by Kelly Fordon
Eunice had shrugged when she heard Zane was dead. “Not surprised,” she had said.
According to Paul, the official theory was that Zane had pulled the drunken bicycle stunt on Tina one too many times. Whatever the reason, on that particular night, he had simply crawled into the tool shed instead of pounding on the back door to get into the house. The shed was way too small to contain his six-foot-three frame. When Eunice looked out the window the next morning, she saw his legs sticking out. He was wearing khakis and loafers. She recognized his feet because he always wore dark brown loafers with tassels, no socks. Tina had discovered her husband was dead when she opened the back door to take the kids to school a couple of minutes later. The police arrived before she even had a chance to call them—summoned by Eunice, of course.
Leah was happy when Tina moved back to West Virginia with her children six months later. Why should she remain in that house next to her snotty neighbor forever? Besides, she had always seemed so homesick. Since then, Leah had received only one message from her. Tina said she was happier than she’d been in a long time. She and the children were staying with her mother. All five of them had to share a two-bedroom apartment, but it was only temporary. Her estate would be settled soon, then the construction on her new house would begin.
At the checkout counter, Sasha gave Leah the keys to the car so she could pull up to the front of the house to load the chairs. As Leah walked down the block to Sasha’s car, she felt bad about so many things she could barely sift through all the layers of remorse. If she hadn’t been so jealous of Tina, she would have been a much better friend. She should have suggested contacting Alcoholics Anonymous or a doctor about Zane’s drinking. Leah and Paul had discussed confronting Zane, but they’d never done anything. Paul, the police officer and model citizen, was always reluctant to preach or meddle in other people’s business. For the most part, it was a trait Leah admired, although it certainly hadn’t been the best solution in this case.
When Leah pulled up to the house, Sasha was waiting in the driveway, but she was not holding the chairs. Instead, she was glancing over her shoulder.
Leah beeped to get her attention.
“What happened to the chairs?” Leah said.
“It was crazy!” Sasha slammed the passenger door. “I can’t believe what just happened.”
“What?” Leah said.
“Just start driving. I hate estate sales. Why do I do this to myself?”
Leah drove down the block and turned toward the village.
“On my way to the checkout, I stopped in the den to look at some books. While I was rifling through the bookshelf, that old bitch came in the room and started yelling at me about the chairs: They were nice chairs! Why was I trying to rob her? Then the old biddy picked up the chairs and took them back up the stairs. When I told the checkout lady, she just shook her head and said she’d never held an estate sale quite like this one before. She said the owner is a total quack.”
“Wait, she’s still alive?”
Sasha nodded. “She doesn’t have any family. Her plan is to move into assisted living after she sells everything.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“Sure, but the saleslady said she showed up this morning and started giving all the salespeople a hard time—things were priced wrong, she was being robbed, she’d decided not to sell certain things—so the saleslady said to her, “Why are you having this estate sale if you don’t actually want to get rid of anything?”
“She said she didn’t really want to move. She was afraid her old neighbor was going to come back to town and ‘take her out.’ She told the saleslady that her next-door neighbor is a homicidal maniac.” Sasha paused and raised her eyebrows. “But, if you ask me, that old lady is the crazy one.”
“Did you ask the saleslady why she would say that?”
“Yup, the old woman told her every night her next-door neighbor’s husband would get drunk, and this wife—the one she called a maniac—would send him out to the doghouse, like, literally there was a shed in the backyard. The old woman said that on the night the husband died, she saw the wife marching the husband out to the shed as usual. The old woman couldn’t believe she was going to leave him out there because it was frigid outside. The next morning, she looked out the window again and there were the husband’s bare feet sticking out of the shed. Frozen. She told the police the whole story, apparently, but everyone believed the wife.”
Superman at Hogback Ridge
I called my wife, Teri, to tell her the car had conked out on the road to Hogback Ridge. “Serves you right!” she said. Then, she hung up on me.
