During the months Karyn was making her ecological statement by going with cloth, Jamie dreaded changing his son’s diaper. He could never get enough experience during his visits and feared he would botch the folding and that Karyn would return to eventually find Aaron a feces-stained mess.
“Dah-dee ‘tay hee-uh,” Aaron said as Jamie pried apart his legs and slipped the clean diaper under his bottom.
He snapped Aaron’s jeans together at the waist and lifted him onto his feet. Aaron lurched to the books that were neatly stacked on the shelf on top of the toy bin, not quite able to reach them.
“Let’s see what we have,” Jamie said, doing a deep knee bend and selecting a handful.
Books in hand, he plopped down on the carpet, inspecting the titles. He leaned back against the sideboard of the bed Aaron had already been sleeping in for three weeks since he rebelled against naptime by vaulting over the crib bars and into his startled mother’s arms. Jamie knew because Karyn called him that night and told him she had purchased a bed on credit and would let him know when payment was due.
Aaron lowered himself into the nest formed by Jamie’s crossed ankles and grabbed for the top book.
“Dis one, dah-dee,” Aaron said.
“Slombo The Gross?”
“Lombo geen,” Aaron said, giggling and pointing to the colorful cover.
“Good choice, Aaron,” Jamie said, skipping pages to the beginning of the story. “Right over by the dump, just behind the dirty part of the highway, lives a truly disgusting guy…”
“Who write, dah-dee?”
“Write?”
“Mommy say.”
“Oh, right,” Jamie said, reminded that Karyn always followed bookstore etiquette.
“Slombo The Gross, by Rodney A. Greenblatt.”
The author was apparently an Aaron favorite. After Slombo he chose another Greenblatt offering, Uncle Wizzmo’s New Used Car, followed by Sam Goes Trucking by Henry Horenstein, in which a father wakes his son at dawn to accompany him in an eighteen-wheeler as he hauls his load across the interstate.
Jamie suspected that this book—filled as it was with photos and explanations of how to hitch a trailer to a cab, pump air in the tires and fill the tank with diesel fuel—was published with the purpose of inducing sleep without having to medicate the child. It seemed to work effectively on adults too, given Jamie’s sudden craving for a nap of his own.
Sure enough, just as the fish were about to be unloaded by forklift, Aaron unleashed a mighty yawn. His chin sank into his chest.
“Looks like it may be time for sleeping,” Karyn said. She stood in the doorway, clutching Aaron’s favorite stuffed animal, a light brown, floppy-eared dog he called Ruffy.
“Dah-dee read,” Aaron insisted.
“What if Daddy reads you Goodnight Moon?” Karyn said. “But you have to be in bed.”
She handed Aaron his stuffed animal, lifted him from Jamie’s lap and deposited him gently onto the sheet. She unfurled the quilt that was neatly folded at the edge of the bed and draped it over his body.
Jamie untied his sneakers and slipped them off. He climbed onto the bed from the far end and wedged himself between Aaron and the protective guard. Karyn handed him the copy of Goodnight Moon, purchased by Karyn soon after she had quit her job in the city and began working at the bookstore.
“Ready?” Jamie said, turning to Aaron, who nodded.
“Goodnight Moon,” Jamie began. Aaron held tightly to Ruffy under his right armpit. He scratched his nose with his free hand, looking earnestly at his father.
“By Margaret Wise Brown. Pictures by Clement Hurd.”
Aaron’s eyes were already half-closed. He rubbed them with balled-up hands. Jamie caressed his soft cheeks.
He read the rest of the story without further input from Aaron. He reached the last page and finished—“Goodnight noises everywhere”—in a soft, theatrical whisper.
Karyn rose from her perch at the edge of the bed and put a finger to her lips. She cautioned Jamie to dismount as quietly as possible. He lifted his sneakers from the carpet and pinched them together to carry downstairs. He and Karyn stared lovingly at Aaron, their shoulders nearly touching. They reveled in tandem, almost a family.
Just as Karyn hit the light switch, Aaron’s head made an impeccably timed rise from the pillow.
“Dah-dee?”
“Yes, Aaron?”
“You seep hee-uh.”
Jamie bit his lip and seized up.
“I’m just going downstairs with Mommy for a little while,” he said. “Daddy loves you very much.”
As they descended the stairs, Karyn first, she said, without turning, “You’re welcome to stay, you know. I can make up the bed in the guest room or even put some blankets and pillows on the carpet next to Aaron.”
Outside, a gusty rainstorm was emptying trees of their more stubborn contents, providing the perfect excuse to take Karyn up on her offer. But as much as Jamie could feel in his bones how thrilled Aaron would be to climb out of bed, jump on his father for the first time in his two-year-old life, he worried about misleading him.
“I’m afraid he’ll get the wrong idea about where his father stays,” Jamie said. “And then what happens if…well, you know, this job you’ve been talking about…?”
“I know,” Karyn said. “We do have to talk.”
They sat facing each other at the small table stationed against the wall, working on a pot of coffee she had brewed. Jamie couldn’t help but wonder if this was the real reason she had invited him to the party.
Two hours later, exhausted to the point of lightheadedness, he glanced at his watch. He said it was getting late and that he thought it would be better for him to leave.
