Shelter Me

by Juliette Fay

  “Come on, Dylan, just grab one. We’re going to be late for school,” Janie had said.

  “It’s important!” he’d replied with a tremor of panic in his voice. Finally he chose the red one with the orange waist band.

  After pickup, the boys were buzzing with silliness in the back of the car, their booster seats shoehorned in next to Carly’s toddler seat. They poked at each other and howled with laughter when one of them passed gas. “Toot, toot, tootie!” called Keane.

  “You’re a fart head!” Dylan sang out.

  “No potty talk, please,” warned Janie, knowing that it was all but useless, like sending compulsive poker players to Las Vegas and saying, “No gambling, please.” The boys giggled in the back and whispered their bathroom words to each other.

  “Who’s excited about swim lessons?” asked Janie, trying to derail the toilet talk.

  “Me!” they both yelled.

  “Well, kinda,” added Keane. “I maybe might sink.”

  “Yeah, I’m kinda nervous,” said Dylan.

  “Why are you nervous?” asked Janie.

  “I just am.”

  Keane did sink on numerous occasions, his pale white arms slashing at the water as if he were engaged in battle. The swim instructor, a young man with a thick nest of curly hair that he seemed intent on keeping dry, plucked Keane from the chop of his own waves over and over again. Watching from poolside, Carly asleep in her arms, Janie saw that Dylan took these moments to lift his goggles and scan the deck. When his eyes alit on her, he would give a little wave, then keep on looking.

  The lesson was over and Janie escorted the boys to the women’s locker room.

  “Let’s have these two showers,” said Keane. “They’re right next to each other. I’ll knock on the wall and you knock back.”

  Dylan complied, but Janie couldn’t help but notice how quiet he was. Not sullen exactly, but working out some puzzle, perhaps, that distracted him from Keane’s announcements that he was knocking with his elbow, his knee, his butt. When they finished rinsing off, Janie knelt down, Carly still draped limply over her shoulder, and wrapped them each in their towels. Keane sprinted toward the changing room, racing to see who could get dressed the fastest.

  “Hey,” said Janie, hanging on to Dylan’s towel for an extra moment. “What’s on your mind?”

  His eyes blinked rapidly as he tried to conjure up the right words. “Dad…,” he said.

  Janie tucked and retucked the towel. “Yeah?” she said.

  “I thought…he always was here before. I know he’s in heaven and he can’t come back, like you said. But we always put our goggles on together, and went swimming together. And it seemed like he might be here…even though he can’t. I wore the red bathing suit so he could see me better…if he came…in case he didn’t recognize me from his trip to heaven.”

  Janie nodded, smoothed the towel, readjusted Carly over her shoulder. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Sorry to make you cry, Mom.”

  “You didn’t make me cry, honey. It’s just sad. It’s always going to be…disappointing when he’s not here. Even though we know he can’t be here, we’re still sad and disappointed when he’s not.”

  “Are you always going to cry?”

  “I don’t know. I might sometimes. Does it make you worry?”

  “A little.”

  She nodded again, pushing at the twisting tension in her throat. This is what the book had said, this is what she knew. You had to keep reminding them. You had to keep talking. “You know how sometimes there’s a right answer and a wrong answer to things? Like your name is Dylan. That’s the right answer. If someone calls you Bob or Bill, that’s wrong.”

  “Yeah.” He fingered his goggles, sending them around and around through his hands like worry beads.

  “Sometimes crying is the right answer. For me, right now, it is. And then I’ll stop, okay?”

  “Okay.” His pale eyes watched her face, studied her tears, a towel-skirted weatherman checking the precipitation. His hands were still now, clutching the goggles, waiting.

  “Hey,” she said, her face relaxing, turning to wipe her drippy chin on her shoulder. “Maybe goggles are the right answer sometimes.”

  A smile, half embarrassed, half relieved, bloomed on his face.