It sounds harsh, but she had a point. I should have given up on this clunker long ago. My Volvo 240 is nearly fifteen years old, and I had been trying to hold on until I hit the three-hundred-mile mark. I’d replaced the fuel pump the week before, but clearly, that wasn’t the problem. Suddenly, on Route 307, the car was refusing to go faster than ten miles per hour. Not good to coast to a stop on a rural road out by Hogback Ridge State Park, but better than zeroing out in the middle of the highway, I figured.
Teri had just bought a new car for herself, and I admit I was holding it against her, refusing to replace mine because she’d acted so imprudently. The Lexus was way beyond our means, especially if we planned to retire in seven years as we had discussed ad infinitum.
My son, David, fifteen, was beside me in the passenger seat. Ear buds in 24/7. Let’s just say, he was there, but not there. This fishing trip was a means of luring him back, no pun intended. When he was younger, Hogback Ridge had always been one of our favorite destinations, 414 acres bordered on the north by the Grand River and the south by Mill Creek. The Grand is home to more than seventy species of fish. Plus, the river is bounded on one side by a high narrow ridge, which in the winter clearly resembles the bony spine of a hog, and in the early spring, when the steelhead are running, is overlaid with delicate white bloodroot and spring beauty flowers.
I decided to try to coast downhill into the parking lot. Because of the slight decline, we were cruising at a cool 10 mph when I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a black pickup truck barreling down the road at 80–90 mph. I turned my wheel toward the side of the road and the entrance to the long-abandoned Thunder Bay Golf Course, though there was no way I could make it out of his way in time. My only hope was that he would see me and slam on the brakes, which he did. He came to a stop about two feet before impact. Before I could even release my grip on the wheel, he screeched out into the other lane and pulled up alongside me.
I rolled down the window.
“Fuck you, grandpa, what the fuck? What the fuck are you doing sitting in the fucking road?” The driver was a teenager with light blue, red-rimmed eyes, a shaved head, a nose ring, and earrings that ran like ladder rungs up and down his earlobes. He scowled at me, and I noticed his right front incisor was missing and the rest of his teeth were dung brown.
The person in the passenger seat leaned forward, a pasty young girl with a nose ring whose hair was concealed by a white ski hat with a pink pom-pom. “You fucking loser,” she yelled. “Why don’t you learn to drive? Get the fuck out of the road.”
I glanced over at David. He was staring at them, but his ear buds were still in. I hoped he couldn’t hear them through his music. I turned away without responding. It’s not wise to interact with insane people. I have a button under my desk at the bank that I have used twice to diffuse situations much like this one. My son might be recalcitrant, but at least he’s not a skinhead, I thought. If parents don’t occasionally pad the pros and ignore the cons, this job can seem pretty thankless.
At least, David wasn’t as openly hostile to me as he was to Teri. She’s a high school principal, so you might assume that no surly teen could flummox her, but nothing could be further from the truth. The strain of David was nearly killing her. In fact, I think it was worse for her because kids at her school were always confiding in her, telling her she was so much more und
erstanding than their parents. Since David was now effectively mute, the three of us spent most of our evenings sealed off in separate rooms—me in my upstairs office, Teri in the TV room competing in the Netflix Olympics, and David down in the basement gaming.
After the skinhead had doused me with vitriol one last time, he rolled up his window and peeled out ahead of us. Thank God that’s over, I thought, and I started to loosen my grip on the wheel. But then a few yards down the road, he must have decided that he had more to say, because he stopped again, got out of his car, and started marching down the middle of the road toward me. The girl remained in the car. I noticed the license plate read GoFast1. The skinhead was at least six feet tall. Skinny. Pale as shaved ice. Combat boots. Tattoos covering every inch of skin right up to his neck.
“What about it, old man?” he called out as he approached.
Did he think I wanted to fight? While he stared down at me with his rheumy blue eyes, his arms jerked up and down like a marionette who was being yanked around by a sadistic puppeteer.
