The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  Janna played guitar—another point in her favor—and we sang together once in a while. I’d back her up on her songs—Ani DiFranco, Michelle Shocked, the Indigo Girls, some of it not as bad as you might think—and she knew “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” and the usual stuff by Emmylou Harris. I tried to teach her a couple of Porter and Dolly songs, though she didn’t have much of a range and we could never hit on the right key for her. It was Janna, in fact, who talked me into having the music parties again. She hated to cook, so we’d lay in beer and Jack Daniel’s and chips, get pizzas delivered, and tell people to bring whatever. She hung back most of the time and let the bluegrass guys do their inside-baseball thing—Yeah, “Rank Strangers.” Who’s gonna do Ralph’s part?—but late at night I could sometimes get her to step into a circle of pickers and sing “Sin City.”

  “We could probably make this work,” she’d told me when we’d been together for a month. “If neither of us turns into an asshole.”

  “How likely is that?” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “if people aren’t willing to change. I mean when things call for it.”

  “But you’re happy now.”

  “You would’ve heard,” she said.

  When I sent the notice out for the party that last summer—we were having it early, since we were going to Yorkshire in July, to see Brontë country—Paul e-mailed back that he’d taken a buyout from Newsweek and was “living on Uneasy Street” but that he’d try to make it. He was working on a book proposal, he said, about mountaintop removal, which would get him some time in eastern Kentucky—where maybe he’d be able to play some music too, if he didn’t show up in a car with New York plates.

  The Friday night of the party, he rolled into the dooryard just after dark, in a Jeep Wrangler, with a woman at the wheel. She looked to be Janna’s age and not quite up to Paul’s standards—maybe too much nose and too little chin—but with a slender body and straight, dyed-black hair down to her shoulders. He got out, stretched, and looked off at the hills. “Shee-it!” he said to the woman. “Just smell the air. I ever tell you? This is my favorite place in the world.”

  “Several times,” she said.

  “I want y’all to meet Simone,” he said. He always talked more southern when he was around the music. “My last and best.”

  “Until the rest of the ass parade comes around the corner.” She ran a finger down his arm.

  “Never happen,” Paul said. He looked even lankier than usual, and when he turned to me I saw dark pouches pulling his eyelids down, exposing red below his eyeballs. “Hey, listen, we gotta do ‘Hit Parade of Love.’ But first off—what do you say?” He opened his mandolin case and took out a pipe and a plastic bag of buds.

  After one hit, I knew I’d had plenty, and that a beer might help and might not; even Paul stopped at three. He kicked off “Hit Parade of Love,” and somehow I found myself singing the first verse, whose words I thought until the last instant wouldn’t come to me—From what I been a-hearin’, dear, you really got it made—but when we got to the chorus, with the tenor part, his voice cracked on the word top, and he asked if we could take it down to A. Well, hell, he had to be what, pushing seventy by now? If I was fifty-one?

  He gave up before midnight—he said the drive had done him in—and we put him and Simone in the big guest room at the far end of the hall. When the music petered out around two-thirty and people retired to their tents and RVs, Janna and I came upstairs and saw their light was still on; Janna thought she heard him coughing. The rooster woke me for a few seconds as the windows began to show gray; I hoped that if Paul was hearing it too he’d fall back safe asleep.

  In the morning I put on one of the knee-length white aprons Diane had left behind, cooked up enough scrambled eggs, along with kale from the garden, to fill the turkey-roasting pan, set out paper plates and plastic forks, and clanged the triangle she’d always used to get the party guests in. Paul and Simone didn’t come down until the others were finishing up. “You sleep OK?” I said.

  “Never better,” he said. The pouches under his eyes looked darker in daylight. “Once I got my nightly obligations taken care of.” He put a hand on Simone’s ass and squeezed. “This is the one that’s gonna be the death of me.”

  “You’ll scandalize your friend,” she said. “Look how he’s blushing.”

  Paul reached down, lifted the hem of my apron, and peeked under. “What’s fer breakfast, Maw?”

  They took plates out onto the porch, and when I came out after a preliminary cleanup, I found Janna sitting next to him while Simone was on the lawn, trying to get up into a headstand, her black hair splashed out on the grass. He hadn’t touched his eggs. “Hey, the Iron Chef,” he said. “Listen, did I tell you I’m playing bass in a rock band? Like one of those daddy bands? I fuckin’ love it—we missed so much shit being hillbillies.” He speared a forkful of egg, but set it down. “I might have to quit, though.”

  “What’s going on with the book?”

  “Yeah, well, that too. Story for another time.” Simone had gotten both feet in the air, muscled legs straight, toes pointed, black-polished toenails. Paul clapped his hands and called “Brava!” He turned back to me. “I can’t believe I finally got it right,” he said. “In the bottom of the ninth. Check her the fuck out.”

  “She seems great,” I said. The legs of Simone’s shorts had fallen just enough to expose about that much of black lacy underwear.

  “Listen, I might call you pretty soon to ask you a favor,” he said. “I might. It would be a big favor.” He looked at Janna. “From both of you.”

  “You’re being mysterious,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever whenever.”

