The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  Today he got there before the rush started, so he quickly changed into his workout clothes. He spent thirty minutes on the treadmill, starting at four miles an hour and working up to five, raising the incline several times. When he finished, both he and the machine were dripping with sweat, so he grabbed a handful of paper towels and the spray bottle and wiped it down. After a quick stint on the StairMaster and a few chin-ups, he told himself he’d done enough. Since the gym was starting to fill up, he went back to the locker room and put on his swim trunks. He enjoyed ending his session with a soak in the Jacuzzi, then a trip to the sauna.

  This afternoon, the Jacuzzi looked like somebody had dumped bubble bath in it, though he knew the foam resulted from body oil and chlorine. Two guys were in there now, both about his age, neither familiar. As Matt lowered himself into the water, one of them was saying, “You know how much I’m out to my lawyer?”

  “Ten, fifteen thousand?”

  “I wish.” The guy sloshed some foam away from himself, into the middle, and it floated toward Matt. “I owe that bastard sixty fucking grand.”

  “Sixty? What’s he doing for you?”

  “He files motions. I’m getting sick of that word. You know how some words make you think of something that’s got nothing to do with them?”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Okay: ‘motion.’ When I was a kid and I heard ‘motion,’ it made me think of a milk shake. God knows why.”

  “Maybe because it rhymes with ‘lotion.’ Lotion’s a thick liquid, like a milk shake. See what I mean?”

  “I guess.”

  “Sure. Your tendrils are at work.”

  “What the fuck’s a tendril?”

  “A little thread in your brain that connects the cells together. You got a motion cell and a lotion cell.”

  “Yeah, well, what I started to say is that when I hear the word ‘motion’ anymore, I don’t think of a milk shake. Because I like a fucking milk shake. I hear the word now, I think of all the dollars floating through the air from my pocket into his.”

  His philological analysis was followed by a rant against the Massachusetts courts, whose judges ignored the rights of fathers in favor of the mothers who’d divorced them. This, in turn, led to several increasingly maudlin confessions: that for the first thirty-nine years of his life, the guy who owed sixty thousand always had a woman to answer to—first his mom, then his wife—whereas now he had only his attorney. That the other guy, who’d been divorced for nearly five years, had only recently moved out of “the mourning phase.” They began tossing around terms like “speed-dating” and “availability index” and discussing such services as Singles in the Suburbs, Good Genes, Telemates and Lavalife.

  Fearing it was only a matter of time before they tried to include him in the conversation, Matt vaulted out of the Jacuzzi and took off for the showers. No sauna for him today.

  Needing to do a little grocery shopping, he decided to drive up Route 28 to the nearest Whole Foods. He’d let a lot of things go since Carla left him, but he couldn’t be accused of eating badly. Most days there was only one mouth to feed, and he fed it well, preferring organic fruits and vegetables, free-range chicken, grass-fed beef.

  The store was in Andover, a town he otherwise tried to stay out of. It boasted the second-oldest continually functioning bookstore in the country, and until a few years ago his secret aspiration had been to buy it. He saw himself working on his own stuff in the morning, then going in midafternoon to sell the books of others. He knew he’d never make much money—harboring few illusions, if any, about the future of bookselling, and everyone knew the Andover shop wasn’t profitable—but he thought it would be a marvelous thing to do. And it would’ve been, if only he hadn’t fucked up.

  At Whole Foods he gathered his items slowly, caressing the navel oranges so carefully that he drew strange looks from other shoppers, though he failed to notice. For a time, before moving out to Montvale to manage the local Stop & Shop, Carla’s father had been in charge of produce at the DeLuca’s on Beacon Hill, and he’d taught his daughter how to tell good oranges from bad ones, and in turn she’d instructed Matt, who used to drive her half mad with his rush to get out of grocery stores as quickly as possible. “You’re looking for smooth skin,” she’d tell him, holding one up for him to examine. “You want it to be shiny, small pored and firm—but not hard.” What he wanted was to go home, finish the galleys he was reading so he could decide how many copies the Book Emporium would order, put the girls to sleep, drink some wine, snort a line in the bathroom and make serious love to his wife. In order for that to happen, he first had to master oranges.