  “I win!” yelled Keane, appearing at the doorway to the dressing area, white-blond hair an electrified frenzy around his face.

  “No fair!” called Dylan. He ran to get his clothes on, the tight-wrapped towel causing him to scuttle penguin-like, the goggles flapping through the damp human smell of the locker room.

  EACH WEEK, TUG CAME for lunch. Sometimes he brought his cooler; other times he might arrive with wicker furniture catalogues or a little toy for Carly or a bag of particularly burly-tasting coffee beans. Janie found herself stocking sliced turkey; a jar of roasted red peppers now sat in the door of her fridge. Tug’s appearances weren’t exactly planned, but nonetheless seemed to be settling into a Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays tempo. He always made casual mention of his softball schedule. Janie and the kids usually made it to the home games, though they rarely stayed until the end.

  “How’d you get the name Tug?” Janie asked him one day, as Carly fingered pieces of Muenster cheese on her highchair tray. He would beat the sawdust out of his jeans as he walked toward the house, and Janie could see faint lines across the thighs, a fingerprint here, a darker palm-shaped spot there.

  “From Sue,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “My parents always called me A.J.—Augustus Junior.”

  “Well?”

  “You really want to hear it?” he asked. He ran a hand back across his head. It lingered there a moment then flopped back into his lap. Janie knew this meant he was hesitating for some reason, perhaps because it was painful to talk about, or merely because he didn’t know where to start. Her curiosity about him had grown over the last several weeks. She remembered when he told her that Sue had been the one to initiate the divorce, and at the time it seemed like far more information than she wanted or had a right to. But now he wasn’t just that guy with the power tools out in her front yard, creating maddening clouds of sawdust with the hum of his saws-all. Now he wiped other people’s sawdust from his jeans before he came in. “Up to you,” she answered.

  He shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or the other to him, but she could see two things: it was painful, and he did want to tell her. It reassured her, this quandary he was in. It was her own quandary—being attached to the past, constrained by a rupture that might never fuse; and yet the mail still arrived, children continued to outgrow their clothes, the house demanded maintenance and repair. Connections with other people continued to occur, despite all her intentions to shut them out. Unlikely connections at that. The countless stories that made up her life—and his—hadn’t evaporated, as almost everything else had seemed to. Might as well tell them.

  “You probably wish you’d stuck with A.J.,” she said to get him started.

  “Nah,” he said. “It’s not like that.”

  He and Sue had grown up together in Natick. “Always had a bit of a thing for her, even before I really, you know, thought about girls.” As he described her, Janie saw that she was like Heidi, in that every-hair-in-place, always-wearing-just-the-right-thing kind of way. She was friendly and smart and, unlike Heidi, so rock-solid sure of herself that she was the one most often chosen to lead the class in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or to take a sick friend to the nurse’s office.

  “Teacher’s pet?” asked Janie.

  “Not really,” said Tug. “Teachers loved her, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think she ever handed in even one assignment late, including the time her family went to Florida for February vacation and got stuck there for three extra days because the airline went on strike. But she wasn’t a goody-goody either. She was just driven to do things right, be the best. People admired her for it.”

  Tug had gathered sufficient courage to ask her out in
the seventh grade, after a summer of bamboo-like growth, with a voice that was now an octave lower. She had taken a week to think about it. During that week, Tug could feel himself being pulled into the vortex of her correctness. He studied more, got his hair trimmed, and spent far less time playing desk football with folded-up wads of lined paper during study hall. Suddenly he was aware of how ridiculous he looked with his fingers formed into a mini goalpost when it was the other guy’s turn to try for the extra point.

  After thorough consideration, she accepted him, and they dated all through junior high, unlike most of their friends, who changed partners like school was one big square dance. Sue didn’t approve of that. Waste of time, jockeying in and out of “relationships” based on little more than whether your friends thought you looked cute together.

