The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  Sam reached for the bottle of Joy and, aware that her mother was watching, squeezed and counted aloud: “One drop, two drops, three drops. To quote the esteemed Eleanor Grace Fetters McGinty, ‘We’re not washing the Kleshinskis’ Oldsmobile.’ ”

  “Very funny,” Ellie said. “Fill it with water and put enough Joy in there to wash the silverware after dinner.”

  Sam turned on the tap. “Why is Daddy working so much overtime? He hasn’t been home for dinner in weeks.”

  “Don’t exaggerate, Sam. He had dinner with us twice last week. He’s giving up all those evenings with us to make enough money to buy a house.”

  “How much money?”

  “I never have to worry about that,” Ellie said. “Daddy takes care of all that. Deposits his checks, pays the bills. That’s how a marriage works.”

  “We already have a house, Mom.”

  “It’s not ours, Sam. We rent it from somebody else.”

  Sam pulled out her mother’s footstool and sat on the top step. “I like this house just fine. It’s got paneling in the living room, and the linoleum looks like bricks. Lenny says it looks classy.”

  “Lenny,” Ellie said, wiping the countertop. “That boy is from another time, I swear. Acts like an old English man trapped in a skinny boy’s body in Erietown, Ohio.”

  Sam laughed. “Still, he’s my best friend.”

  “Clever you,” Ellie said, tossing the dishrag into the sudsy bowl. “I knew exactly what you were doing when you decided on that one.”

  Sam shrugged and smiled. “Worked, too. We’ve been friends for two and a half years now, and Daddy hasn’t said a bad thing about him.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ellie said, shooing her off the stool. “And Daddy still likes his father. Funny how that goes. Like I said, Sam: Clever you.”

  Sam shoved the stool back under the counter. “Lenny understands me like nobody else. He likes books as much as I do, and he likes black people, too. Says we don’t have to hate somebody just because our dads do.”

  Ellie frowned. “I’d keep that to myself when Daddy is home, if I were you.”

  Sam shoved her hands into her pockets. “If we move, I’ll miss Lenny. A lot.”

  Ellie handed her three plates and pointed to the dining room. “Men aren’t like us, Sam. Your father needs to feel bigger and stronger, and part of that means living in a house that is all his. It’s part of taking care of his family.” She smiled and reached up to smooth Sam’s hair back from her forehead. “He loves us, which is why he’s wearing himself out for us.”

  “Fine,” Sam said, walking into the dining room. “I’ll make Daddy a card, a Sam McGinty original, and stick it in his lunch pail.”

  “That’s my girl,” Ellie said.

  For the rest of his life, Brick would relive in his mind the chain of events that killed off the Brick McGinty he used to be. One bad decision rolled into another and another until the whole damn thing was too big to stop. Click-click-click, like the kids’ dominoes falling. Ellie’s God flicked his finger, and their family, the life they had built together, came tumbling down. Why does it take hurting someone to understand how much they used to love you?

  He’d been bored, and he got reckless. He stopped after work at Sardelli’s, and there she was, waiting for him. “I knew we were going to meet,” Rosemary had told him that first night. “I just didn’t know when.”

  He had loved all of her questions, and the way she cooed every time he added another napkin to show her how a guy as ordinary as Brick McGinty made electricity that lit up all of Clayton County. For the slightest moment, her enthusiasm reminded him of Sam and Reilly huddling around him as he drew on those napkins. How fast that guilt lost its power to the scent of her long naked neck.

  She wouldn’t let him wad up the napkins after he finished drawing. “I don’t want to lose these,” she said, plucking each square of napkin as if she were lifting a piece of art. “I’m going to hang these on my bedroom wall, to remind me of the power of Brick McGinty.”

  By the third beer, he knew he wasn’t going home early to fetch Ellie and the kids. By the fifth, he knew he wasn’t going home at all. “Double time if I stay,” he told Ellie as he hunched over the pay phone outside the men’s room.

