A Roof Over Their Heads

by M. K. Stelmack

  The sixth day and the sixth evening of excellent, noisy suppers, the food going down a lot easier than he would’ve thought possible given his dad had fallen to his death from the roof he slept under.

  He didn’t think about his dad when the kids were on the tear. It was in the quiet moments like now on the couch, his broken leg stretched out on the coffee table, that the memories drifted in like a toxic gas, poisoning his peace with Alexi.

  Seth prodded more batting down the tail with a chopstick, stealing a look at Alexi. She sat at an old table in the living room, her temporary manufacturing headquarters. Judging by the piles of cloth, yarn, cotton batting and shelving units crammed with little bright shiny objects, business was booming.

  Right now she was, she’d explained, pleating the wattle of a cassowary, which involved her long fingers having to tuck, smooth and gather pink and blue cloth into folds. It also meant that her lips were puckered in concentration, inches away from a faux leather beak.

  “Any of your customers heard of bunnies and teddy bears?”

  Alexi’s gaze didn’t shift from her pleating. “Dime a dozen at all the stores. I specialize.”

  “In the gruesome. Child services would have a field day profiling your customers.”

  Alexi began to poke pins into the wattle. “They already have a field day with me.”

  He didn’t want to bring it up but who knew when they’d get time alone again? “You got any ideas about how to handle Attila the Caseworker?”

  She nailed him with the same look she gave her kids when they got lippy. “We might start with using her name.”

  “The easiest would be for me to clear out while she’s here. Pack up my stuff and hide out in the barn.”

  Alexi shook her head. “She’d find out from Matt. Besides...besides I don’t want to hide it.”

  “Some secrets are worth keeping.”

  “Like the one you’re keeping from me?” Her voice was casual, her eyes on her work, but she might as well have fixed him to the chair with a hundred of her little pins.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re with us. Then you’re not. You’re staring off into space. I’m wondering if you might be experiencing memory loss.”

  She knew. She’d gotten it wrong, but she’d been watching. “It’s definitely not memory loss,” he said. “The opposite, actually.”

  And maybe because it was a fact that had become a secret through twenty years of not telling it or that he could neither leave nor enter this house without dealing with it, he told Alexi the story of how his dad had died.

  She listened, her busy hands quiet on her lap, her eyes filled with tears. When he was finished, she said, “I’m honored.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that despite your pain you came to stay anyway. It would be like me choosing to live where I could look out the window and see where Richard had died.”

  Seth straightened a tooth on the gorillagator and waited.

  Alexi stroked the wing feathers of the cassowary, in a caress that Seth wished was for whatever part of him wasn’t in plaster. “I used to wonder how people could stand to build those cairns alongside the road where their child or father died. And then drive past it while going where you’re going. Wouldn’t it wear a person down after a while? On your way to a movie or to buy laundry detergent or the latest computer, and facing that pain?”

  Alexi poked in another pin. “And then Richard died.”

  Would there ever be a conversation with Alexi without that man in it?

  “I put up a cairn. I didn’t have to drive by it every day. It’s north of Calgary. Still, it’s there. It has helped me to let go. Knowing it’s there.”

  Seth watched her smile at the photo on her phone. “So you’re saying you’ve moved on?”

  “Yeah,” she said softly, “I am.” Still looking smiling at her phone. Saying one thing, doing another.

  “Then who are you looking at right now?”

  She raised her head, her eyes slightly unfocused, her mind no doubt still on the image of her husband. Then her eyes cleared and narrowed.

  She turned the phone so he could see. “This,” she said, “this is what I’m looking at.”

  It was him. Just him.

  On a deck chair, his leg thick with the white cast stretched out in front of him, smiling down at a kitten nestled against his chest. He’d done that each evening, sat there petting kittens and mixing it up with the kids, while she barbecued during the chill sun of autumn. She must’ve taken a shot of him when he wasn’t looking.

  “Oh,” he said and nothing more, because that picture pretty much showed him for the jerk he was.

  “There’s more,” she said. She tapped on the screen and started a slide show—a slide show!—featuring him and the kids, shots of the kids drawing on his cast, more of him with other kittens, him and the kids and kittens, him and Mel side by side, catching up on the day’s news, some he knew she’d taken, others like him with a beer staring at the deck, he didn’t know.

  “No Richard,” she said. He heard her breath hitch. She’d made a choice she was having a hard time living with. She’d already been dealt her fair share of sadness. He didn’t need to add to it. One of her fingers hovered over the photos icon.

  “You still got the pictures of him, right?”

  She dipped her head and nodded.

  “Hey,” he began, praying he didn’t screw this up. “I don’t know about losing a spouse. I can tell you I’ve met someone who, if she...who, if I lost her, I couldn’t forget even if I moved on to someone else. So I don’t want you to get rid of his pictures. I’m only hoping for...for maybe like a folder of my own.”

  Alexi raised her face to his. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  She moved to the arm of the couch and tapped here and there on her phone screen before turning it to him. “Your folder. Already with fifty pics.”

  He began scrolling through them. “You’re not in any of them. Time to change that.” He did his own tapping of the screen and handed her the phone. “You do it. Us together,” he said softly. “Get close.”