  He put five nice ones into his shopping cart, then picked out a couple tomatoes and some butterhead lettuce before moving on to the butcher shop, where he splurged on a New York strip. When there was no need to save because there was nothing to save for, small, easily purchased pleasures assumed inordinate importance. For that reason, it occurred to him that he probably had a lot more in common with the countless people around the country standing in line and waiting for their Double Quarter Pounder with cheese and a half gallon of soda than he did with anyone here. These people probably had investments, IRAs, season tickets to the BSO, vacation homes in Vermont, New Hampshire or the south of France, and they probably regarded a trip to Whole Foods as, at best, a necessary nuisance. They’d have better ways of spending their time. Who, besides him, went to Whole Paycheck for fun?

  He grabbed a loaf of French bread, a pound of coffee beans and some other things, then went through the checkout line. The parking lot was full when he got back to his car, and a few drivers were circling, looking impatiently for a space. He quickly stuck the sacks in the backseat, climbed in and pulled out.

  You couldn’t make a left and go uphill to Route 28. You had to make a right on Railroad Street and pass the train station, then hang a left and drive back through downtown. Today, due to the hour, traffic was slow, so he was just inching along when he noticed his new neighbor—Kristin, was it?—plodding toward the station, on the opposite side of the street. She had on a very sensible beige dress and businesslike shoes. Her hair was askew.

  There were too many cars for him to make a U-turn and wheel in behind her, so he pulled onto the shoulder, hopped out and jogged a few steps toward her. “Kristin?” he called. “Hey!”

  She stopped and turned, shading her eyes. At first, she appeared not to recognize him. He was wearing sunglasses and, after all, they’d met only once, though he’d seen her many other times as she walked her dog, sometimes alone, more frequently with her husband. “Yes?”

  He looked in both directions, caught a break and made it to the other side. “It’s me, Matt. Your neighbor?”

  “Oh … well, hello,” she said. It was clear she hadn’t the faintest idea why he’d run across the street to talk to her.

  Neither did he. He didn’t find her particularly attractive; she had a nice figure, but she was probably close to fifty, her complexion was pale and he’d never been drawn to blondes. Carla’s hair was thick and as close to pitch-black as you could get without opening a bottle. She had long, dark lashes, butternut skin, a majestic heaviness in hip and thigh. And there was nothing tentative about her—her own mother used to call her Hurricane Carla. Whereas Kristin, even when walking her dog down the sidewalk, moved with her head down as if in retreat from some catastrophic defeat, with the expectation of further losses ahead. “What are you doing in Andover?” he asked.

  Her lips formed a skirmish line. “Is there something horribly wrong with this town? This is the second time today someone’s wondered what I was doing in Andover. It looks like a really nice place, but there must be something bad about it that I’m not aware of, so I’d love to find out what it is.”

  He grinned and shook his head, and she recalled a boy in her hometown who, even in the dead of winter, would ride his bicycle up and down South Market Street clad only in shorts and a T-shirt. She and her friend Patty Connulty
once asked him if he’d lost his mind, and he’d grinned and shook his head in a similar manner and said he’d never had one. When she was in college, they found his body in Penns Creek. He’d run a nylon rope through the hole in a fifty-pound barbell, then knotted it around his waist and jumped off the bridge.

  “Why are you grinning like that?” she asked Matt. “Won’t you say something?”

  “I just had a funny thought.”

  “Care to share it?”

  “A second ago,” he said, “I realized that you might be the only grown woman I’ve spoken to in almost two years who wasn’t ordering a sandwich.”

