White Plains

by David Hicks

  Then he said something I’ve never forgotten. “If I had to do it all over again,” he says, “I’d still throw the ball to second.”

  “What?” I said. “Why?” I was still watching TT glide around the outfield, making everything look easy. Hawk might have been a better fielder, but only slightly, and TT was a killer at the plate. Lefty with a big looping swing. Terrific ballplayer. I brought him with me when I got the Rutgers job, and he was drafted by the Cardinals, fourth round, but nothing ever happened. Never knew what happened to him. Some kids, they just disappear.

  “Because,” Hawk says, “I wouldn’t have hit the bag at third. I was about to throw the ball right at Dante Harrison’s head.”

  I look at him. “The basketball player?”

  He nods. “Would have hit him, too,” he says. “He was talking to my girlfriend. He tried to put his arm around her.”

  “Your girlfriend?” I say.

  He shakes his head. “It was a secret,” he says. “Our parents wouldn’t have approved.”

  I didn’t say anything. I would have probably been the same way if one of my kids had brought home a black girl, especially one as dark as the Brandon girl. It’s not natural, you know? That’s how I thought back then, anyway. Now, I don’t know what to think. The world’s changing. My oldest, he married a nice Jewish girl. Who would have thought? Lynnie was furious about it, but it’s all working out. She’s good to him, that’s all I care about. But jeez Louise, a Jew! I must be getting soft in my old age.

  “So that’s why I threw it to second,” he said.

  Now what would you say to that? “Because of the black girl?” I said. “We lost a game because of a black girl? We lost the league title because—”

  He looked at me kind of sadly. “Exactly what my dad would have said.” Then he put his glove on and jogged out into centerfield.

  I felt bad about that for a while, let me tell you. But that’s the way I thought at the time. What the hell? Live and learn.

  Anyway, next thing you know—God’s honest truth—next thing you know the kid goes on a tear. Ends the year with a ten-game hitting streak, something like that. Even belted a curve ball once—he just sat on it and ripped it into the gap in left center. Big grin on his face standing on second. Such is life, right? Who can predict these things. Who can predict.

  IN LOVE WITH LOUISE

  Flynn was late to the Halfway Café. He and Judy Lee had come directly from their new work site in Clarks Summit, and she had screwed the directions. He was about to give her hell about it, figuring it would make for an ice-breaker of sorts, but then he set eyes on Louise, fiddling with her long spoon at an otherwise empty booth, her shoulder just touching the pink wall.

  Whoa.

  She was clearly too young—late twenties, if that—and far too pretty for the likes of him. And too classy. He considered fleeing the premises, but then she half-stood and reached out her hand. He took it, then held on a bit longer than he needed to, on account of her slender fingers.

  Judy Lee rolled her eyes.

  Flynn apologized for being late, Judy Lee excused herself to take a phone call from her needy girlfriend, and after Flynn ordered a beer and some food, Louise said something like Well, here we are! and laughed.

  The lilt of it. Like summer rain on a field of wildflowers. Flynn had heard some interesting laughs in his thirty-eight years—his friend Sydney’s was like a pleasant, low-lying fog, while that of a young artist he had recently known (in the Biblical sense) was like a staggered-emission garden hose. Louise’s laugh? Think poppies.

  Next thing he knew, he was reaching across the table, to get those fingers back in his hand. An audacious act—he was jumping the gun, and you would think he’d know better, given his age—but he held on anyway, afraid to speak lest he’d blow it right then and there.

  But then he did. “Nice fingers,” he said.

  And she quickly withdrew.

  But as she forked some whipped cream off her shoo-fly pie, she flashed the barest hint of a smile.

  When Judy Lee returned, Flynn took the opportunity to wash up. In the restroom mirror his eyes looked a little droopy, his teeth slightly yellowed (from all the coffee, no doubt); but still and all, he was looking Okay en route to Better. His hair was graying at the temples, he had his mother’s crow’s feet by his eyes, and there were early warning signs of turkey neck, but otherwise, the moves he’d made recently—renting a sweet house in the woods, quitting his faculty position at Sacred Heart, taking his ex-wife to court to improve his visitation agreement (and being introduced to a guardian ad litem who would intervene on the children’s behalf in future disputes), finding work at Sunshine Orchards, and then starting up his own business on the side—had done him a world of good.

  He scrubbed his hands, trying to get at the stubborn dirt under his nails. He had told Judy Lee he hated blind dates, but in truth he had never been on one. Ever. Never mind the typical scenario where both people hated each other on sight and then had to be pleasant for two hours; that’s not what he was worried about. What if it actually worked? What if he managed to earn his way into this longfingered young woman’s heart over the course of a milkshake and she invited him to her family’s Labor Day cookout? Then what? He imagined Louise’s mother (a proper lady, the kind who summered at the Vineyard) and father (silver-haired, with a polo shirt and chinos) taking in the sight of him, Flynn Hawkins, a divorcee on the brink of forty, with two kids living with their malcontent mother in Binghamton, to say nothing of the Abandonment of His Children in Late December of Oh Nine and the Sacred Heart Scandal of Two Thousand Twelve. In graduate school he had read a number of sonnets on this topic, lyrical bums who had fallen in love with women far beyond their reach: instead of admitting defeat and propositioning the local peasant’s daughter as a viable alternative, they persisted in their outlandish yearnings, certain that one day their fair damsels, once aware of how sensitive and heartsick they were, would leave their aristocratic husbands or tyrannical fathers and offer their soft hands and delicate fingers to the callused, dirt-encrusted mitts of the gardeners who loved them more than any fancy-pantsed princes ever could.

