by Ethan Joella
She had to be so tough. Taking over the dry cleaning place in her late fifties, when all her friends were retired or retiring, when she had hardly ever written a single check. The kids said she had enough money (the savings, Social Security, his pension), but she felt vulnerable. She got a business going she knew nothing about. She read for nights and nights about how dry cleaning worked, and how to outsource most of the cleaning and pressing services while still pulling in a nice profit.
She has had to stand up straight these ten years, pretend she has grit when she feels she has nothing.
She faces the keypad outside the garage and slowly punches in her code. The motor starts to hum, and the door lifts slowly. She feels as though she’s in a horror film, about to see something terrible. She holds her purse and hugs it against her body.
Her eyes adjust to the darkness. Her foot kicks a small piece of glass—probably one the garage people missed when they swept up the mess.
First, there is just dust, as there always is: dust on the headlights, dust on the hood with the swirl she made with her fingers the last time she was here. Dust on the tires that have lost their air, dust particles in the sun that peeks through the broken window. On the wall is an old poster she didn’t put there with a war bond slogan—Care Is Costly—featuring a soldier with a troubled expression, a bandage wrapped around his knee. She focuses on the car, and sees what they’ve done.
“Von,” she says, and her lips are so dry. “Your car.”
She walks over and touches the hood. Broken glass from the side window. I could have fixed that, she thinks. Glass is glass. But then she sees the gashes in the convertible top. Three gashes each at least six inches long. She walks closer. An empty Doritos bag inside, a cigarette burned into the leather seat. “Hoodlums,” she whispers.
She wants to promise Von she will fix it. She has learned from his dying that there is much she can do. She has also learned some things are unfixable. Which is this?
His 1964 Lancia. How he worshipped that car. It hardly left their own garage for twenty-five years. He would wash it weekly without fail, rub that special cream polish into its seats. He would get that flicker in his eye and say, “I think we’re taking Betsy out tonight,” and a Betsy night was always a better night. He would wear the aviator sunglasses he kept in the glove box, and he would smile when she’d take that scarf out of her purse and wrap it around her curls. “Ooh, the movie star’s with me.”
She never should have brought Betsy here. She failed Von by putting her into storage. She hiccups with guilt and makes a noise that sounds like a sob. She wants to find the people who did this. She wants to hold their shoulders, shake them and ask if they knew what kind of man her husband was.
In the trunk is a soft wool blanket. Do they know how many times Von took her to the overlook and they sat on that blanket and stared at stars? Do they know how he covered their children with that blanket at a drive-in picture?
She wants to kick something.
She thinks she could kick Betsy, even.
Darcy is ashamed. She always thought she’d come here one day and rescue the car. Wash it again the way he used to, or take it on a road by herself where the trees were high, and the breeze would blow through her hair, and she’d miss Von properly—finally—but she’d tell him she was okay. Look at me doing this. Driving her for you.
The truth is she couldn’t stand looking at Betsy. Every time she’d come out to their garage to get into her own car, the sight of Betsy would give her a sudden leap of hope: just that second-long trick was too much. She had gotten rid of Von’s truck when he was sick. “I ain’t gonna be hauling concrete blocks anywhere anymore,” he said. “But when I’m better, we’ll take Betsy all the time.”
She remembers first telling their son, Luke, about the rental garage. Sweet broken Luke—broken from his girlfriend, Ginger, leaving; broken from his father dying; broken from the pain of always being too sensitive and never being able to shake things off. She remembers his sullen face when she handed him the keys so they could put Betsy in storage, and she followed him the five miles in her car.
How she watched Betsy with regret that day, its navy blue body gleaming, its simple red taillights, its small rectangular window and cloth top. It was wrong to be putting the car in storage, wrong to have made Luke drive it with all his father’s touches still inside—Von’s sunglasses in the glove compartment, his plastic bag of quarters for the tolls.
She pauses now and thinks about Luke in the driver’s seat. How defeated he must have felt putting his dad’s car away for good. Maybe that’s what led him further into that world: the pills, the drinking, the—whatever else.
