by Juliette Fay
I saw a few people from high school. Melanie Koutzakis took my hand in both of hers and gave me a big “How are you?” with that sympathy look she has where her eyes go all soupy. Boy, she’s been perfecting that for the last twenty years. I told her we were doing okay, thanks for asking, and pulled my hand away as soon as her grip loosened.
After the parade, we all went to Town Beach and had a picnic. The aunties sat in their lawn chairs in the shade and quibbled over the ages of their friends’ grandchildren. I was sure Barb wouldn’t go in the water when I saw her wearing a lime green string bikini. I hated her for a few seconds and then I got bored of that and took Dylan to the dock so he could jump into my arms about four hundred times. Then Barb swam up and he jumped to her.
Later, I heard Cormac tell her she should have brought her camera. From the corner of my eye I could see her shake her head at him and glance over at me. Maybe some day in the distant future I will no longer be the reason for every uncomfortable moment on the planet.
Dylan begged me to stay for the fireworks. I dreaded it. Robby loved fireworks. Of course, the ones at the Esplanade in downtown Boston were his favorite. We used to go early in the morning to get a good spot on the lawn and hang out all day playing cards, reading the paper, and listening to music. We tried it once when Dylan was a baby, but we ran out of diapers, and he was teething and miserable and we never went back after that. So, Robby researched the best suburban fireworks, and we’d go to at least two sets every year. In the nine Fourth of Julys we had together, not one went by without us lying on a blanket somewhere, his arms around me, staring up into the dark, explosions of light booming in our chests. We always had great sex after that. Post-fireworks sex is unbelievable.
I really didn’t want to stay. Cormac said he’d bring Dylan home. But I thought I should be with him, knowing that the noise would bother him. And I felt like Robby might almost somehow be there. Like if there were any time or place that Robby would miraculously show up, it would be during fire works.
Guess what? He didn’t. No miracle today.
7
THE NEXT DAY, MALINOWSKI found rot. When he pulled shingles off the side of the house to set the floor joists, there it was, dark and pungent.
“Janie.” He said it through the kitchen window as she was setting down a plate of toast. She wondered if she’d ever heard him use her name before. “Something I gotta show you.”
She wrapped her blue flannel bathrobe more tightly around her and listened at the bottom of the stairs for a moment. Dylan and Carly were still asleep, exhausted from the late-night festivities. When she came through the front door, he studied her for a moment. “Are you sick?” he asked.
“What?” Her hands went up to her face, searching for what he’d seen. “Oh. No, I just didn’t get a good night’s sleep.”
“Looks like allergies,” he said skeptically. “Fireworks keep you up?”
“Kind of. What do you need to show me?”
“See this?” he waved his hammer toward the discolored wood. “It’s all rotted out. I can’t set the joists against that. It has to be replaced.”
“Replaced?” Janie wished he would explain it after she had a second cup of coffee. Or maybe a third.
“Yeah, I have to pull these boards here and put in new ones. At a minimum.”
“What’s the maximum?”
“Well, if there’s rot down at the bottom, there could be more. Especially if the moisture came from above, which it often does. Could be a buckle in the flashing up by the gutters. Or seeping in around this window. I know the plan was to keep the shingles, but you might want to reconsider.”
No, thought Janie. Stick to the plan. Robby’s plan. No reconsidering. “But he wanted…it was supposed to be…”
Malinowski nodded. “I know.”
She tried to make sense of it. Tried even harder not to cry. “You should have told me…It’s your job to…”
He cocked his head to one side. His patience was infuriating. Even so, she couldn’t quite make it his fault. He had not created the rot, only discovered it. She sat down on the front step, surrounded by unattached floor joists, and leaned her head against her hand. “Okay, you tell me.”
He squatted down near her, his elbows propped on his knees. “If it was my house, I’d pull it,” he said quietly.
“How much will it cost?”
“I won’t know until I see how far it goes.”
She knew there were more questions to ask, but none came to her other than, “Are you good at this?”
He nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Want some coffee?”
“No thanks,” he said. “But I will take a little chocolate milk if you’ve got any. In one of those sippy cups, so I don’t spill? And maybe a baggie of Cheerios?”
She smiled wanly at his joke. “He worships you, you know.”
Malinowski grinned. “That’s a good boy you’ve got there. You’re lucky.”
“I don’t always feel so lucky.”
“Nobody does.”
APPARENTLY JAKE DRANK TEA even on really warm days.
“Doesn’t that make you hotter?” Janie asked, as they sat on a blanket she had spread out in the backyard. The spot was shaded by a tree that hung over the fence from the front yard. Carly sat with them, surrounded by toys appropriate for a nine-month-old, chewing on the sunscreen bottle. Dylan hung stomach down on a swing toward the back of the yard, orchestrating a pirate attack in the dirt below him.
“The tea?” said Jake. “It should, I guess. But it doesn’t.” He wore his standard black slacks, but today’s black shirt was short sleeved, and the top few buttons were open, no collar in sight.
Janie shook her head. He raised his eyebrows in question.
“How come nothing affects you?” she asked. “You’re like made of steel. Or PVC, maybe.”
