Crossing the Bridge

by Michael Baron

  When I got off, I felt better than I’d felt in a few days. Spending the time exploring New Mexico reminded me that my stasis in Connecticut was only temporary, that the store would eventually sell, and that I would be free to make my way West. To get my kicks out on Route 66.

  I picked up my Updike book where I’d left it on the stairs and decided to check in on my father before going to my room. A Denver Broncos drive against the Green Bay Packers had my father’s absolute attention. I wondered if he would notice if I changed the channel.

  “Dad, do you need anything before I head upstairs?” The sofa bed was already open, since I hadn’t bothered to fold it in in the morning. He didn’t say a word as John Elway completed another pass to Ed McCaffrey. It dawned on me that it was entirely possible that he didn’t know who won this game – if he was even actually paying attention.

  “You sure you don’t need anything, Dad?”

  As the Broncos huddled up, he turned to me. “Yeah, a new body,” he said.

  “I’ll see if I can order you one online in the morning. I’m going to read in my room. If you need me, give me a call.”

  He turned back toward the game. I watched him for another minute, stupefied at the way he’d decided to kill the clock.

  On Sunday, the store was busier than I expected it to be and I stayed behind to give the late shift a hand. When I got back to my parents’ house in the late afternoon, my mother had returned from her trip. I hadn’t been expecting her until after dinner, but was relieved to see her there. We talked for a couple of minutes about her weekend and then I told her I was going out again.

  “You aren’t staying for supper?” she asked.

  “I’ll get something wherever. I’d kind of like a little free time.”

  She looked toward the den. “Was this too much for you?” she asked crisply.

  “Not too much, Mom. But definitely enough.”

  “I’ll see you later, then.”

  I called Iris the next day and she invited me up for the following Wednesday. As had been the case the first time I drove to see her, I felt a little looser and a little more liberated with every mile that passed. It was as though the enervating frequencies sent out from Amber began to fade as I put more distance between them and myself. Though the trip was nearly two hours long, it energized me.

  I met Iris at her office a little after seven. As soon as she saw me, she grabbed her sweater, kissed me on the cheek, and we were out the door.

  “That was surprisingly easy,” I said.

  “Calm before the storm. Opening night is next Wednesday. By Friday, there will be all kinds of crises – real and imagined. But right now everything is on track and everyone is happy.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t want to be here Friday night.”

  We went to a restaurant in town where Iris was hoping to get us a table on the porch. Unfortunately, every one of them was occupied and we were parked in a cramped spot in the bustling main dining room. We could just barely hear ’60s R&B above the chattering of nearly a hundred patrons and the clattering of dishes being speedily bussed.

  “Cozy little spot, huh?” she said as we were seated.

  “Is it always this busy?”

  “I didn’t think it would be on a Wednesday night, but yeah, it’s really popular. You should see it in the summer. At least if we were outside we’d be able to talk.”

  A couple got up from the table across from ours and a busboy was there as they took their first step away, throwing plates into a bin.

  “This is fine,” I said. “They really do like to turn those tables, don’t they?”

  As if in response, a waiter was at our side, asking if we’d decided what we wanted to order. We hadn’t even looked at the menus and I laughed, though he didn’t seem to think anything he’d said was funny. Feeling pressured, I opened my menu and the waiter said he’d be back in a minute. In most restaurants, this would mean that he would be back sometime in the next hour, but no more than a hundred seconds later, he was standing at our side again.

  “My heart is pounding,” I said to Iris after the waiter left.

  “You never let him see you sweat, though.”

  I caught her up on the water disaster in the store and the glacial pace at which the contractor had begun to deal with the repairs. The person I’d hired had convinced me that he would need to replace the back wall and then informed me that he needed to do this in a very slow, very deliberate fashion. I didn’t know enough to know whether he was playing me or not, but since he was yet another friend of my father’s, I felt that I had to trust him. After he dealt with the wall, he would need to do considerable work to the stockroom and replace a huge piece of the carpeting. The fact that he refused to be governed by a schedule was flat-out depressing.

  Iris told me about the resolution to the tempest with the set designer – it turned out to be less about his romantic entanglements than it was about an adjustment to his antidepressant – and then about an actor they needed to replace on very short notice because he broke his contract to take a gig out in Utah. She related both of these stories matter-of-factly and I could imagine that she dealt with the actual situations in much the same way. I admired her for this. Either one might have been enough to send me packing.

  The meal came promptly and I felt a bit compelled to eat it as quickly. As we tended to our food, we did-n’t say much to each other. I could just barely make out the harmonies of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” over the din. At another table, a man animatedly explained a painful breakup to a friend.

  “So what’s happening with your father?” Iris asked as our coffee arrived.

  “He’s managed to confine his entire existence to the den.”

  “Well, from what I remember, it’s a nice room.”

  “I guess I should consider it a good thing that he’s not sitting in the garage.”

  “Are you worried?”

  I shook my head. “Worried is the wrong word. Confounded would be a better word. Flummoxed maybe. He’s fifty-five.”

  “You have a right to be flummoxed, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that word out loud before. He’s gonna come out of it, though, right? If he’s relatively okay physically, he’d have to, wouldn’t he?”