  “You do what you have to do, honey,” Ellie said. “Sam and I will put your plate in the fridge.” Honey. She hadn’t called him that in such a long time. He’d hesitated only long enough to talk himself into resenting how goddamn long he’d had to wait for that.

  If Rosemary hadn’t lived above the bar, would he have let her grab his hand and lead him away that night? He used to wonder about that, before Ellie found out. “It doesn’t matter where she lived,” Ellie said. “What matters is that we weren’t enough for you, Brick. That you’ve always wanted more. Why weren’t we enough for you? Why wasn’t I?”

  The truth was messier, but he couldn’t tell her that. He had wanted the young Ellie, his Pint, the girl who believed he was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She had made him feel like he could do anything in the world. The way her face lit up at the sight of him, so hungry for him. She protested the first time they made love, in his truck, but not much, really. By the third time she was wrapping her legs around him and whispering in his ear, “Fill me up.” After Kitty, she never said that again.

  Rosemary rekindled something in him. When her eyes widened at the sight of him he felt like that teenager again, his stomach tightening, the front of his pants swelling even as he approached the bar. The first time he was with her, he was too fast, barely sliding inside her before exploding. “I’m better than that, I promise,” he said, lying on his back as they shared a cigarette. She took a long drag on it and stretched across him to rub it out in the ashtray on the bedside table. “Yeah?” she said, pulling him on top of her. “Show me.”

  Afterward, Rosemary rolled out of bed and started taping his napkin drawings in a row across the wall. She was naked, her ass framed by moonlight as she swayed her hips and hummed “Go Where You Wanna Go,” by the Mamas and the Papas.

  He stared at the drawings and felt a rising sense of panic as he tried to will his daughter’s voice out of his head. You throw a big bolt of lightning high into the sky and it flies straight to our house.

  Brick sat up and reached for his underwear on the floor. “I have to go.”

  “Go where?”

  Brick looked up at her. “Are you kidding? I’m married, you know that. I have to get home.”

  “What are you going to tell Ellie?”

  He stood up to pull on his pants. “Don’t ever do that.”

  “Don’t ever do what?”

  “Don’t ever say my wife’s name,” he said, tucking in his shirt. “She has nothing to do with this.”

  Rosemary sat down on the bed and draped the edge of the sheet across her lap. “And what is this? Us, I mean?”

  He stood motionless at the side of the bed as she reached for the buckle on his belt. “What are we, Brick?” she said, slowly unzipping. He didn’t even try to fight her.

  Nights turned into weeks that became months of sliding out of Rosemary’s bed and into the one he shared with his wife. Ellie was asleep, but she always left out a wrapped plate of dinner on the counter. “You’re working so many extra hours for us,” she’d told him after his sixth night with Rosemary. “The least I can do is make sure you eat.”

  He’d just hit the three-month mark of Rosemary overtime when he found Sam’s card in his lunch pail. Slowly, he opened it.

  Dear Daddy,

  I miss you, but Mom says that’s how it has to go right now because you’re working a lot of over time to save money to buy a house. If you get too tired, you should come home because this house is every thing I ever wanted anyway.

  I love you. Don’t worry, I know you can’t say it back, but Mom says how hard
you work says the same thing.

  Your Sam

  His hands trembled and he folded the card into fourths and tucked it into his shirt pocket. He closed his lunch pail and stood up. Howie Lobdell had been watching. “Not eating, Brick?”

  “Nah. Not in the mood for meatloaf again.” What a shitty thing to say. Ellie didn’t deserve that. He felt shorter with each step toward the exit, cowering from Ellie’s God.

  Brick grabbed the end of the dining room table with both hands and leaned in. “I’m gonna catch you. You can’t escape.”

  Sam and Reilly dropped their forks in unison and stared at their mother, who was gripping the other end of the table. “You just try,” she said, her face flushed as she laughed. She took two steps to her right to trick Brick, and then darted to the left.

