Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Sorry,” she said. He could see she was shivering.

  “Why don’t you come inside, Miss-”

  “Terry.”

  “-Terry. We can try to call a cab or a tow truck. Meanwhile, you can warm up.”

  She turned and looked at her car. “Will it be okay here?”

  “Oh, it’s not going to go anywhere,” he assured her.

  And neither was she, it seemed.

  It turned out all the tow-truck operators in the area were busy hooking up their plows, hoping the snow down below was going to amount to something. Some of them plowed part-time for the county, others for the town, and most of the rest of them had standing arrangements with homeowners to do their driveways, at $25 to $35 a pop, depending on the driveway. Stephen’s - a nasty combination of long, winding, narrow, and steep - would have been a $50 job, at least. Which is why he’d gone out and bought a plow that fit the Renegade, so he could do it himself.

  Used to do it himself, make that.

  As for getting a cab driver crazy enough to try to make it up the hill, well, Stephen wasn’t even going to waste his time calling.

  “Here,” he said, handing the phone book to Terry. “Knock your socks off.” He remembered her now, the redhead with the green eyes. Flynt Adams had read him the article she’d written for her newspaper. According to her, the photo he’d taken of Penny was a sexual performance, and Stephen was a child pornographer. She was the enemy; she’d come here hoping to apologize to him. Bullshit. She was here to get something on him, so she could really bury him in her next story.

  She took his spot at the kitchen wall phone and dialed the first number. The snow on her clothes and boots had melted and now was dripping off her. “I’m going to ruin your floor,” she said.

  “I think the brick can take it,” said Stephen, heading back to finish his repair job on the front door. As much as he disliked her, he still found it an effort to be nasty to her: She was that pretty.

  He went to work on the second hinge of the door and was soon absorbed in the process. Stephen liked working with his hands, and he particularly liked solving little repair problems. The toothpicks, for example - using them to fill the screw holes and seeing them work to perfection - that was the kind of thing that gave him pleasure.

  “What happened to your door?”

  He hadn’t heard her come up behind him, and he jumped slightly at the sound of her voice.

  “Sorry,” she said when he didn’t answer. “I’ve called every cab company listed in the directory. As soon as they hear where I am, they laugh.”

  He tightened down the last screw and wiped off the excess glue. “They kicked it down when they came to search my home,” he said, surprised now to hear his own voice. He hadn’t meant to answer her.

  “Search for what?”

  “Evidence, they said.”

  “Did they take anything?”

  He laughed bitterly, at both the question and her seamless way of launching into an interview.

  “My lawyer told me not to talk to anyone,” he said, tapping the pins down into the hinges and closing the door. “I don’t recall him saying, ‘Except reporters.’“

  “We’re off the record,” said Terry.

  He managed another bitter laugh. “How do I know that?”

  She seemed to think a moment. “You just took me into your home in the middle of a snowstorm,” she said, “after I’d written a pretty nasty story about you. You tried to find a tow truck for me. You let me use your phone. The reason you know we’re off the record is ‘cause I said so. I’m a reporter, Mr. Barrow, not a cunt.”

  At that, he did a double-take. And then, in spite of himself, he laughed. Not a bitter laugh, the kind he’d been finding himself involuntarily spitting out lately, but a real laugh. The absurdity of it all: the sight of this timid little prude - prude because from the article she’d written she evidently believed (or at least was willing to embrace the belief) that any photo of a naked child could only be pornographic, and timid because only a moment ago she’d felt the need to apologize for dripping water onto a brick floor you couldn’t hurt with battery acid - had all of a sudden blurted out the C-word, just like that. It was the last thing in the world he’d expected from her.

  So he’d laughed. Big deal.

  Except that somewhere in the back of his mind, it occurred to Stephen that the laugh brought his total for the last four days to a single one.

  “It’s not Mr. Barrow,” he told her now. “It’s Stephen.”

  She hadn’t meant to use the word; it certainly wasn’t part of her everyday vocabulary. But once she’d said it, and he’d laughed in response to it, everything changed. All the attitude suddenly went out of him, and he dropped the protective cover of nastiness - which, as far as she was concerned, he hadn’t seemed too comfortable wearing in the first place.

  He made them tea, or at least something that might have passed for tea with someone who wasn’t of Irish extraction. Sitting across from him at the kitchen table, she followed his cue and drank it with honey and lemon instead of asking for milk, which she would have preferred. He made her take off her wet coat and hung it on a peg - not to save his floor, but to help her dry out. He had this old, rusty stove in the middle of the room, and the thing seemed positively alive to her with its two glowing burners for eyes and a slotted grate at the bottom that looked like the teeth of a grinning mouth. Every once in a while he’d feed it a new log, and the thing would make these weird clanking and whooshing noises, as though it were eating them.

  But it sure kept the place warm.

  “They took my Jeep,” he explained to her, “my computer, my camera, every photograph they could find in the house, a bunch of my daughter’s toys-”

  “Safari Barbie?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Safari Barbie,” she repeated.