  “He should. I’m guessing he will. It’s just so bizarre seeing him this way. I mean, he was never a Type A guy, but at least he was always motivated.”

  Iris sipped her coffee and seemed a little hesitant before she spoke again.

  “Was this what he was like after Chase died?”

  Of course she wouldn’t have known. I recalled my father’s thousand-yard stare out the window and the stoicism that followed until the day I left. “That’s definitely the last time I’ve seen him this resigned. But at least then he had a better reason.”

  “If it’s any consolation, my mother’s been driving me a little crazy lately, too,” she said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “She went out on a date last Friday.”

  “Wow. First one since your dad?”

  “First one that ‘counts’ as my mother puts it. About a year ago, some friends invited this widower over to some dinner parties. She assumed they were trying to set her up with him, but she wouldn’t give the guy the time of day. This time it was someone she met at a craft fair. He took her to dinner and it sounds like they had a very good time.”

  “Great.”

  “Except that she’s feeling insanely guilty about it. I mean can’t-get-out-of-bed kind of guilt. She thinks it diminishes my father’s memory if she likes another man.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Try finding a half dozen delicate ways to say that and you’ll understand what my phone conversations with her have been like lately.”

  “So is she going to go out with him again?”

  “She’s screening her calls. She can’t decide what to do.”

  I shook my head and just said, “Families.
”

  The check arrived and, seeing that there were others waiting for our table, we dutifully paid it. We’d been in the restaurant less than an hour.

  “That was kind of brisk, wasn’t it?” Iris said when we got outside.

  “I’ll never complain about slow service again.” We walked toward the parking lot. I certainly didn’t want to drive back to Amber yet.

  “It’s kind of early,” Iris said. “Do you want to go to a movie?”

  It was nice to have her suggest that we extend our time together. We drove to the local theater and bought tickets for the movie with the nearest start time. It didn’t matter that the movie wasn’t particularly interesting and it didn’t matter that we couldn’t talk during the show. It was just good to be in the same place with her and to bump fingers with her on occasion as we reached for the popcorn.

  On the way back to Connecticut that night, I played some Temptations songs on my iPod as a reminder of the music I could barely hear in the restaurant. I sang high harmonies and pounded out the syncopated rhythms on the steering wheel.

  Iris and I had set the time machine on “now” tonight.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Plaster in the Air

  During the winter break of my junior year at Emerson, I helped in the store, as I had every holiday season since I was ten. This was one of the few times of year when it actually made sense to me that my father carried porcelain figurines and pen-and-pencil sets. While I would never have gone to a card store for these kinds of things (though honestly, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere for these kinds of things), the citizens of Amber buzzed in here to buy every trivial knickknack we could offer. From mid-December until the twenty-fourth (Christmas Day being the one day of the year when my father closed Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery) there would be customers in the store at all moments. Sometimes there would be dozens at a time. My father seemed incredibly happy during these periods, less I think because of the money that this activity generated than because it reminded him that the community wanted and needed him.

  This didn’t mean that I actually liked working in the store during these times. The rushes kept me occupied and there was always something to do, which made the hours go faster. And it was charming to see my otherwise understated father exchanging pleasantries with the customers. But it still seemed like a chore to me, something I was doing to be a dutiful son rather than anything I would have ever chosen to do. And now that these sessions took place during my winter break, I found myself thinking about all the friends who were back in town from college and what I could be doing with them instead of being here.

  I would have assumed that Chase would be feeling this way even more than I did this season. It was his first Christmas with Iris and Amber could be a romantic place during the holidays. Surely, he would have preferred a sleigh ride with her out on Pearson’s Farm. Or perhaps Mexican hot chocolate and pumpkin bread at the lavishly decorated Tavern on Russet. Or browsing with her through the thousands of handmade ornaments on display at Celebrations. Or cuddling under a blanket to stay warm while listening to the carolers in the park. I know that if I had a girlfriend like Iris to spend this time with, I would resent my dad tying me down.

  But if Chase minded, he gave no indication of it. A huge rush had ended a few minutes before, and while I stood behind the counter with my head propped up on my arm, he was at a display good-naturedly haranguing my father because he felt the toy selection had gone stale. He pointed to a grouping of stuffed animals and called them “stuffy animals,” suggesting that they weren’t at all what kids wanted as gifts. My father listened carefully to what Chase said and gave it the careful consideration that he always did, while at the same time mentioning that we’d just sold a “stuffy animal” in the last flurry of activity. Chase laughed and said that this actually proved his point, as the animal had gone to an older man who probably had no idea what his grandchild really preferred.

  The debate continued for a few more minutes, Chase teasing my father for “fossilizing” while my father jokingly suggested that he should bow to Chase’s “decades of experience.” I had just rung up a sale and was counting out change when Chase came behind the counter, grabbed fifty dollars from the cash register, and continued out the door.

  “I think you’ve just been robbed, Dad,” I said.

  My father laughed. “Assaulted maybe, but not robbed. He’ll be back, though God knows what he’ll be back with.”