There was no escaping the guy. My car had slowed to 5 mph, if that. We were on a flat stretch. The doors were locked, but I doubted they would save us. David took out one of his ear buds and asked, “What’s going on?”
“This guy’s a real jerk,” I said.
Then, just as he was about to lean into my window and do who knows what, I heard three beeps. Teri had pulled up behind us in her shiny black Lexus. I had never doubted she would come to rescue us. Though we were annoyed at each other, we had not slipped down the next notch to complete indifference or contempt. Not yet, at least. I had seen that transformation many times in couples we’ve known and when I’ve counseled people separating their assets. Teri and I used to thank our lucky stars we had not succumbed to that.
The skinhead looked over at Teri.
“Shut the fuck up, you rich bitch,” he said. Then he glared down at me one last time, flipped me off again, and turned back toward his truck.
“That was weird,” David said. He put his ear buds back in.
My cell phone rang. “Who was that guy?” Teri asked.
Since David wasn’t listening, I explained what had happened as we slowly crawled toward the parking lot, Teri bringing up the rear.
“That’s crazy! What did David say?”
“He’s not even on location.” I glanced over at him. As usual he was staring blankly at his screen.
“Well, for once, I’m glad to hear it.”
David’s video game addiction had ramped up over the past six months, taking over his whole life. We had time limits, but he kept circumventing them. Do your homework first, we said. No gaming except on the weekends, we said. But if we weren’t home—if Teri had a late meeting or we were out to dinner—what was he doing? You guessed it. Where were his friends? We didn’t know.
He said his friends were “in the game.”
“One day you’re going to wake up and you’ll have spent an entire decade in the basement,” Teri said.
Of course, that didn’t faze him at all.
Sometimes, I tried to inspire him. I told him stories of our Irish ancestors, how they’d come over in the 1860s in a boat. How they’d survived the potato famine. My father was the son of a Cleveland firefighter. He had worked his way up from stock boy to salesclerk. Eventually he bought his own hardware store. What I was trying to convey was that people needed survival skills. There had to be a point to one’s existence, even if that point, in my case, was simply working in a bank, bringing home a paycheck.
“Did you dream about becoming a banker when you were a little kid?” he’d asked me one time. The disdain in his voice made me clench my fists.
“No one dreams about becoming a banker,” I said. “I was lucky to have options though. I can tell you that.”
What I didn’t tell him was that I had wanted to be an artist, the least practical profession in the world. The reason I didn’t pursue it was because one professor, Mr. Holman, had looked over a couple of my pen and ink drawings and said, “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call you precocious.” I switched into the business school the next day.
We finally ended up taking David’s computer. We left it at his grandmother’s house. In response, he refused to study at all. His grades plummeted. He spent whole weekends in bed. After that, we tried therapy. Part of his behavior was pure teenager, according to the psychologist. Part of it was still under investigation. David was currently undergoing testing. The only thing he had revealed to the therapist was that sometimes he got scared “for no reason.”
Since David’s metamorphosis, Teri had been depressed. Out of the blue, she bought the Lexus. “I’m fifty years old,” she said, “and I’ve never had a decent car.” I shouldn’t have made her feel bad about it, but inside I was seething. How were we going to retire early if she made such expensive impulse purchases?
My car came to a full stop as soon as we reached the parking lot; it was all I could do to maneuver it into a space. It turned out the space was right next to the lowlife’s pickup truck. The driver and the girl with the pom-pom hat had just emerged from it. When I parked, the skinhead was pulling on his waders.
“Did you have to park right next to them?” David asked.
“I didn’t have much of a choice. We’ll just wait until they leave.”
In order to avoid making eye contact, I reached over David and opened the glove box pretending to look for something. After a few minutes, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the skinhead stomp off toward the porta potty. A quick glance around the parking lot revealed two other cars, as well as a ranger’s truck and Teri’s Lexus.