  He stared at her as though she might be some kind of Gypsy with magical powers. “How did you know about Safari Barbie?” he asked.

  “I was in line right behind you at the Drug Mart the day you bought it. I tried to make a joke about it, asking if you were going to Africa.”

  A look of recognition slowly spread across his face. He had noticed her, after all. “And I, like a jerk, thought you were serious and said no.”

  “Right. You told me it was for your daughter.”

  They both laughed. She could actually see him beginning to relax in front of her. She was good at this, thought Theresa the reporter. She decided to push a little. “And then you dropped off a roll of film,” she said.

  He nodded, but said nothing. Had she pushed too quickly?

  The phone rang. He got up to answer it. She drank her tea-water while he spoke, and from his end of the conversation she was able to figure out that he was talking to his lawyer, and that the news wasn’t good. By the time he’d hung up the phone and rejoined her at the table, his face was pained, his whole body seemed tense, and he was having trouble making eye contact.

  “That was my lawyer,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “We’ve got to go to court Friday,” he explained. “My ex-wife’s asking for permanent custody and increased child support.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Theresa. It was hard not to be, so visible was his pain. “May I ask you a question?”

  He looked up, as though he had one of his own.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re still off the record.”

  “I guess so,” he said, with a shrug.

  “Why were you giving your ex-wife child support in the first place? Wasn’t your daughter living with you?”

  He laughed, but it came out sounding more like a snort. “Technically, we’ve always had joint custody,” he said. “And being Jewish, I felt guilty about the original separation and divorce. No-fault guilt, I call it. So paying child support seemed therapeutic. Then, even after my daughter started spending all her time here, I was so grateful, I didn’t want to rock the boat. So I kept on sending
the support checks, along with the alimony ones. I suppose it was bribery, in a way: I was paying my ex-wife not to share custody.”

  “And now she wants more money.”

  “Lots more, apparently. And she wants to put our daughter in therapy.”

  “Does she need therapy?”

  Stephen seemed to measure his words before speaking. “My daughter is the most terrific, normalest kid who ever lived,” he said. “If she needs therapy, then so does everyone else on the planet.”

  “You sound like you’re very anti-therapy.”

  “I don’t really think so,” he said. “I’ve been in therapy myself. And before my wife and I separated, I was the one who suggested we go into marriage counseling.”

  “And?”

  “And she insisted on having her own therapist, so there wouldn’t be a conflict of interest. Of course, there was no conflict when it came to who was going to pay the therapy bills. Anyway, it took the therapist about a month to convince my wife she better move out before I murdered her in her sleep. So she did. She moved in with the therapist.”

  Coming from an Irish family, Theresa didn’t know too much about therapy. The best she could offer was, “That happens a lot, they say.”

  “With two women?”

  “You didn’t mention that.”

  “It was just a stage. With Ada, everything’s a stage. The militant feminism, the yoga, the drugs, the drinking. Marriage, motherhood.”

  “Then maybe spending all day with a six-year-old will turn out to be only a stage, too.”

  “Spending all day with her? You don’t know Ada. First thing she’ll do when she gets more child support is go out and hire a nanny, or drive to the nearest mall and find a dozen truants in need of baby-sitting money.”

  “Not exactly a hands-on mom, huh?”

  “Thank God,” said Stephen. “It’s the only thing that’ll save Penny.”

  It was the first time he’d mentioned her by name. “Penny,” Theresa repeated. “Pretty name. Tell me about her,” she said, not quite certain if it was Theresa the clever reporter who was asking, or some other Theresa altogether.

  And so he did. For the next fifteen minutes, almost without interruption, Stephen Barrow talked about his daughter. Or at least he thought he was talking about his daughter. What he was really talking about, it was quite clear to Theresa, was his relationship with his daughter, and therefore himself. He told her about their breakfast routine, their drive to school each morning, the things they’d talk about on the way, how he looked forward to picking her up each afternoon, how she shared her school day with him, the chores they did together, their outings, her critiques of his writing, their cooking collaboration, their dinnertime, their bedtime stories. He talked about driving her to gymnastics, shopping with her for her new clothes, cutting her hair, meeting with her teachers, getting to know her friends, or consoling her when she didn’t think she had any.

  And by the time he was finished, Theresa the reporter knew that her days on the crime beat were over. The story she’d hoped to get, wasn’t. There was no child pornography, because there was no child pornographer. Whatever it was that had happened that day between Stephen and his daughter that had prompted him to reach for his camera and photograph her, it couldn’t possibly be what she’d thought it was, and what - thanks in large part to her - her readers no doubt still thought it was. She wanted to tell him that, to let him know she understood how wrong she’d been, and how she wished she hadn’t written the article in the first place.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” is how it came out.

  He nodded. “I already accepted your apology,” he said.

  “But you didn’t forgive me.”

  “Last I checked,” he said, “that was somebody else’s department.”

  “What happens now?”

  She meant with his case, with his ex-wife, with his daughter, with picking up the pieces of his life. But he misunderstood her, whether inadvertently or deliberately. She decided it was most likely the latter, that he’d simply reached a point where he didn’t feel like talking about those things anymore.