  His car was a garbage dump. Climbing in, she surveyed the backseat. Along with two grocery sacks from Whole Foods, there were several balled-up towels, a few empty Gatorade bottles, a green gym bag from which a grimy sneaker protruded, two or three issues of The New Yorker that looked like they’d been left out in the rain, a plastic container of 10W-30 Castrol, a yellow raincoat, a leather boot with no laces, some orange peels and a dog-eared paperback entitled Kaputt. When she leaned back in the passenger seat, a spring poked her spine.

  “Sorry about the mess,” he said, sliding behind the wheel. “I take comfort in it, though. Some of what’s back there’s been with me a long time.”

  “Whatever Kaputt is?”

  “No, that’s fairly new. Gave it to myself for Christmas.”

  “That looks like something from graduate school.”

  “You went, huh? Where?”

  “Chapel Hill.”

  “English?”

  “Comp lit.”

  He put the car in gear, looked over his shoulder at the line of cars behind them, then told her to hold on and floored it. His tires shrieked, and somebody laid on the horn.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Sorry. Can’t be too polite if you want to get anywhere in a car around here. Thought you’d be used to that, though, coming from California.”

  “Not really. Californians drive fast, but in some sense they’re old-fashioned.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  “They pay attention to things like traffic lights and stop signs.”

  They merged onto Main Street and headed south toward Montvale. When he offered her the ride, she’d accepted because the next train wouldn’t come for half an hour, and she felt like getting home sooner rather than later. She could use a glass of wine. She’d called Cal before leaving work. He was going to grill steaks.

  “To answer your snarky question about Andover,” Matt said while he drove, “there are a few splotches on its character.” He explained that during the Salem Witch Trials, around forty people from here, primarily women and children, were accused of entering into a pact with the devil, and three were executed. The rapacious mill owners who’d tried to break Lawrence’s 1912 Bread and Roses strike had lived here to keep their distance from the masses, and while you couldn’t blame it on anyone, Franklin Pierce’s son was killed here in a train wreck not long before his father’s presidential inauguration. “On the other hand,” he said, “it has a few things to be proud of. Harriet Beecher Stowe called it home for several years, and it was a center of abolitionist sentiment and a stop on the Underground Railroad.” As they passed Phillips Academy, which looked a lot more like a college than the place she now worked, he tipped up his sunglasses to glance at her. “Who else asked you what you were doing here?”

  She told him her administrative assistant at North Shore State had, and while she now understood she’d gone out of her way by taking the Haverhill Line and then complicated matters by getting on the wrong bus, she hadn’t liked the tone of the exchange.

  He laughed and lowered his sunglasses. “In New England it helps to be tone-deaf. People here tend to speak their minds.”

  “Speaking your mind’s just fine. Since I’m going to be her boss, though, I thought more politeness was called for. Especially since I work in administration, which is pretty serious. But who knows, maybe I got a little touchy-feely during my years in California.”

  He asked where she was originally from, so she told him, and then he wanted to know how she’d become an administrator. She fielded that question all the time and usually responded with platitudes about wanting to help faculty members maximize themselves, but today she didn’t feel like fudging the truth. “I wasn’t much of a teacher,” she said, “and I’d lost interest in what I was doing. So when something up the food chain opened up, I applied. And it turned out I was good at it.”

  “It’s great to be good at something,” he said, his tone suggesting he might be the rare exception who was good at nothing. But since he’d told her not to pay too much attention to tone, she went ahead and asked, “What do you excel at?”

  “That’s a tough one. But all things considered? I’d have to say pastrami on rye.”