  Alexi had to get both of their faces in the selfie, and to not fall against him. She slid her arm across his shoulders and he slipped his arm behind her and along her thigh. Her cheek brushed the top of his head. “Smile,” he said and they did. Big, happy ones.

  He reached for his own phone. “One more.” He snapped a few, deliberately messing them up, so she could stay pressed against him, until she took the phone from him and clicked a perfect one of them grinning together over a joke they didn’t need to share with anyone.

  She moved to pull away but his arm tightened reflexively around her. She sank back against him with a soft, contented sigh as if he was the bed she lay on at night.

  He shifted in his chair to open a bit more room for her. “Let me kiss you.”

  She laughed, barely louder than her sigh, and then lowering herself against him, she did as he asked.

  Later, as he settled himself against pillows and soft, glassy-eyed critters, he remembered that he and Alexi hadn’t discussed arrangements for Marlene. Tomorrow he’d be better at—and here his palm felt warm from the memory of Alexi’s curves against it—not getting sidetracked.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HE DIDN’T GET the chance.

  Seth was on the front porch with a second cup of morning coffee, Callie drawing what she said was a flower on his arm cast, when a pickup pulled up and a beefy woman dressed as if ready to shovel out pens got out. He pegged her as a neighbor, until he spotted her bulging briefcase.

  It couldn’t be.

  Callie dropped her markers and ran for the porch door to be met there by Alexi coming out.

  “Marlene. The caseworker,” she said, confirming his unspoken fear, her jaw tense
.

  “I thought she wasn’t due until Friday.”

  “Yeah, well, the only schedule she follows is her own.” Alexi raised her voice. “Hello. It’s Wednesday. Do we have a mix-up with the dates again?”

  The caseworker was coming up the short walk, her eyes pinned on Seth like a hawk on a mouse. “Nope. My timing’s impeccable, as usual.”

  She climbed the steps, her weight shuddering through the boards. He was wearing sweatpants and a jackshirt over a T-shirt. His hand went to his day-old stubble. He must look like a deadbeat. It didn’t matter that Marlene was in a hockey jersey and hiking boots. She carried the briefcase, which she plunked down on the table.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I fell off a roof. Work related. Seth Greene, by the way.”

  “I figured that out.” She turned to Alexi. “You promised you’d tell me if you two got in contact.”

  Alexi jutted out one hip and crossed her arms. That was her stance before she put either him or the kids in their place. “I didn’t break my promise. On Friday, during our scheduled meeting, you would’ve have met him.”

  Marlene pulled out a chair across from Seth at the table and sat herself down. “Too late. I’ve got my birds twittering in my ear.”

  Seth and Alexi glanced at each other. Informants? Who? “How about I get started here, then?” She looked up at Alexi. “You still got some of that delicious lemonade?”

  “You’re going to interview him? Now?”

  “Since we both have nothing else to do on this fine morning except sit on your porch, why not?”

  Alexi turned to Seth. “You can always say no.”

  But they knew he couldn’t. Not unless he wanted it to go down on record that he refused to cooperate.

  “No worries.” He turned to Marlene and said, “Shoot.”

  Alexi retreated into the house for the lemonade, Callie trotting behind.

  Marlene pulled out a thick yellow legal pad. “You know the background on that one?”

  Seth assumed she was talking about Callie. “No, actually. She seems scared of everybody except Alexi and the kids.”

  “Doesn’t appear to be scared of you. She was out here alone with you on the deck. Only ran off when I pulled up.”

  As far as Seth was concerned, Callie came and went, sneaking and darting about like a curious stray cat. It was part of who she was, but if Callie’s trust in him helped his cause with Matt, then he might as well play it up. “I guess I have that effect on kids.”

  “And what would that effect be?”

  “They like me, I guess.”

  “Naturally, you think? Or have you experience in that area?”

  He knew what she was getting at. No use ducking it. “Experience, definitely. Gained from the majority of my two hundred and fifty hours of court-ordered community service to fulfill the terms of my sentencing for drug trafficking. Hours I paid off last month, by the way.”

  Marlene scribbled and nodded, as if this was all news to her. After she’d written down apparently word for word what he said, Alexi reappeared with a glass of lemonade. “Thanks. You’re a doll,” Marlene said and then turned to Seth.

  “Thanks for your explanation. I always appreciate a little honesty,” she said pointedly to Alexi.

  The woman Seth had kissed and cuddled the night before looked ready to launch daggers. “Will there be anything else, Marlene?” Alexi said. “Would you like me to sit in on the interview, too?”

  “Naw,” Marlene said. “You can hear it from the kitchen window.”

  Alexi gave her a tight smile, shot Seth a warning look and went inside. Moments later, the kitchen window snapped shut with a sharp click.

  Marlene seemed to take no notice. She sipped from her lemonade and looked around the place at the slumped sheds, the tall overgrown grass, the cracks in the cement sidewalk. The things he could do nothing about in his present state. “This is civilized,” she said.

  “Why? Are the interviews usually conducted in the basement under a bare bulb?”

