You know, it’s not a dirty word.

  He downshifts for the switchback, watches Rudy’s bumper.

  The future, she says. It’s where you’re headed, you can’t help that.

  He doesn’t answer, just shifts again, letting gravity do the work, pulling him down the mountain.

  It’s not a bad thing, Taz. Remember? We could hardly wait to get there ourselves.

  DAY 443

  They work all week, twelve-hour days, more, Alisha helping out a little longer, through dinner, Taz bringing Midge days Alisha’s in school. Rudy lifts, holds, runs the level, climbs the ladders, but otherwise plays with Midge, keeps her away from the tool bucket, the nailers. Taz squeezes her food into his lunch cooler. Some toys into Rudy’s tool bucket. Changes diapers on brand-new kitchen counters. They’ll never know.

  Stiff, sore, exhausted, he plods in every night, the house dark, Midge all but unconscious on his shoulder. He sings her a few songs, tells one short installment of Marnie the Mariner, then slides her into the crib, her thumb in her mouth. He tiptoes away, eases the door half shut, flips on a light, sits, gathers himself before reaching down and untying his boots. Toeing them off. Eventually he forces himself all the way up, gets the mail. Bills. Junk.

  Trying to stay on top of things, he lines the bills up on the table the way Marnie did. Cuts them open with his utility knife. Knows he has to.

  He looks at totals, due dates. The numbers swim, and he leans over, head in his hands. If he closes his eyes, he’ll be out where he sits. With all the work, things do look better. Until he lines up the bills. The house payment right on top, crushing as ever. Even with the first-half check folded in his pocket, the owner doing a surprise walk-through this afternoon, ecstatic, pulling out his tooled leather checkbook. He’d glanced over at Midge in her walker, lifted an eyebrow, but didn’t ask. Some sordid divorce, no doubt. The working class. The pathetic masses.

  He pulls out the check, sets it down on top of the bills. Maybe enough to get him through the rest of the year. He’ll have to put the ad on Craigslist for Marnie’s Ghia.

  He pushes at the mail stack, beyond the bills. A Costco flyer. A credit card app. Something stiff, like cardboard.

  A postcard.

  He sees the picture. Helena. The bright lights of Last Chance Gulch.

  He turns it over. “You going to make it another weekend without me?”

  A postcard?

  He takes his phone from his tool pocket, changes his mind, puts it down. “Yeah,” he says, to the empty room, “we’ll make it.”

  Marn says, I don’t think she’s talking just brute survival.

  He picks the phone back up, types, “Got your card. We’re hanging in there.”

  His phone buzzes almost instan
tly. “Good for you two.”

  He looks away from Marn’s I told you so, texts back, “Everything OK over there?”

  “Hanging in there.”

  Marnie says, Ouch.

  Taz has no idea what to say, holds the phone so long it goes black. He puts it on the postcard, spins it.

  I think she’s waiting, Marnie says.

  Minutes pass before it lights up, buzzes. “Okay then,” she says. “Off to bed. A room full of third graders always comes too early.”

  He picks up the phone, clicks to see if maybe she’d called before resorting to postcards, if somehow he’d missed it. But there’s only one from Lauren. He knows he wouldn’t have missed it.

  Hardly aware of his hands, he pushes call back instead of voicemail, and clicks and clicks to get it to stop, hears one ring before it shuts off. He just doesn’t have it in him. Not tonight.

  Leaving the phone, he pushes back his chair, wanders into the kitchen, knows he should get something to eat. But he sees his computer, wonders since she’s using the post office, if maybe she emailed. He swings the lid up, waits, and waits, and sees nothing but the blank circle of his parents’ Skype dot, just two missed calls, both late, his mom waiting until his dad’s asleep. He wonders what it’s like down there for her, with him, and slowly shuts the computer. He wonders, too, what it’s like for Lauren, just sitting, waiting for the life ring of his call.

  After looking over El’s texts once more, not a lot for analysis or hope, he shuts down the lights, walks through his empty house in the dark, and finds his way into the little bed in Midge’s room as if it’s the only walk he’s ever taken. Listening to her breathe, he drifts off, the night a tangled spin of Marnie and Elmo, even Lauren, his own mother. Midge sleeps through it all and when he wakes in the morning, he’s snarled in the sheets and his head aches. He feels less that he’s slept than that he’s been on a forced march. He drags out, starts the coffee, picks up his phone.

  Nothing from Elmo. Not a word.

  He looks at the computer, almost afraid to open it, but it’s the middle of the night there, maybe his mom’s only chance.

  The phone rings in his hand, and he smiles, thinks, “At last,” like the two of them have this connection, can tell when the other needs them most.