“You look so sad,” she told him at the door. “Don’t be. This doesn’t have to be the end of the world.”
“I’m just a little tired,” he said. “And I have a lot to think about.”
“But this—today, I mean—was good, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was good,” he said. “It was really good.”
She gave him a hug, stiff to the point of being formal. He appreciated the gesture.
Jamie turned and walked to the car. He was indifferent to the pelting rain, grateful and suddenly buoyed by the blurring newsreel his life had become. He needed to think. He told himself, The drive back to the city will do me good.
The wind picked up on the darkened parkway. He’d hated this road from the time he began using it. He felt fortunate to have survived more than a few late-night drives going in the other direction without falling asleep at the wheel.
On one frightening occasion just weeks after they’d moved in from Brooklyn, Jamie found himself in a snowstorm that got worse the farther north he drove, not another car in sight. The traction was treacherous, only glimpses of the broken white line visible enough to guide him through the more curvy patches.
Jamie shelved his agnosticism that night and prayed for a safe pathway home. The main town roads were plowed but accumulations on his narrow street turned the walk from the driveway to the back door into an artic hike. Karyn had tacked a note onto the refrigerator to inform him that the boiler had shut down. She had called the oil company and been promised a repairman by mid-morning.
She was asleep upstairs under a stack of blankets with a verticality that rivaled the snowdrifts outside. Jamie slipped out of his clothes and under the blankets. He couldn’t stop himself from wondering out loud why the hell they had ever left Brooklyn. He mixed in an F-bomb for good measure.
Like a zombie rising from the dead, Karyn turned and glowered, the whites of her eyes giving her a ghostly look in the darkness.
“Why didn’t you take the train when you knew it was going to snow?” she shouted. “That’s all you talked about when we bought the house: walking distance to the station, you can read the paper, you can take a nap. So don’t you dare blame me!”
Looking back, he could see how their relationship had devolved to bein
g all about blame as soon as they’d left Brooklyn. He held her responsible for dragging him to the suburbs. She resented him for not rising above his relocation misery for the sake of their unborn child. Jamie’s missing Aaron’s birth was proof to her that he never wanted the baby. He’d spent two years trying to prove her wrong. Maybe he had finally succeeded.
He tapped the eject button and yanked a Jackson Browne cassette from the mouth of the car’s cassette player. He dropped it into the passenger seat. He was in the mood for something more up-tempo, less self-pitying. He reached over to the passenger seat for the tape he had pulled from the glove compartment before starting the car. He slid it through the slot and fast-forwarded from the middle of the album, approximating where he needed to stop.
He tapped his left foot lightly against the clutch to George Harrison’s opening guitar riff to his favorite Traveling Wilburys’ tune.
Well it’s all right, riding around in the breeze
Well it’s all right, if you live the life you please…
The cassette, having loosened from its spool, popped out of the slot. Jamie yanked it out and dropped it onto the passenger seat. He wished he had the money to spring for a new car with a compact disc player. In his apartment, vinyl was still retro hip. Here in the car, cassettes were so fragile, so 1980s.
The radio automatically switched on, tuned to the all-news station, a male anchor’s resonant voice.
“It’s ten-thirty, and here are the top stories. The five-day strike at the Trib has ended for all but one of the newspaper’s nine unions returning this evening to produce tomorrow’s editions, the drivers being the lone holdout…”
The radio shockwave was followed by a torrent of wind-blown rain drenching the windshield. Temporarily blinded, Jamie gripped the wheel tight but violated the Drivers Ed manual by hitting the brake as he splashed through a puddle. The car skidded, veering right. He tapped the brake again but remembered another fundamental rule—to ease off the pedal and steer into the skid. He brought the car to a crooked halt on the shoulder.
The engine stalled.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second before he realized he was sitting at a ninety degree angle, the rear of the car still in the right lane. He saw headlights coming in the driver’s side view mirror. He needed to move fast. He depressed the clutch, turned the key to re-start the engine, exhaled when it turned over. He straightened the wheels and maneuvered out of the right lane.
The approaching car slowed for the puddle and rolled past to where Jamie was parked. The driver rubbernecked to see if there was any problem before speeding on.
While the car idled, Jamie’s thoughts raced at breakneck speed. On the radio, a reporter was reading a statement by Leland Brady welcoming the returning unions back to work. He conveyed his “sincerest wishes” that they would finally agree to engage in contract negotiations that would address the need for concessions, ensuring “long-term financial viability of the newspaper.”
Of course the unions were welcomed now that he had all but one back—with their strike leverage scratched like a losing lottery ticket.
Eight unions, including his own and more notably his father’s, had crossed the drivers’ picket line. None of this made any sense to Jamie, who could only ask himself what was the point of striking in the first place? What on earth had they accomplished by returning to work without a deal?
He pumped his brake as a safety precaution and steered the car back into the right lane. Anger surged through him. He wanted to howl at the moon but settled for yelling, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
There was one positive development in the end of the strike. Jamie was no longer the only Kramer male to have crossed a picket line. But why on earth had he needed to humiliate himself two days before everyone returned?