  Without the sideshow of Chase and my father sparring, the next couple of hours dragged. Business ebbed and flowed, but it didn’t seem as crisp or stimulating as it did when Chase was there chatting up people in line, running madly to find some piece of merchandise, making incongruous gift suggestions to those who were naive enough to ask him for one. My father asked me to straighten a display and to rearrange the copper candlesticks to make them appear less picked over (for some reason we’d had a run on these earlier in the day) and I took to the tasks, only once slipping away to the phone to set up a drinks date with some friends that night.

  About an hour after Chase left, Tricia, that era’s manager, arrived for her shift. She was a sophomore at MCS and had been working for my father the past couple of years. I’d gone out with her and her boyfriend a couple of times when I was in town.

  “What’s it been like here today?” she asked.

  “The usual,” I answered.

  “Where’s Chase?”

  “One of the mysteries of the moment. He gave my father a dissertation on the marketplace, then grabbed fifty bucks from the cash register and disappeared. My father seems to think he’ll be back. I think he’s buying chocolates for Iris.”

  Tricia laughed. “What was he telling Richard he was doing wrong this time?”

  “Kid’s stuff.”

  She nodded knowingly. With Tricia there, I’d at least be able to catch up on gossip and find out if anything interesting was happening while I was in town. I couldn’t have these conversations with Chase while we were in the store because he was always in the middle of something else. Tricia did a good job for my father, but she also understood that what we were doing required minimal concentration.

  An hour later, Chase returned with a large plastic bag from the Toys “R” Us in the mall. He called my father over and produced a couple of handheld electronic games, a plastic velociraptor that made “authentic” dinosaur noises from a sound chip, and three stuffed animals: one round yellow thing that bleated and stuck out its tongue when squeezed, one purple and green alien with spikes on its arms, and a bald guy with a hatchet in his head. He proceeded to pull the Toys “R” Us tags off of the merchandise and remark the pieces with our price tags. My father pointed out that it was difficult to make a profit when you bought something retail and charged the same amount for it. Chase countered that buying these things wasn’t about making a profit, but rather showing that the store was on top of the market enough to carry them in the first place.

  “I’m with Chase on this one, Richard,” Tricia said. “Love the raptor, by the way.” To punctuate this, she pressed the button to activate the sound chip and the raptor squealed. This drew the attention of a young boy who had just entered the store with his mother. I just shook my head as the kid told the woman that this was the dinosaur he wanted and as she asked Tricia to hold it aside for her while she finished her shopping. As they walked to the back of the store, Tricia and Chase high-fived while my father took the other items and put them on display.

  “That was purely coincidental,” he said, grinning. He stopped and looked accusingly at Chase. “You set that up, didn’t you?”

  Chase held up his hands to express his innocence.

  “I’ll talk to the distributor about getting some of this stuff in January,” my father said, grinning.

  The process of taking the back wall of the store down to replace it was even more excruciatingly slow than described in advance. Since it was a load-bearing wall, the contractor couldn’t simply knock it down and put
up a new one. Instead, he had to strip it down to its beams. This meant days of plaster in the air, footprints on the carpet, and dust on the cards in spite of the plastic we’d put up to segregate the work area. Given that the tourist season wasn’t yet in full swing, it was just about as good a time as any for the store to go through this.

  It was not, however, a good time for Howard Crest to bring a potential buyer to visit.

  I was standing in the back of the store surveying the work the carpenter was doing when I heard Howard’s halting voice.

  “Oh, there you are, Hugh. Can I have a bit of your time?”

  I turned around to see him approaching me with his hand outstretched. He was a fragile-looking man who seemed to vibrate slightly as he talked. My father knew him from the Chamber of Commerce and was certain of his competence, even though I’d seen little evidence of this in my first few meetings with him. I knew Howard was well aware of the repairs we were doing at the store, as I had called him about them myself. I shook his hand and then eyed him warily when I saw that someone was with him.

  “Hugh, this is Mitch Ricks. He’d like to take look at the store. Can you give us some time?”

  “Sure,” I said, casting another glance at Howard. He clearly wasn’t as concerned about doing this under these circumstances as I was. The man walked past me and up to the plastic covering behind which the carpenters worked.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “We had a pipe explode on us. It did a lot of damage, but we’re doing the repairs now.” I looked over at Howard again. “All of it will be finished before any new buyer comes in.”

  The man looked down at the floor and scuffed up a streak of plaster dust.

  “Carpet, too?”

  “We’re replacing the entire back portion,” I said.

  The tour was off to a rousing start. I took Ricks through the store, telling him as much as I knew about traffic, turns, and the strongest revenue streams. Howard said nothing the entire time other than mentioning that he’d bought his granddaughter one of the kites we had on sale. Since the back office was unavailable, we settled behind the counter and I answered some more of Ricks’ questions. They weren’t particularly probing and he seemed preoccupied with the sounds coming from the other end of the store. Fifteen minutes after he’d arrived, he was gone. I was relatively certain I wouldn’t see him again. When Howard shook my hand as he was leaving, I still wasn’t sure that he understood that he should have at least given me some advance warning.