  He was posturing, and nothing put her off quite as much as a man who could fluently marshal a line. Her first husband had been able to, and he’d done it so well, for so long, that she couldn’t distinguish between a spiel and the truth. He wrote about the poetry of high modernism—his first book was T. S. Eliot and the Shifting Persona—so perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised when he informed her that the trip he’d taken to Ann Arbor was for a job interview, not a conference, or that he’d just accepted a position there, or that his thesis advisee, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Visalia dairy farmer, would be going with him in the fall. The primary attraction to Cal, if she wanted to be honest, was that he initially appeared incapable of delivering any lines at all. When asked why he alone, of the many musicians who gathered at the crossroads grocery, never tried to sing, he smiled shyly and said he couldn’t remember lyrics. It took her a few years to discover that while he might be no good with poetry, even he could tell a story.

  “You asked me two serious questions,” she told Matt, “and I gave you two serious answers. I asked you one, and you gave me nothing.”

  They were out of Andover now. On this stretch Route 28 had only two lanes, and they’d fallen in behind a large truck with the Salvation Army logo on its rear door and were doing all of thirty miles an hour. The train might have been faster and less taxing.

  “Well,” he replied, “it’s complicated.”

  “Isn’t that what people put under ‘Relationship Status’ on Facebook when they’re seeing somebody who’s seeing somebody else?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know the first thing about Facebook.”

  “I don’t either. But I live in the world in the year 2010, and I have some idea of what other people are up to.”

  “I used to be good at books.”

  “Reading them? Writing them? Stealing them?”

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I never stole a book in my life. You don’t steal what you love.”

  Rather than take issue with an assertion she considered suspect, she said, “So what did you do with books?”

  “I bought them.”

  “For yourself?”

  “No, for the Harvard Book Emporium. For years I ordered every work of fiction that came through the door.”

  Ahead of them, a traffic light was just turning red. Knowing he’d shoot right through it, she braced herself against the dash, and he didn’t disappoint her. “And?”

  “And then the complications started. I lost my job.”

  “I lost mine, too. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’ll be damned. Really? What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “You might not have heard, but the country’s going through a recession? As always, California got ahead of the curve. We had cutbacks. My position was combined with someone else’s.” She should’ve held her tongue then, and might have if she hadn’t started her day by climbing aboard a bus to Lynn that sat in a spot marked BRADBURY. And ever since, people had been acting as if the signs and signals that were supposed to govern behavior had no meaning. “So what,” she asked, “did you do?”

 
He didn’t answer right away, and she knew he was trying to decide whether to lie, tell the truth or change the subject.

  He finally said, “I didn’t have to work the cash registers, but I made a point of doing it for an hour or so every day. The staff loved it. You’ve got a very leftist workforce there, and for me to do something as lowly as ringing up sales … well, that created a kind of egalitarian atmosphere.

  “What I’d do once or twice a week was engage somebody in a lot of book chat while checking them out—usually, customers who were getting on in years, very often women, and only when they were buying a number of big hardcovers—and then I’d immediately hit the RETURNS button and zero out the entire sale. Toward the end of the day, I’d take exactly that sum in cash.

  “I eventually made the mistake of canceling out a sale on the same customer twice. She was one of those Cambridge types we referred to as ‘the wives of dead professors.’ In her seventies, reasonably well off, not too much to do anymore except read. When she got interested in something, she’d research the topic and then come in with a list of titles. When she decided to bone up on LBJ, she wanted all the Caro books, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Dallek stuff, Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, The Best and the Brightest—even Lady Bird’s White House Diary, which to my surprise we had with the used books in the basement. We’d follow her around with two or three hand baskets. She gave us a pretty good workout.

  “When she went in to see the manager, she told him that the first time it happened, she assumed it was a mistake. Said I was the nicest, most helpful person she’d come across in ages, which was why she always asked for me. Most people never look at a receipt as long as the total sounds right, but she wasn’t most people. The second time, I didn’t even remember having done it before—close to three years had passed—but she never threw away sales slips and she still had the old one and handed both of them over to my boss.

  “When they got through auditing my receipts, it was stunning how much I’d stolen. I had no idea. I could’ve gone to prison, but my boss was a softhearted guy, and he let my mom pay him back and didn’t press charges.”