  “What happens now,” he said, “is we start thinking about putting something together for dinner.”

  “Oh, no,” said Theresa. “I’ve imposed on you too much already.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, “but neither you nor your car is going anywhere for a while. And you should look at it this way: You’ve actually done me a favor. Except for my lawyer, who calls me every time he’s got some bad news, you’re the first person I’ve had a conversation with in four days. You’ve also given me the first occasion to laugh out loud, something I was beginning to think I was never going to do again. And now you’re going to give me an excuse to cook a meal, sit down at a table like an adult human being, and eat.”

  “Will that be another first?”

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  Then again, if his tea was a preview of his cooking skills, she figured she might be in for a lot of trouble.

  While she sat, he chopped things up. He didn’t believe in food processors, blenders, and other electronic gadgets. He rather enjoyed coring and dicing peppers, could slice an onion into wafers so thin you could see through them, and took pleasure from the simple act of making uniform wedges from a tomato. It took longer when you did it by hand, but when you were finished, all you had to do was wipe off a knife and rinse a cutting board. And you’d created something.

  What he created this particular evening was a thick vegetable soup with slices of turkey sausage he found in the freezer and sliced (by hand, of course) while they were still hard, so they ended up thin as pepperoni, but without the fat.

  They ate at the kitchen table. It was where Stephen and his daughter always ate: After Ada had moved out, he’d eliminated the dining room by moving the long harvest table against one wall and selling six of the eight chairs. The remaining two he’d placed side by side, creating a writing space for himself and a work surface for Penny. Sometimes, when she’d finished her homework - and she was very serious about her homework - she’d teach him to do things on the computer.

  “Good soup.”

  “Huh?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Nowhere,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  He did know, of course; he just wasn’t willing to tell her, this woman who’d already gotten him to open up much more than he’d wanted to, simply by listening. She’s a reporter, he had to keep reminding himself. She’d come out here to interview him, to collect dirt on him, so she could put it in her newspaper.

  He got up from the table and walked over to the window. Stood there for a moment, his back to her. Outside in the darkness, the snow seemed to be falling a little less heavily, but it was still coming down. He wanted her to go now; he was tired and ready to be alone again, ready to pull the covers up over his head and make the world disappear. But he knew she wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere. He was stuck with her, and the thought of it made him angry.

  He was aware that she was saying something now, speaking to him. He turned around. She was waiting for him to answer whatever it was she’d said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t hear you.”

  She smiled. “I said, go to bed, Stephen. I’ll do the dishes.”

  He gestured vaguely toward the living room. He didn’t want her sleeping in Penny’s room; he knew that much. But he didn’t have the energy to find blankets for her, either, and towels and a pillow and whatever else she might need.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Good,” he said. He knew it must have sounded stupid to her, but it was all he had left, that one syllable.

  Somehow he made it to his room and onto his bed before collapsing. He would sleep for the next ten hours straight, the first time he’d done something like that since his college days. And when he’d awaken at first light, he’d discover that someone had covered him, after removing his boots and placing
them neatly at the foot of his bed.

  Ten

  It was full light outside when Theresa awoke, and full light doesn’t come to northern Columbia County in February until well after eight o’clock.

  After doing the dishes and straightening up the night before, she’d found a spare blanket and made a bed of the living-room sofa, using a cushion for a pillow. Walking by Stephen’s bedroom on the way to the bathroom, she’d seen him, still fully dressed, stretched out across his bed as though he’d fallen onto it. It had seemed cold in that end of the house, and she’d taken the comforter he was on and wrapped it around him as best she could. And when he’d given no sign of waking, she’d untied his boots and slipped them off.

  He never budged.

  Back in the living room, she took inventory of his library. It was a hodgepodge of contemporary fiction, Shakespeare, reference works, and children’s books. And there, tucked over in the far corner, four novels authored by Stephen Barrow. She pulled out the first of them, or at least the one farthest to the left. The Dying of the Light, it was called. She thumbed the first couple of pages until she found the source of the title.

  And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

  She didn’t need to look to know it was from Dylan Thomas. She turned the page, found a dedication.

  To my daughter, Penny, born the exact day I finished this manuscript:

  I’m afraid this story is a sad one, and I’m sorry for that.

  But from now on, thanks to you, the rest of them will be absolutely joyous.

  She closed the book. Was she somehow invading his privacy, she wondered, reading a book of his in his own home, a book dedicated to his daughter? But that was absurd: It had been published, hadn’t it? She could have walked into any bookstore and bought it, simply by plunking down . . . whatever. She turned it over, looking for the price. But she never saw it. Instead, her eyes were drawn to his photo, a black-and-white glossy that almost filled the back of the jacket. He was standing by a woodpile of split birch logs, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a suntan, and smiling back at her broadly. This wasn’t the Stephen Barrow she knew - the pale, drained man collapsed on his bed down the hallway. This man looked younger by fifteen years, heavier by twenty pounds, and, what? Alive, that’s what. This was the man she’d tried to flirt with in the Drug Mart that day long, long ago.