Maybe she had asked too much of him by having him help her do such a heartbreaking task. Wasn’t that the person she always was—the woman who asked too much of everyone? Making their daughter, Mary Jane, practice and practice the scales on the piano when she was in junior high, shaking her head at Luke because he wore a shirt that was too wrinkled, getting the lawn service to come back because they left some grass clumps around her alstroemeria bed.
She clutches her purse and walks away from the garage. She will be relieved to get back in her own car. To run to the market for muffins, and to the bank with yesterday’s deposit. She will relish being at the cleaners where she can sit in her small office for a few minutes and settle herself.
That day they brought Betsy here, Luke stepped out of the driver’s seat. She can still see the scene as if it’s a clip played on repeat. The car made that soft clicking sound it always did after it was driven. The interior light switched off when he gently closed the door. Luke put his hand to the windshield and glanced inside one last time. She remembers thinking how he looked like a young Von then: the light whiskers on his face, the way his shoulders slumped just a bit, his ears, his jaw.
“That’s that, Mom,” Luke said. He held the keys with the plastic Hula dancer on the key chain in his palm. He smelled vaguely of cigarettes. He looked at his feet, and Darcy said nothing. She was always too complicated a woman, too restrained. He worshipped his father. Those two hardly ever fought. Von would always be thumping him on the back or flicking his ear. “Hey, Lukey,” he’d say.
The day they put Betsy away, she should have gotten out of the car. She should have hugged Luke. She should have just given him the keys and let him take Betsy. What would that have meant to him?
She longs to have a do-over. She would go back to that day. She would stand beside her son, reach for his shoulder the way other mothers do. She would have said something smart like, “I know, dearie. I know.”
* * *
Darcy opens the door of Crowley Cleaners. The stereo is not on, and the room seems odd without the usual sound of “Mainly News,” an NPR segment she looks forward to. She hears the hammering sound of the sewing machine in the back.
Tabitha, the thin college girl who works the register two mornings a week, gives a shy wave. “Hey, Mrs. C,” she says.
“Good afternoon, Tabby,” Darcy says. “I brought mini pumpkin muffins for anyone who’s interested.”
“Definitely me,” Tabitha says. She gently plucks a napkin from the pile Darcy places on the counter. Her fingers hover over the tiny brown muffins and she picks the smallest one.
The sewing machine whirrs behind them, and Darcy can see the seamstress Frederica in her cubicle, hunched over the green paisley bridesmaid dresses for that wedding. They look like a tapestry, not like wedding attire. She wonders what kind of wedding Luke would have had if he had married Ginger, that sweet girl who called the house all the time. The one who went on to become a veterinarian in Georgia.
Behind Frederica are spools of thread and a bright spotlight angled on the sewing machine. Darcy wonders if Frederica will be able to see the redness in her eyes, the tiredness of her face under the makeup, but when Frederica looks up, there is something parallel in her expression. Something so defeated or frightened that it almost makes Darcy gasp.
Darc
y holds her hand to her heart, and the two women stare at each other—so equivalent, it seems. Frederica’s eyes are devastated. What has happened? What has broken? She knows Frederica has a husband and daughter—a perfect family. Did he leave her? Is someone sick? Maybe one of her parents?
If Tabitha weren’t here she would go to this woman, her seamstress, a few years older than Mary Jane and Luke, pretty and fragile with her blond wisps of hair in her face. She would hug her the way she should have hugged Luke those years ago. “Whatever has happened, dear?” she would say. She hears the words exactly as she would say them: Tell me. It’ll be okay. You’ll see.
She thinks she would send her home, to go fix what’s broken. She surprises herself by feeling she would do anything to help mend this. Darcy wants to hold Frederica against her like she’s her third child. She knows, she knows, what it’s like to feel that type of pain.
“I can’t believe it’s fall,” Tabitha says as she bites a muffin.
Frederica holds Darcy’s gaze for a moment longer, and then there is the chime of the door and a burst of talking: the Peruvian woman with her two small children who sometimes bring Darcy drawings to hang below the cash register.
Darcy shrugs and watches Frederica as she shakes her head as if clearing her mind. Frederica angles one of the dresses a different way, and the machine makes its reliable pounding sound.