  The summer between junior high and high school was a different story, however. Sue calmly explained to him that she thought it was for their own good to date other people and try the many new activities that high school had to offer. She was considering joining the debate team and wanted to be able to concentrate her full attention on being Natick’s first female debate champion.

  Tug had assumed there was another guy, and accordingly dated up a vengeful storm that summer and throughout the fall. He was surprised to find that he never got turned down, and attributed this at least in part to Sue. Any guy deemed good enough for her must be something. And he was something. He could see how she’d molded him into someone with higher standards and aspirations beyond what had been expected of him by others. His grades were good and he had become an excellent third baseman, fairly confident that he could make the high school team in the spring. Sue would have expected nothing less.

  But spring was a long way off, and he was having a hard time distracting himself from the rumors of Sue dating the captain of the debate team. The first night of Christmas break, one of his friends had a party, and Sue showed up with the debate captain. Tug was mortified, having come without a date, and proceeded to try and correct the situation with whoever was handy. From across the room, with his fingers safely entwined in those of some girl he barely knew, Tug was stunned to see Sue take a swig from a bottle of beer. Sue didn’t drink.

  “She used to say, ‘Alcohol is for people without ambition.’ I found out later she hadn’t done well at a debate. She hadn’t done that badly, you understand, but she hadn’t come in top three, either.”

  A few days later there was a huge snowstorm. Almost two feet of snow fell overnight, and the only thing that made it slightly less exciting was that, being vacation, it hadn’t resulted in a school cancellation. Most of Tug’s buddies spent the morning sitting on lunch trays, testing the durability of their spines as they sped down Walnut Hill. Well-trained by Sue to seize opportunity, Tug was making fistfuls of cash shoveling his neighbors’ driveways.

  He always shoveled out the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Bellows for free. “Fixed income,” Tug explained to Janie, “hadn’t made a home improvement in about twenty years.” Besides, Mr. Bellows always came out with his bent, rusted old shovel and tried to help. Tug was working on the driveway while Mr. Bellows chipped away at the front path, clearing it in spoon-sized chunks. All of a sudden the old gentleman was lying on his back in the snow, face half covered with tiny avalanches of sparkling flakes. Tug screamed in to Mrs. Bellows to call an ambulance, and ended up giving Mr. Bellows CPR until it arrived. Sue had previously convinced him, in that calm, smiling, relentless way she had, to take a CPR course with her. It was every citizen’s duty.

  A week later, the day before New Year’s Eve, Tug found himself on the front page of the Natick Bulletin: A HERO IN THE SNOW. Sue, as well as the mothers of most of his friends, called to congratulate him. She seemed strangely stuttery and nervous when she asked him if they could meet on a bench at the Natick Green. “She brought a thermos of hot chocolate and two mugs.”

  “She knew how to butter you up,” teased Janie.

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “I guess I’m a sucker for a woman bearing chocolate.”

  A flutter of anxiety went through Janie. What’s that supposed to mean? Does he think I purposely…he knows I’m not trying to…he likes chocolate for godsake, everyone knows that… But Tug was talking again, so Janie had to leave off worrying about the implications of her beverage offerings.

  Sue had read the article about him, how he had likely saved old Mr. Bellows’s life. (“For the time being, anyway,” Tug added. A couple of months later, Mr. Bellows had died in his sleep of a more thorough shuttering of his ancient aorta.) Sue went on to say that she was reminded of what a good influence Tug had on her and was hoping that he might consider getting back together.

  Good influence? On Sue? It was the first time Tug had considered that he might have any effect on her whatsoever. Sue was Sue. No one influenced her. Except, he was now learning, maybe him.

  It was very flattering, and yet there was something missing from her proposal. In retrospect, it still surprised Tug that, at fifteen, he’d had the wherewithal not to jump at the offer he’d lain awake imagining for the previous six months. She had done the cost-benefit analysis and determined him to be the appropriate choice for her. He waited to see if he meant anything more to her than that.