The only person Jamie wanted answers from more than his traitorous cousin was his hypocrite father.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The rain had turned into a foggy mist by the time Jamie crossed the Triboro Bridge and headed south on the FDR Drive. He had heard no new details of the strike’s conclusion when the news cycle restarted on the Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, the shuttered Yankee Stadium still visible in his driver’s side view mirror.
He couldn’t wait to get downtown and find out just what had happened. He cursed under his breath when traffic slowed for an accident near Forty-Second Street.
Finally downtown, he blew through a stop sign at the South Street exit. The strike news aired again, this time with a reporter on scene. He described a large police presence to control the drivers, the last striking union.
As Jamie approached the building, he could see for himself: barricades lined both sides of the street. Dozens of cops were wandering around in bunches. They were stationed opposite the front entrance, warily minding the handful of drivers milling in the vicinity of the door. Jamie rolled by to the corner of South and Catherine. An officer motioned for him to proceed straight through the intersection. He slowed and looked right to the loading docks along the side of the building. There, inside more barricades on the far side of the street, was a long picket line with more clusters of drivers and cops. Abandoned by the other unions, they were out in force and no doubt spoiling for a fight.
Jamie accelerated down South Street. He parked three blocks away under the highway. He walked back at a brisk pace, mindful of the fact that no matter where he entered the building, he was likely to encounter harassment. To the drivers, anyone who walked into the building was technically a scab, but this time Jamie had his own agenda.
I could give a shit what they think.
Holding court at the corner was Gerry Colangelo, his back to Jamie but unmistakably identifiable by his slicked-back hair. He wore a blue windbreaker with Deliverers scripted across the back. Next to him was the ubiquitous Debbie Givens. They deserve each other, Jamie thought. He shook his head in disgust as he walked past. He made his way toward the front door where a dozen more drivers were cordoned off twenty feet away.
They lit into Jamie the moment they saw him advancing, fresh meat for a pack of wolves. One of the cops turned to determine the cause of the commotion, the eruption of profanity. He pointed his nightstick, first at Jamie and then at the entrance to the building.
In his own pissed-off mood, Jamie looked directly at the faces made partially visible by the street lamp, indistinguishable as they were in contortions of anger. Not the time or place for mischief, he knew. He couldn’t resist. He flashed a two-fingered peace sign. The drivers responded with solitary middle fingers and the corresponding four-letter epithet.
“Go ahead, knock yourselves out,” he mumbled.
With the Trib staff already in the building, it made strategic sense that the majority of drivers would be by the loading docks, leaving the other entrances sparsely covered. They were getting ready for the trucks to roll. But Jamie could care less about the drivers. They weren’t why he was here.
He pushed through the revolving door and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. He headed straight down a narrow corridor leading from the newsroom. Left turn at the vending machines leading to another musty smelling straightaway and dead-ending at a metallic green door with a small, rectangular window. The only means of identification was a strip of adhesive tape with the word “reflex” printed in smudged black marker. This was where his father worked.
During his early days at the Trib, clerking overtime one night, Jamie had taken an unplanned detour to this door while grabbing a candy bar. He peeked through the window and was surprised by the sterility of the room, so disparate from his recollection of the old composing room pandemonium.
There were a few desks with bulky computer equipment. A couple of bigger machines stacked against the far wall, three or four of the workstations manned, though no trace of his father or uncle. They might have been on break, returning within minutes. But Jamie left without asking and to this day had no idea what actual service the transitioned printers contribu
ted to the production of the paper.
“We move pages,” Morris had grumbled when Jamie had asked—whatever that meant.
He never understood why his father had to be so evasive even when the line of questioning was exceedingly benign. He once asked his mother, “Is he that way with everyone or just me?” She laughed. “I learned to figure out what he’s saying even when he won’t say anything. Don’t take it personally.” Jamie did anyway.
For him, meaningful conversation with his father was painful even before the cold war caused by the dissolution of his marriage and his real estate story. After that it was near impossible.
How naïve Jamie had been to so much as harbor a fantasy that his picket line provocation could have ended in any other way than it had. This time it’ll be different, he assured himself, believing—and perhaps hoping—that Morris would have gently tried to dissuade him the way Uncle Lou had. Should have known better, he’s always been so high and mighty. But let’s see what he going to say now.
Jamie told himself that he didn’t have to wallow in self-pity anymore or swallow more strike sanctimony after what Steven had done. His father and uncle had also caved with no discernible cause, downgraded their job action from military strike to extended fire drill.
Jamie only wanted to have his say now, the last word on all the empty rhetoric.
I deserve this, he told himself. I owe this to myself.
Chapter Thirty
Morris was hunched over his desk, leaning left to spare his keyboard the residue of the seeded roll he was biting into. His back was to the door when the rap at the window came.
A holdout crumb fastened to his upper lip, he looked up to find Sean Cox—at the station opposite him—pointing a finger. His owlish eyes were barely visible above the computer screen.
“Looks like your boy, Mo,” Sean said.
Morris swiveled around and, sure enough, there was Jamie’s face framed in the window.
“Oh, brother,” he mumbled, rising from his chair. Carrying his roll, he pulled the door open.
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