Oh life. Oh broken glass.
4. Hurts
Luke Crowley lies in bed, arm folded behind his head, and watches his new girlfriend, or whatever she is.
Hannah stands in the kitchen with his T-shirt over her body and pours herself a poor man’s mimosa: Korbel champagne and Turkey Hill orange drink. “Cheers,” she says, and holds it up to him.
He gives her a half smile. Her hair is mostly blond, but the ends are dipped in pink, and he likes the lines of her body: smooth long legs and the way the shirt stops just below her ass. She has two tattoos, but he likes that only he can see them and that they’re covered when they go out. He likes the earrings she wears, large hoops or the silver ones that dangle like feathers.
His mother would size Hannah up and roll her eyes. “Next in line,” she’d say, clicking her tongue. The pink hair would set her over the edge (So we’re into punk rock?). Hannah says gonna and wanna and chews too loudly. His mother would probably disappear into the kitchen and whisper a prayer, and when she’d talk to Hannah, she’d use that awkward voice, the way someone talks to a foreigner or an old person.
Oh well.
He looks at Hannah and lifts the covers. “Want to come back?” he asks. His morning voice is hoarse from too many Camels, from shouting over the music last night at Rocco’s and telling her the band sucked and he could have played better.
She winks at him. She sips her fluorescent mimosa and places it on his kitchen table—among the binder pages with his artwork, the scattered bills, the measly tips (mostly singles) from his shift Thursday night, the invitation to his niece Lizzie’s party (so colorful and promising against his sad stuff). She tiptoes in his direction over the scuffed hardwood floor and lifts the shirt over her head. “You rang?” she says.
* * *
The party is at one.
He stands out on his small balcony overlooking the city, in frayed sweatpants and no shirt, even though it’s on the chilly side, and smokes. He tried to keep a plant out here, but it died in the early frost a few weeks ago. Now it sits like a brown squid in the planter.
Another planter next to it is filled with cigarette butts, and there is a folding chair someone was throwing away. The city is gray today, and a couple walks by in J.Crew-style coats holding hands, gripping white coffee cups, making the most of the morning. A fit woman jogs by in a sports bra and leggings, and a father and little daughter come out of Let’s Bagel with a large paper bag. The girl wears ladybug boots and marches ahead. Luke blows smoke out of his nose.
He has got to clear his head. The party is at one. He hates when things are at one. Too in the middle. Either be at ten in the morning or six in the evening. He hates the middle of the day.
It takes at least thirty minutes to get from Wharton to his sister’s house in Middletown. His sister, Mary Jane, has probably been awake since 4 a.m., arranging the napkins in a perfect fan and trying out some alcohol-free punch recipe from Pinterest. He guesses the party will be circus-themed, since the invitation showed Lizzie in a lion tamer’s costume. Why didn’t he hide the invitation from Hannah? What if she asks to come? Should he bring her to stuff like this? He’s not ready for that. Keep that can of worms inside another bigger can, his dad would have said.
Mary Jane will have made her husband, Alvin, wire up some complicated red-and-white tent and spotlights to the garage ceiling. There will be a tower of cupcakes and a clown walking around. She may even have enlisted their mother to pass out cotton candy and small bags of popcorn. He shakes his head.
He feels his back being touched. “What are you getting her?” Hannah asks.
He cringes. She knows. He turns to look at her. The sun is in her blond hair, and there is this girlishness about her he never noticed beneath all that eye makeup. Her eyes are light green, and he imagines his father saying, She’s a looker, Luke, and doing that thing where he’d push up his eyebrows a few times. Luke lights another cigarette and keeps staring at her.
“Sorry,” she says. “I saw the invitation.”
“It’s okay.” He sighs. “Yeah, a day with the family,” he says, hoping she won’t ask to come. He touches her cheek, and he wants to love this girl. Why can’t he? Because of the disapproval from his mother, his sister? Because she’s not who he pictured he’d end up with? He sees two extra holes in her ear, and feels let down. By everything. By the day getting away, by the fact that he hasn’t bought a present for Lizzie, by the fact that he’s not showered yet and just wants to play his guitar and climb back into bed with a white pill or two. He wants to be better than this guy who stands around in the cold morning with his raspy voice. With his mistake tattoo on his rib cage, another mistake tattoo on his left shoulder.