  “You can’t keep this up,” Brick said. “You know you can’t.” Ellie put her hands on her hips and wiggled, waiting for his next move. He faked to the right and whirled around, grabbing her wrists. “Gotcha.”

  “No!” she screamed. The children clapped as he scooped her into his arms. “You’re fast, Daddy,” Reilly yelled. Brick started tickling Ellie in the ribs with both hands. “No, no,” she said, laughing. “Brick. Stop! You win!”

  Brick planted a kiss on her mouth. “Damn straight I win. Every time.” He blew up at the wisps of his hair plastered against his sweaty forehead. “Look at what you did to me, woman. I look like I’ve played nine innings.”

  Ellie’s eyes glistened. “Nice to know I can still get you worked up.”

  Sam’s cheeks started to burn. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mom and dad so playful with each other. She was grateful for the reprieve from the usual dinnertime gloom, but she was nervous about it, too. Didn’t trust it. One fight and everything could go dark again.

  “Live in the moment,” her mother liked to say now that she was spending so much time at church. “You can’t change the past and the future is in God’s hands.” As far as Sam could tell, God didn’t spend much time with the McGintys.

  After dinner, Sam stood at the sink washing dishes while her parents sat on the porch swing. She could hear her father singing his medley of Dean Martin songs. It’d been months since he’d done that.

  She finished the dishes and pulled up the sink stopper, then walked slowly toward the front door. The empty swing was slowing to a stop. She heard the click of the lock on her parents’ bedroom door, followed by her mother’s laugh. She walked out the back door, where Reilly was sitting on one of the swings. He was swaying as he dragged the toe of his sneaker in the dirt, and as she got closer she could hear his soft voice singing the same line over and over, like a prayer. Everybody loves somebody sometime…

  * * *

  —

  Brick stretched his free arm over the side of the bed to grab the cigarette pack on the table, moving slowly to avoid waking Ellie, who was nestled into his other shoulder. He slid out a cigarette and picked up the Bic lighter. He still hadn’t found Ellie’s lighter, and it bothered him more than he admitted. He was just about to strike a flame when he looked at Ellie’s beehive blooming over his shoulder. With all that hairspray it’d probably catch on fire. He smiled, surprised by his lack of annoyance. They were rounding a corner. He could feel it. The way she’d smiled at him as he chased her around the dining room table. God, he loved that, and the looks on the kids’ faces. He couldn’t remember the last time all four of them had been in the same room laughing.

  She’d grabbed his hand on the porch swing and guided him to their bedroom. She hadn’t done that since his affair with Kitty. He closed his eyes. His mistake with Kitty was nothing compared to what he was doing now.

  Ellie stirred and rolled over on her stomach. “Oh, my,” she said, looking up at him. “I must have fallen asleep.”

  He reached over and stroked her cheek. “Guess I wore you out.”

  She lifted her face higher. “What’s wrong?”

  The skin on the back of his neck tightened. “Nothing.” He slid his arm out from under her and inched up against the headboard. “I’m still amazed at what just happened here, in broad daylight.”

  Ellie sat up, tugging on the sheet to cover her breasts before turning to look at him again. “I love you, Brick.”

  Brick exhaled slowly. “I love you, too, El.”

  “No, I mean it, Brick. I really do love you. Even now. Even after everything.”

  He nodded slowly, unsure of where this was going. “I’ve never stopped loving you, Ellie. Not for a minute.”

  She pressed her lips together into a thin line and nodded twice. “I wanted to believe that was true,” she said. “But I went a long time thinking you didn’t, Brick. Thinking I wasn’t enough for you. But I do now. Look how hard you’re working to get us our own home. That’s about a future. Our future. That’s love.”

  He could barely breathe.

  “Brick,” she said, cupping his face. “My Brick.” He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in, squeezing his eyes shut.

  She pressed her ear against his chest. “Your heart,” she said. “I can feel it pounding.”