“You know things affect me,” he said, his gaze diverted to a leaf in his hand. He twirled the stem between his fingers. “I just don’t show it very much. You don’t show it that much, either.”
“Oh, come on—I’m a walking wreck and everyone who comes within fifty feet of me can tell.”
“You think that’s true because that’s how you feel inside. But it doesn’t show nearly as much as you think. To most people you probably seem very stoic. Are you still having trouble sleeping?”
“Yep,” she said, and replaced the sunscreen bottle in Carly’s hands with an actual toy. Carly threw it down and picked up the bottle. “How long did it take you to ‘adjust,’ like you mentioned in that e-mail the other night?”
He squinted back down at the leaf. “Six or eight months, I would guess.”
“What exactly were you adjusting from?”
For a long moment he didn’t answer, and Janie’s first instinct was to apologize for asking. But she really wanted to know, so she held her tongue in the faint hope that he would reveal something.
“I don’t usually talk about this,” he said tentatively.
She strained against the urge to respond. In the silence she could hear Malinowski ripping shingles off the front of the house.
“First of all,” he said, “it puts me in a position of vulnerability to gossip.”
Janie’s wall of reserve broke. “Jake, you know ALL about ME!”
“I know a lot about this episode in your life. But you have to understand something.” He looked directly at her, his gray eyes taking on a sudden purposefulness. “We are not friends.”
“Excuse me?” was all she could think to say.
“I am a priest. I hear people’s innermost struggles and shame all the time. It’s my job to listen, to offer reconciliation with God and with oneself, and never to share a single word of it with another living soul. You have no such commitment.”
“Well, no, I haven’t taken any vows or anything, but do you really think I would subject you to gossip? That’s insulting. And I’m not asking you as a friend. I’m asking you because you seem to know
something about this! Also, frankly, the fact that you may have had a relationship gives you some credibility.” She pointed at him. “Being a real guy might actually make you a better priest!”
He twirled the leaf some more. The shingle ripping had stopped, and the quiet seemed to enshroud them. Jake glanced over at her and then back toward the leaf. “I was engaged to be married. We dated in college.”
Engaged? Father Solitary? “What happened?”
“I couldn’t go through with it. The closer the wedding got, the more uncomfortable I felt.” He pressed his lips together momentarily, as if to bite back some remnant shred of shame. “I had no vision of myself as a married man.”
“What did you do?”
“Went and talked to an old friend, a mentor really, the parish priest who helped me get into a Catholic boarding school and away from my father. He was going to marry us.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that God was in my feelings, telling me to pay attention. He said that if I wasn’t ready to embrace married life with my whole heart, it would fail. I would end up hurting her more if I married her than if I backed off.”
“So you backed off.”
He sighed and shook his head, abandoned the leaf to the grass. “It was terrible. She was such a good person, and I loved her. But I felt sick to my stomach every time we talked about the wedding or being married. I couldn’t ignore the signs anymore.”
“And you signed up for the priesthood.”
“Oh no. Not right away. That was a year or so later. I wasn’t that clearheaded. I had given up the one thing I thought I wanted, and for months and months I hadn’t a clue as to what to do next.”
“You were adjusting.”
He shifted on the blanket. “In every way.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s married. She was pregnant last I heard, but that was about ten years ago.”
“Any regrets?”
“No.” He looked at Janie again. “You know the one thing that helped me back then? I prayed for her. Every day, every night, I prayed for her happiness. When I heard she was engaged to a good man, that’s when I found peace. That’s when I could embrace my own vows.”
Janie studied her hands, twisted her wedding ring. “And you never get lonely.” She heard him chuckle and she looked up.
“Any priest who says he never gets lonely is a liar. Nothing makes you immune to loneliness. Not God, not marriage, not even sex.” For some reason, hearing him say that word out loud made Janie blush, and she busied herself with straightening Carly’s sun hat. Jake went on: “But loneliness has a purpose. It makes room for something. It’s built to make us reach out. That’s not such a bad thing.”
“It’s not making me reach out,” she muttered. “It’s making me a wretched bitch.”
“Loneliness is painful. But suffering is not wrong in and of itself. It’s part of the human experience, and in that way, brings us closer to all people.”
“Thank you, Pope Jake,” she said.
He laughed out loud, a true laugh, she knew, and it lifted her for a moment. “Hey,” he said. “I look good in white—and it beats the heck out of all this black!”
ON MONDAY, POND PALS camp started at the Town Beach. Dylan was worried that it wouldn’t be fun and they wouldn’t have good snacks and the camp counselors wouldn’t be as nice as Miss Marla. But when they arrived, Keane was already there, having been dropped off by his mother the minute the camp opened.
“DYLAN!” he screamed, and turned to the teenager who was helping him put stickers on his name tag. “That’s my friend, Dylan LaMarche, and he has big holes in his yard, and he likes pirates. DYLAN, sit next to ME!”
Janie never got a backward glance from Dylan after that, which felt a little strange, but better, she told herself, than having him cling to her and refuse to stay.