He wants to bring Hannah to the party and not have his mother whisper to Mary Jane. For him and Hannah to be that couple he saw below with the expensive coats and coffee cups and good degrees and a Range Rover. He wants to wash that pink shit out of this girl’s hair because she’d be so beautiful without it. He wants her to wear a sensible sweater and a piece of heirloom jewelry and stop blowing bubbles with her gum. Stop chewing gum, even. He wants his own hair to be cut better. His face to be clean-shaven. Has he been clean-shaven once in years? He wants his shirt to be tucked in and pressed.
He wants to put Lizzie on his shoulders and not have people wonder if he will fall over. He wants to be asked, just one time, to babysit his niece, his favorite little person. To make a blanket fort with her in the living room and watch a Disney movie and make her some kind of cool uncle specialty sundae.
At the party he wants to say something about circuses that doesn’t sound drug fueled and foolish.
“I didn’t get a gift yet,” he says.
Hannah stoops and picks up a few stray cigarette butts and places them in the planter. “Let’s get dressed,” she says. “A kids’ store just opened on Walnut Street that has old-fashioned toys like Lite-Brites and Barrel of Monkeys. We can go there.” Her eyes are so hopeful, and he can imagine her as a younger girl. As the quiet C-plus student with clothes from Kmart whom teachers overlooked. He wonders if she had the opportunities he had (his father paying him twenty dollars to weed-whack the lawn, his mother proofreading his sixth-grade paper on Lyndon B. Johnson), and feels worse than before.
He wants to hold her hand. To tell her how some nights all he can see is his dad gasping in his hospital bed, that awful fucking tube in his throat. The way his dad lay there, pale with his muscles sagging, in that humiliating gown, loose around his neck, all those tubes and wires trailing from his arm.
He wants to tell her how his dad—the guy who lifted a
slab of granite with one hand, the guy who told Luke’s baseball coach who was twice his size he would flatten him if he ever talked to his son that way again—looked like he was drowning with that tube in his mouth. Luke’s sister sobbed, and his mother was silent, and his dad was wasting away. How his dad scribbled on a piece of paper, “Hurts.”
Hurts. How Luke has thought of that word every day for the last ten years. What do you do with hurt? All this hurt.
Luke wants to tell Hannah how it feels to disappoint your tough-bird mother (who has to say he looks tired every damn time she sees him) and your sister who is perfect and did all the right stuff with a cheerleading trophy and a graduate degree and an adorable child—and even disappoint a dead father who meant everything to you. How it feels to be the guy who can barely keep a waiter job, a gig in a band. He wants to tell her, but he doesn’t see the point. She is his sad reflection in the lake, isn’t she? She is just as hurt, drifting by in the same way. Both of them lost and broken for no apparent reason. What’s the point of talking about it?
He realizes he hasn’t responded to her suggestion about going to the toy store. “I’ll figure something out,” he finally says. “I need a shower.” He shrugs, leaving her standing there in that T-shirt, the cars going by below, her pink-tipped hair lifting in the wind, the church bell ringing faintly (maybe a wedding, maybe a funeral) in the distance.
* * *
It is noon, and he stands in the toy shop holding a Bozo the Clown Bop Bag and a wind-up scuba diver toy Lizzie can play with in the bath. Hannah was right about this place. He should have brought her. Now he regrets ignoring her attempts to help him out. God, he regrets everything these days.
He hopes no one else got Lizzie these things; he hopes they’re the type of stuff a four-year-old would play with. He hopes his credit card will go through. There is nothing worse than when that shit happens: the irritated look on the clerk’s face, what he imagines the people behind him think. He looks like a guy whose credit card gets rejected, doesn’t he? Even today in his green-and-navy-striped polo shirt and one pair of jeans that isn’t ripped. This is as close to presentable as he can get. He thinks—thinks—he paid the minimum a week ago. Forty dollars or something. He got the rent in at least.