  Rosemary pulled herself up from her knees at the toilet and turned on the cold water. She splashed her face and looked in the mirror. “Jesus God. No, no, no.” She held out her fingers and counted the weeks since her last period. “He’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna wish I was dead.”

  She walked into the kitchen and glanced at the clock on the wall. She wasn’t due at work for another hour and a half. She lifted the window shade and looked down at the parking lot. Four cars, not one of them his. She had no idea if he was planning to stop after work. She never did, not once, in these last nine months.

  She picked up the pack of Kents and pulled out the metal lighter she kept wedged in the middle of the stack of paper napkins. She flipped it over and felt the familiar burn as she read the inscription: LOVE, PINT. Rosemary had slipped the lighter out of his pocket two weeks ago, when he was in the shower. It was a test. How long before he’d ask her if she’d seen it? How long before he admitted he missed it?

  Stupid games, but as of today, she was winning. She had something Ellie McGinty would never have. She was carrying Brick’s third child, the one that doctors said his wife could never give him. The baby Brick desperately wanted. He’d never said it quite like that, but he had his ways of letting his hopes slip out.

  Rosemary had once picked up his wallet on the table and thumbed through the pictures of his family. She’d been so upset by the photo booth picture of him with Ellie—“Our wedding day!” he had written on the back—that she didn’t hide her snooping when he walked out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.

  She had expected his usual blowup at the proof of her prying, but he didn’t yell. Didn’t even look angry. He just said, slowly, “What are you doing, Roe?”

  “I was just wondering why you left one of the picture sleeves empty,” she said, fanning out the photos. “You told me you take pictures of the kids all the time, but you’ve got an empty one here.”

  Brick stepped back into the steamy bathroom. “I do,” he said, looking into the mirror as he ran a comb through his hair. “Maybe I’m still not sure we won’t have another one. Another boy, maybe. Despite the damn doctors. So, I keep that one empty. So I don’t jinx it.”

  She deserved that sucker punch, she’d told herself at the time. She was getting into his business, as he always put it, and that never turned out well. They weren’t supposed to talk about his wife and kids. Not ever.

  She had overplayed her hand in the beginning, giving him the wrong impression about her. That first night at the bar she had played to win. She knew from years of customer confessions that marriages got tired after a while, and most husbands longed to believe there was more to them than an hourly wage job, and a wife and kids who always needed mor
e than they could give them. Rosemary wanted to introduce Brick to the part of himself that he’d lost, and with her edgy banter and sympathetic smiles, she was sure she could do it. By the time Brick McGinty sat down at her bar, she’d had years of practice on how to make a man feel shiny and new.

  Their first few weeks were everything she’d hoped they would be. Sometimes they didn’t get any farther than inside the door before she was naked and soon writhing underneath him. After three months or so, though, she started to wonder if there was anything else about her that interested him. He never asked her about her day, and except for quizzing her a little about her hometown of Foxglove, he seemed to lack any curiosity about her life before he’d met her. He didn’t want to talk about anything from early in his life, and his wife and kids were off-limits.

  He was always looking at his watch, too. “You know, you’re not punching a clock here,” she said to him recently, after they’d made love twice and he rolled out of bed.

  “You know what you signed up for,” he said. “You know I’m married.” He walked into the bathroom and slammed the door. That’s when she took his lighter.

  There was that one time, though, when he said he wanted another child. She’d sat at the table as he finished his ritual for departure. Buckling his belt. Propping a foot on the toilet seat to tie his shoe. Unwrapping a stick of peppermint gum and popping it into his mouth, his square jaw flexing as he chewed.

  He had smiled at her when he walked back out of the bathroom. Didn’t seem the least bit angry about her sneaking through his wallet. Even kissed her goodbye.

  She had talked herself into thinking maybe he was giving her a hint that day. Ellie couldn’t have any more children. That’s what he’d told her.

  Rosemary sat down at the kitchen table and started writing on the notepad there.