  “I appreciate it.” He stood up and called to Simone. “You going to stay like that all day, babe? Come on, I want to show you the gals.”

  He took her hand and led her along the path to the henhouse. He was limping worse than usual—that broken leg had never healed properly—and I noticed that he was wearing Nikes instead of boots.

  Janna touched my arm. “I don’t think he’s OK.”

  “He’s just in love,” I said.

  “I could see that little display wasn’t lost on you.” I was thinking of how to deny it, but she put a finger to my lips. “I mean, you know him better than I do,” she said, “but I think she’s got a situation on her hands.”

  That summer was the first time Janna and I had traveled together. The Brontë Trail turned out to be a five-hour trudge through British badlands—“No wonder the brother was an alcoholic,” Janna said—and back in Haworth we found our rental car had a yellow metal clamp on the front wheel. At Whitby it was too cold to swim, and neither of us had any interest in joining the fossil-hunters at low tide, or in taking the Dracula tour. When we got home, I found a package Janna had sent me from Amazon—she’d found an Internet café in Whitby—with a book of Doré’s illustrations of the Divine Comedy, and a note reading It’s time we got you interested in writers from Tuscany.

  A week later, I got the e-mail.

  This is Simone, Paul’s friend. I hope you remember me from your party. He doesn’t know I’m writing this (truly), but I was afraid he never would ask you. I’m sure you must have seen that he wasn’t well, and the truth is that he’s been diagnosed with liver cancer, stage 4, though he still seems like his old self most days. Anyway, I know that his wish is, and I apologize if this is just too much to ask, that you could let him be in your home for the very last part of this—he says he will know when. He has always told me your home was his favorite place ever to be. I can take care of all the arrangements, home hospice and etc. (truth is, I’ve already made some calls to places in your area). Not really knowing you, I hope I’ve explained all this in the right way. Do you think you could in any way do this for him?

  “What?” Janna said. We were propped up together on the bed. One thing I’d learned from being married to Diane was not to be furtive about e-mail.

&nbs
p; “Here.” I turned the screen her way. “I guess you called it.”

  I watched her face as she read, but Janna didn’t give much away. “He put her up to this,” she said.

  “She says not.”

  “Well of course,” she said. “That’s the tell.”

  “I just have no idea what to say to something like this.”

  “He’s your friend,” she said. “What time is it?”

  “So you’re saying I should call?”

  “I don’t even know this man,” she said. “But I’d do this with you.”

  They came late on a Sunday afternoon in October. Simone helped him out of the Jeep, then reached behind the seat and handed Janna a gallon of cider, just as she might have done if they’d been normal lovers up for a country weekend. The label showed it was the catchpenny orchard on the state highway, where kids could feed donkeys with pellets from dispensing machines at a quarter a handful. Paul had let his beard grow in, entirely white; he looked like the last pictures of Ezra Pound. “And here he is,” he said. “Appearing for a limited time only.”

  “He rehearses his lines,” Simone said.

  Janna put him on the sofa with the afghan over him while Simone and I went back out to get his stuff. “It’s just a few clothes,” Simone said, “and a couple of pictures he wanted to be able to look at. He didn’t want to take up your space. I think he’s planning to give you this.” She held up the mandolin case.

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “It’s got to be worth a fortune.” Paul’s F-5 wasn’t a Lloyd Loar, but I remembered that it was from the thirties.

  “Welcome to my life,” she said. “He tried to leave me his apartment. He’s turned into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I have to get with his brother tomorrow in the city and figure out what to do. Paul won’t talk to him.”

  “You’re not driving down again tonight?”

  “Breakfast 8 A.M. The brother’s a freak too.”

  “But you’re coming back.”

  “And you’ve known Paul for how long? I mean, I wanted to. He’s got it all plotted out, like each of us with our own little jobs—I mean, not that yours is little. He’s just putting everybody away, away, away. Fuck him, you know? I was a good girlfriend.”

  “Would you like us to disappear for a while? We do need to go to the store at some point.”

  “No, it’s fine. He already got the last sweet blowjob. Under this fucking apple tree—sorry. I just feel like somebody should know. And all the way up here, he keeps finding these sports-talk stations. Did you know that the World Series begins next week? It’s going to be quite a matchup.”

  We found him sitting up on the sofa, propped up by pillows under his back, looking at The New York Review of Books. “So,” he said, “did she tell you what a dick I’m being to her?”

  “I can imagine how hard this must be for both of you,” I said.

  “Ah, still the slick-fielding shortstop,” he said. “But we’re into serious October baseball here.”

  “Can you just stop?” Simone said.

  “Isn’t that the whole idea?” he said.

  Janna came downstairs with her arms full of sheets and blankets. “We’re going to put you guys in the den tonight,” she said. “I thought it would be easier than having to do stairs.”

  “She has to go back,” I said.

  “You know,” Paul said. “Stuff to do with the, ah, e, s, t, a, t, e.”

  Simone turned to me. “They said they’d be coming with the bed tomorrow morning. And the nurse should be here. You have my information, right?”