“I’m going to talk to your mother,” I said to David.
“Are you serious? You’re getting out of the car?” When he looked at me, I saw that his face was devoid of disgust for once, and without that overlay, he looked like the old David.
“He went to the bathroom. There are other people here. Nothing will happen with all these witnesses. Lock the doors after I get out.”
I slammed the door and started walking toward Teri’s car. I heard David lock the doors behind me.
Either the skinhead had the world’s smallest bladder, or he’d decided against using the facilities. He emerged from the porta potty before I’d gone ten steps.
“Well, hello, sir, you piece of crap, asshole, how the fuck are you?” he asked as he approached me.
I continued with my strategy of non-engagement. I was wondering why Teri had chosen to park so far away from me, but then I noticed that she had pulled in right next to a Yukon with a park ranger’s logo on it. As I continued my death march toward her, I saw that she was talking to the ranger. The skinhead must have noticed the ranger, too, because he suddenly stopped in his tracks. “Nice driving, douchebag,” he muttered to me before turning back toward his own truck.
Teri and the ranger were standing in between their two cars. Teri’s not a small woman, but the ranger was at least six inches taller, his face blocked out by a bushy red beard. His belly was so big it looked as if there might be another person lodged inside him. As I approached, he nodded to me and asked if I was OK.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m OK.”
“Are you sure?” His red eyebrows rose.
“That was not OK.” Teri shook her head. Her blonde hair was matted to her forehead as if she’d just returned from a long run. “That kid is insane. Did you hear him just now?”
The ranger looked calmly in the direction of the skinhead. “Why don’t I go check it out,” he said.
“I’d like to kill that kid,” Teri said, her narrowed eyes drilling into the skinhead. Teri’s anger, which appears quite regularly these days, is a new feature. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but I have my theories. When we married twenty years ago, we had similar long-term goals. I was going to work until I was fifty-nine and retire on what I projected by then would be a hefty 401K. Teri was going to retire at the same time after thirty years in education with a siza
ble pension. We were in lockstep, but then one of her coworkers, a science teacher and marathoner, dropped dead the day after his fifty-fourth birthday three years ago. Soon after, Teri insisted we take a vacation. A real one. Not in a tent. She wanted to see Europe, she wanted to cruise, she wanted to live a little. We argued. Then about a year later, Teri’s assistant principal, Mary Ellen, leaned down to retrieve a cup that had fallen over in her car and ran right into the back of a semitruck. Teri signed up for a transcendental meditation class. She started doing yoga. And then the clincher, this past fall: a boy named Thomas, whom Teri had been very close to and whom she had been trying to help navigate a serious bout of depression, went home for lunch after an algebra test and shot himself in the head. Teri had to make the difficult decision to announce the suicide over the PA during sixth hour before social media revved up. This meant that students who had been sitting next to Thomas in his morning classes were traumatized, and their parents were outraged because they had not been notified first. Teri had to go before the school board and defend her decision. She had weathered it, but since then she had become more and more agitated at home. A sock on the ground. A spoon in the sink. Anything might set her off. I was trying to simply live through her mood swings when one day she announced we should start seeing a therapist to discuss our divergent worldviews. And now the “we” has morphed into “me.” It feels to “me” as if Teri and the therapist have ganged up on me. What do you want? What do you want? What do you want? they always ask, as if I haven’t told Teri a million times. When I remind them that I want to retire, Teri always shakes her head. “I mean now,” she says. “I’m talking about right now.”
The skinhead was standing next to the driver’s side door putting on a fishing vest as the ranger approached him.
“Well, hello, officer,” he said. “How are you doing today?”
“I hear you have been giving this man a hard time?” The officer pointed over his shoulder.
The skinhead smiled wearily at me as if I were just a guy sitting on the other side of the table during a loan negotiation. “This man was stopped in the middle of the road. I admit I lost my temper, but I was never disrespectful.”