  In the silence, her chin began to tremble. “She wasn’t a crier. Ever. Times when she should have, she didn’t,” Tug explained to Janie. And Sue didn’t cry, there on the bench that day. But he could see her strain against emotion, a sight that was almost frightening to him.

  “You tug at me,” she whispered, finally. “Even when I should be focusing on other things, the thought of you tugs at me.”

  That was it. “I was a goner,” he told Janie with an embarrassed little smile. And what sealed the deal was that Sue began to call him Tug, effectively announcing to him and to everyone else, that she, the most beautiful, ambitious girl in the sophomore class, had fallen in love like any other fool. The name caught on among his friends, first as a taunt—one he didn’t mind all that much. Eventually, as with most nicknames, the meaning behind it faded and it was just what he was called.

  “That’s really sweet,” said Janie. He shrugged and began to tidy up the table, tightening the lid on the kosher dills and brushing potato chip crumbs into the palm of his calloused hand. “Does it ever feel strange,” Janie asked, “that she named you, and you’re not together anymore?”

  “Only once,” he said. “The day she told me it was over, and she was still calling me Tug. Seemed like a joke.”

  “But it didn’t bother you enough to do anything about it.”

  “Nah, it bothered me alright. But a guy doesn’t go changing his name in his forties. Plus…I don’t know. It’s my name. It doesn’t belong to her.”

  “Good point.” Janie nodded, thinking that what belongs to who in a relationship is always up for interpretation. It was that muddling of gifts—impalpable as a name or immovable as a porch—that caused the most confusion.

  He crumpled up his napkin and dropped it on his plate. “Think you’ll make it to the game tomorrow night?”

  “Not like I have a choice, now that Dylan’s practically the team mascot,” she said warmly, feeling somehow grateful for his gift of the story of his name.

  He smiled and patted her hand.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4

  Shelly is moving this weekend. I hate even writing that, and then I can’t believe how much I hate it because we’ve lived next to each other for years and I didn’t like her for most of that time. Sometimes I don’t even like her now. She’s so bossy and weird, with her plastic nails and her one-vegetable-only meals. But she saved me so many times, financially and otherwise. And I just love her.

  How is it that the Shellys of the world—the people who you avoid because they’re strange and have nothing in common with you—are the ones that show up when you need them, and my own mother can’t even pull herself together to visit for more than a week and a half?

  Shelly came over this morning to
ask me if I wanted her “moonstone blue” leather couch with the matching chair and ottoman and coordinating striped suede pillows. Apparently she conceded them in the Great Furniture Treaty of Rhode Island, in return for getting to bring her wrought-iron patio set. She told me that combining two households is almost as hard as splitting one up. The big difference, according to her, is that the sex is better. Better? She was having not-so-great sex with her ex-husband while they were divvying up the dish towels? Yikes.

  Taking her couch makes no sense. It will barely even fit in my living room. But here I am, saying yes to the couch and the chair and ottoman. I can’t help it. They’re Shelly’s. I want them.

  She asked me how my finances looked, now that the porch is paid for and preschool tuition is starting up again. I showed her the numbers. We agreed that I should start looking for a part-time slot at a local hospital after the first of the year. Just enough hours to get on the health plan. I’m going to talk to Aunt Jude about watching the kids. Another person who drives me crazy that I can’t live without.

  It feels too soon to start working again, Carly especially seems too young. But her birthday’s next week. For Dylan’s first birthday, we went camping in Acadia National Park. It was a beautiful clear day, and you could practically see the entire Maine coastline. We felt like we were giving him the world. No relatives, no balloons, no hoopla. Just the three of us, needing no one else, happier than I ever thought I could be.

  I better call Cormac and order a cake.

  WHEN JANIE CALLED ABOUT the cake, she also asked Cormac if he would come over on Saturday and help her move the enormous leather living room set from Shelly’s. She mentioned this in passing to Tug between innings, and he said simply, “What time?”