  Paul shook his finger at her. “Now that should have been said sotto voce.”

  “Let me make you some coffee,” Janna said. “I don’t know if anything’s open between here and the interstate.”

  “She’ll be cool,” Paul said. “My guy brought over some Adderall before we left. He gets the real stuff. Made from adders.”

  I walked Simone out to the car. She opened the driver’s door, then turned back and came into my arms, taking deep breaths. “He’s been lucky to have you,” I said.

  “And now he’s lucky to have you,” she said. “There’s just no end to his luck.”

  In bed that night, I said to Janna, “Can we really do this?”

  “What’s our choice at this point?” We were lying on our backs, and she rolled over, her breasts against my arm. “Did you two talk at all?”

  “I don’t want to, you know, press him.” I worked my arm over her shoulder and pulled her closer. Her belly into my hip. She sighed and moved her palm up my thigh.

  “Why didn’t he ever, you know, find somebody?” she said. I felt myself beginning to get hard—could we really do this? “That woman loves him.”

  “He never had any trouble finding them,” I said.

  “Do you ever wish you were like him?”

  “What, you mean dying?”

  She jerked away and rolled onto her back again. “I hate when you pretend to be stupid.”

  “No,” I said. “Who would ever want a life that lonely?”

  “It’s even more obnoxious when you try to figure out the right thing to say.”

  I shoved a pillow against the headboard and sat up. “Are we fighting?” I said. “Because this is a hell of a time for it.”

  “For the record, I don’t blame you for getting us into this. I just hope it gets over with quickly. Is that horrible to say?”

  “No, it’s actually the kindest thing you could say.”

  “But would you say it about me? If I were in the situation?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Nobody can ever—”

  “OK, I need to go to sleep,” she said. “Obviously I’m not going to get laid tonight. Why don’t you go down and check on your friend and see if he’s still breathing. Then you can get yourself a drink and forget all about it.”

  I put my legs over the side and got to my feet. “I bring you one?”

  “I’ll be asleep,” she said. “You don’t even listen anymore.”

  The rooster woke me at six. I heard Janna breathing away and couldn’t get back to sleep. But when I came downstairs Paul had already dressed himself, except for shoes and socks—he’d told us it hurt to bend down—and had managed to get from the den, where Janna had made up the fold-out, to the living room sofa, and was stretched out listening to something through earbuds. He flicked them out when he saw me.

  “How are you?” I said. “You hurting? I can get you another Vicodin.”

  “Just took a couple. They’re coming with the real shit this morning, right?”

  “They should be here by ten,” I said.

  “What we like to hear. Listen, did I even thank you for this?”

  “You’d do it for me.”

  “There’s a hypothetical we won’t be putting to the test. Man, I have been such a shit. To everybody in my life.”

  “You were never a shit to me,” I said.

  “You weren’t in my life. Well, who the fuck was. Not to be grim. How did I get onto this? That Vicodin must work better than I thought. Your lady still asleep?”

  “She was.”

  He nodded. “She’s going to need it.”

  I was in the kitchen cutting up a pineapple when I heard Janna come downstairs. She must have smelled the coffee brewing. “You boys are up bright and early,” she said.

  “Only way to live a long and healthy life,” Paul said. “Get up, do the chores, plow the north forty—I don’t mean anything sexual by that.”

  “No, I’m sure that’s the last thing you’d think of.” She came into the kitchen and put a hand on my arm. “Did you get enough sleep? I’m sorry I was being . . . whatever I was.”

  I set the knife down and put an arm around her. “I think you get a free pass, considering.”

  “I hope I was just getting it out of my system early.” She poured a cup of coffee and put in milk for me. “Will you be OK with him if I go in for a while? I should get some stuff done while I can.”


  “Hey,” Paul yelled out. “Why’s everybody talking behind the patient’s back?”

  “Shut up, we’re having sex,” she called back. She poured a cup for herself. “He seems pretty chipper this morning.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what to hope for,” I said. “Quality, I guess. And then not too much quantity.”

  A little after nine they came with the hospital bed, and the guy helped me move the sofa into the corner so we could set the bed up in the living room, by the window looking out at the hills. Janna and I would take the fold-out in the den when it became clear that we had to be nearby. Paul watched us from the armchair, his bare feet on a footstool, his earbuds back in, his eyes on us. When the guy left, he turned the iPod off, plucked out the earbuds, and said, “Why am I reminded of ‘In the Penal Colony’?”

  The FedEx truck delivered a cardboard box with the drugs, then the nurse from the hospice showed up. She had thick black hair, going gray, down her back in a single braided pigtail, and hoop earrings—not what you’d expect with the white uniform. Her name was Heather. I brought her a mug of herbal tea—she wasn’t a coffee drinker, she said—and she showed me the spreadsheet-looking printed forms, on which we were to record dosage and time, then opened the FedEx box, picked up her clipboard, and took inventory. She wrote down Paul’s temperature and blood pressure, listened to his heart. “So, Paul,” she said, “how would you say your pain is right now?”

  “One to ten? Let’s give it a seven. Good beat and you can dance to it.”

  “We can improve on that,” she said.