When she got home, Shelly was in the yard with Malinowski. She wore an ice blue suit with a large flowered pin on the lapel, which Janie thought was garish, even though she knew it was probably high fashion. The short skirt showcased the length and tautness of Shelly’s legs, an advantage she pressed by leaning one high-heeled jet black pump against the front step of the house. At fifty-three Shelly still had it.
“Hey,” she called, as Janie walked toward them with Carly on her hip. “I just came over to check up on the project and watch Tug work his magic. I like a little beefcake in the morning, don’t you?” She nudged Tug for emphasis. Tug shook his head in mock disapproval and tried to resume the work of replacing boards on the side of Janie’s now-naked front wall. “Nothing like the sight of a healthy young man using his muscles,” teased Shelly.
“Not so young,” he muttered at her.
“What are you, thirty-six, thirty-seven?” demanded Shelly.
“Forty-five next week.”
“Well, that explains the thinning hair, but don’t you worry about that, that’s just a sign of virility. Testosterone flowing full speed. So, Janie,” she said as Janie tried to sneak by her and into the house. “What’s the deal? I thought we were keeping the rustic look with the shingles and everything. Now I come over and find young Tug, here, ripping things apart. Is that in the budget? I don’t seem to recall it being in the contract, so now I’m worried about your finances again.”
“It wasn’t on a whim, Shelly,” Janie retorted. “Of course I wanted to keep the shingles, but it was all rotten under there.”
“Says who? Tug, did you tell her there was rot? Because every house has rot. Unless of course you live in the desert, and Massachusetts is not, as we know, the desert. We’re at sea level here, for godsake, of course there’s rot.”
“Stop sounding like you’re trying to sell me my own house!” Janie’s voice was rising in irritation, and a vague sense of having let Robby down by succumbing to some myth of decay. “There was a lot of rot, okay? A LOT. And if you’re telling me not to trust him, you’re about two months too late, and I may have to kill you.”
“If I don’t get to her first,” said Tug as he measured another board. He let the measuring tape wind fast into its metal case with a sharp snap.
“Trust him!” Shelly laughed, clearly enjoying herself. “Janie, honey, you’ve been out of the game too long. You can never trust a man this fine, especially if he can make a buck off you.”
“That’s enough,” warned Tug.
Thank you, thought Janie.
“Oh, alright,” said Shelly, deflated. “I’m just kidding, for godsake. Of course you can trust him. Do you know how much work he has lined up? Probably eighteen months’ worth. You don’t create that kind of demand by being untrustworthy.” She turned on Tug, all business. “So what’s this going to cost her? She’s a widow with two small mouths to feed, living off the insurance money, which won’t last long if you keep tearing her house apart. I don’t want her going back to work at that hospital before she has to.”
“Shelly, you said I was fine, I could afford it!” Janie could feel the tingle of panic on her skin.
“It won’t be that much,” said Tug quickly. “Under a grand.”
“For all this?” Shelly was skeptical. “Under a grand. You’re sure.”
“That’s what I said.” And he started up the circular saw, effectively ending the conversation.
Shelly followed Janie into the kitchen and shut the window to quell the screech of the saw. “Everything okay?” she asked. “Are you happy with his work?”
“It seems fine. I just wish we didn’t have to take the shingles off.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t in his plans,” Shelly said, leaning against the counter as Janie cut up avocado pieces for Carly.
“What, now I’m supposed to feel guilty for keeping him from all his eighteen months’ worth of work?”
“No, not Tug’s plans. Robby’s.”
Janie tried to shrug it off. “What can I do.”
“Nothing,” said Shelly, patting her shoulder. “Just play the hand you’re de
alt.”
Janie delivered the little squares of avocado to Carly’s highchair tray and sat down. “What’s new? How’s Pammy?”
Shelly fingered an avocado remnant off the cutting board and slid it in her mouth. “She moved in with her boyfriend for the summer, did I tell you? Her father went berserk, but I calmed him down by reminding him that he wouldn’t have to pay me child support if she wasn’t living at home. That perked him right up, the skinflint.”
Janie smiled. “You have a real knack for perspective.”
“Listen, honey,” Shelly said gently. “I came over to tell you about something. I sold that other Pelham Heights house. The jigunzo one with the four-hundred-square-foot master bath.”
“Congratulations!” Janie made a valiant attempt at enthusiasm as her stomach clenched.
“Yeah, it’s great. The commission equals what I made in the last two years combined, and it wasn’t the only house I sold this year.”
“You’re rich!” Janie smiled, but she could sense the other shoe about to fall.
“Also, I’ve been seeing someone.”
“Dating?”
“Yeah, I didn’t make a big deal out of it because I met him through this Internet dating service, and you know how hit or miss those things can be. I didn’t want to bother you with it. It was nothing, just e-mailing for months because he lives in Rhode Island, and neither of us wanted to get into a commuter relationship if we didn’t really like each other.”
“And now you like each other.”
Shelly sighed. “He’s very sweet. Sweet, sweet man. And handsome. And financially comfortable. The whole package.”
“So that’s great!” Janie’s veneer of vicarious happiness was beginning to crack.
Shelly sighed again. “It’s getting serious. And we’re tired of driving an hour and forty minutes each way just to go for a movie and dinner. And he lives in a spectacular, architecturally dramatic house on the water.”