  “That,” she said, and set down her lemonade, “can be arranged. Describe your current relations with Matt.”

  Years ago, Seth’s lawyer had cautioned that an open-ended question was an open-ended noose. “Good, I guess. We talk.”

  “I heard he was up on the roof when you fell off.”

  “Your bird lies,” Seth said. “He was on the roof, without my permission, and I guided him down. His feet were on the ground when I fell off.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it, considering as how Alexi didn’t care to inform me,” Marlene said, as neutrally as she ever said anything. “If you didn’t give him permission, why was he up on the roof?”

  “He showed up one morning. Instead of going to school, he came searching for me.”

  “How did he know where to find you?”

  Seth hitched himself the best he could with two gimped arms into a more comfortable position in his chair. “Alexi said he’d overheard Mel telling her where I was working. It was a few doors down from where they’d been living in town, so he knew how to get there. Alexi and I had already decided to break off...the connection we’d made when I was renovating her house...because we didn’t want the adoption process held up.”

  “I can see how well that worked out,” Marlene commented. “Why did he want to see you?”

  “I can only tell you what he told me.”

  Marlene kept writing. “Works for me.”

  “He offered to give up on getting adopted, if that meant I would be part of their lives again. I told him to stick to the plan.”

  “Which was?”

  “Get adopted.”

  “That it?”

  Seth felt the noose jerk a little tighter. He jutted his chin toward her briefcase. “As you know,” he countered, “that’s more than enough.”

  Marlene grunted in what Seth decided was agreement, and kept writing. She flipped to a clean sheet of paper and said, “Describe your current...relations...with Alexi.”

  Seth’s throated constricted. Probably from the tightening of Marlene’s noose. How did he describe something so raw and new? He’d get it wrong, say something that would destroy his chance with Alexi and Matt’s chance for a family. Best get a few things settled first. “I’m glad you brought that up, Marlene. This is the dilemma I’m having here.”

  Marlene paused her pen. “Go on.”

  “Alexi and I are trying to build a life together but we’re caught up in something of a triangle. There’s her, me—” he paused for dramatic effect “—and you.”

  Marlene rolled her eyes. “Sorry, but I don’t swing that way. I appreciate the offer.”

  Seth chose to interpret her remark as humor and not sarcasm, and plowed on. “The main impediment to the growth of our relationship is our uncertainty of its impact on Matt’s adoption process.”

  “My, what big words you have.”

  Total sarcasm. Still, she was listening. “Naturally, neither one of us wants to do anything that will alter its natural and obvious course. Neither do I want to become involved with Matt in any way that would affect the process, either.”

  Seth felt he was picking up steam.

  “However, it seems fair that I should be part of their lives if it’s determined I’m not a negative element. In fact, if it’s determined I would be beneficial, then my involvement should be recognized.”

  “Cut to it, Seth Greene.”

  “I want to know what you want from me, so I know what I need to do.” He felt as if he was in an interview for a job he was seriously underqualified for.

  Marlene shook her head slowly. “Thought it might come to this.” She set down her pen. “This is the deal. I don’t tell you what you need to do. I see what you’re doing, and then I make a determination if what you’re doing is goo
d for Matt or not. That’s it. What’s the point of me telling you what I’m looking for? Then you do it but that isn’t you. I need to know who you are. And frankly, the fact that you’re trying to suck up to me isn’t winning you any brownie points right now.”

  She picked up the pen.

  “So, you two romantically involved?”

  Seth hadn’t dealt with anyone like Marlene in his life. However, he had dealt with Connie and right now he employed her evasive tactics. “Define romantic.”

  Marlene snorted. “Yeah, you and Clinton, pretty boy. Define it however you like it. Have you looked longingly into each other’s eyes, made out at the back of the theater, had sex? Whatever.”

  For one wild moment, Seth wanted to tell Marlene exactly how it was between Alexi and him. How her lips softened against his mouth, how good her long fingers felt massaging his scalp, how his one arm around her waist made his entire injured body come alive. He wanted to tell the world about what he’d found with Alexi.

  And how stupid was that? “This is just a box for you to fill in?”

  “I have one marked ‘Other,’ too. Now spill.”

  She wasn’t getting anything other than the minimum. “Yes. We are romantically involved.”

  “Do you see a future for this relationship?”

  “If you don’t screw it up, then yes.”

  “Didn’t you hear a word I just said? You act. I react. Let’s move on.” She flipped over a page on her legal pad as if to demonstrate. “How much of your interest in Alexi is based on her connection with Matt, and how much of it is based on her as a unique person in her own right?”

  Seth blinked. Where had that come from? Seth said what he knew in his heart to be true. Knew what Alexi also knew. “I don’t see the two as separate. I’m good for them all. I’m what they need. We tried doing it your way but it’s only made us all unhappy. There’s got to be another way.”

  “You haven’t gone out on dates? Hired a babysitter for a few hours and gone out to a restaurant?”

  Exactly what he’d wanted to do but had never broached it with Alexi. Never a good time. Which pretty much described their relationship. Seth forced himself to appear casual. “Uh, well, no. I can’t say that we have. It never seemed necessary.”