  That’s what Flynn aspired to be: someone’s prince. And that’s what he was now: a gardener. Landscaper, if you will. Not just mowing and trimming, although he had started off that way, after shifting to part-time at the Orchards back in late July. No, to be perfectly forthcoming, he considered himself an artist of sorts, although he would never say so out loud. Once he got around to designing business cards, they would read, “Flynn Hawkins, Landscape Artist: Put your lawn in order.” Then a simple floral design, a swoosh of green topped by a red dot. He’d stencil the same design on the side of his truck—not the ancient Dodge Ram he had picked up in exchange for his old Sidekick, but the gleaming silver Tacoma he had seen one morning in the Toyota of Scranton lot.

  Business was slow, but after some Valpak coupons yielded nothing and an ill-advised Groupon deal nearly ruined him, the flyers he’d stuck in people’s doors, along with chatting up the regulars at the Orchards, had generated enough work to pay his rent and stay current with his child support, and pretty soon he had enough left over to hire Judy Lee to help him with the big jobs. Once he arrived on site, he almost invariably got the job, for he generally underbid the competition and adopted a professorial manner (i.e. kind and knowledgeable, mildly flirtatious) when dealing with customers. He’d take a look around, listening to what the owner wanted, but at the same time sensing what the yard, if you will, was asking for. Then he’d lock his brown eyes onto the woman’s (and it was always the woman) and relate, in sonorous tones, his vision: a shock of limerock rubies bookending the front stoop, some hillside black beauties circling a fountain out back, some arborvitae near the kids’ play area to block off the neighbors’ view. He’d hope for All right, Mr. Hawkins, have at it; here’s a check to start you off, but more typically he’d ge
t How much? and have to downgrade to something like lilacs along the back fence, forsythia on the borders, and fieldstone near the garden. However, while most people in the area had yet to recover from the economic downturn, there were still pockets, in places like Clarks Summit and Waverly, where folks could afford the full realization of his vision. The Lieberthals had a lavish spread on Country Club Road; if Flynn did good work there, word of his talents would spread throughout the Land of the One Percent, and the cash would follow.

  It was a big job: the Lieberthals had just purchased the place and were looking for a complete re-haul of both yards, low walls and pathways included. This work, plus his regular weeklies and monthlies, would carry Flynn all the way until first frost. He’d be able to get the kids some high-class Christmas gifts for once: maybe a new computer for Nathan so he could improve his grades at school, and one of those kiddy keyboards for Janey, the kind where you program the drumbeat and chord sequence and then learn the melody on your own.

  He opened the bathroom door and peeked out at Louise, her lips pursed around the straw. Now here was a woman he’d like to garden for. She’d come out onto the front porch in white pants and a sky-blue blouse, tuck her blonde hair behind her ears, and remark on how breezy it had gotten since daybreak. Flynn would nod, suggest that rain was in the offing, and say, Well then, let’s see about this yard of yours. Once out back, he would envision not only the yard, but a life. He’d imagine rigging up a hammock between the aging maples, reviving the overgrown peach tree by pruning the non-scaffolding branches, and setting up the grill near the back steps in order to facilitate the transport of beef. Louise would lean out the back door, hand him a glass of iced tea and say, The corn’s ready, dear, how are those steaks coming? and Flynn would say, Your medium-well needs another minute or two, but mine’s raring to go. After she extracted the corn from the pot she’d call out, My prince, would you like a beer with dinner or will you join me in a glass of shiraz? And he’d say, Angel, nothing complements a rib-eye better than an ice-cold pale ale.

  Well now, he thought as he headed back toward the booth, what on earth would such a woman be doing meeting a run-down ex-professor like him at a half-empty diner in Old Forge, PA? By now she ought to have settled down with a good-looking young businessman with considerably more cash in his checking account than the $124.52 Flynn currently had, post-child-support-payment and pre-Lieberthal-deposit-check.

  It was all Judy Lee’s doing, by the way. Flynn had met her at the Orchards when he answered their ad for a slightly-above-minimum-wage job that began at five a.m. After his disastrous year at Sacred Heart, he had decided he would finally walk the talk, abandon the professoriate, and lead a simpler life. So he did it: he walked into the dean’s office and told Sister Mary Michael (ignoring the potato-chip crumbs on her vestment) that he would tolerate no longer her general lack of support (referring both to the alleged scandal and to his personnel decisions, as she had refused to place his alcoholic colleague into a rehab program, nudge his most graybearded piece of deadwood into early retirement, and fire the thrift-store-aficionado whose teaching evaluations were the worse he’d ever seen) and was quitting his position, indeed the entire profession, at the end of the school year. He had started off at the Orchards doing grunt work (planting, watering, weeding, and covering beds when frost was predicted), but quickly worked his way into snipping the leafy greens, pruning trees, seeding and watering (in the greenhouse), and manning (side-by-side with Judy Lee) the Farmer’s Market booth on Saturdays. After the market closed, and every Thursday after work, they headed over to Gin’s Tavern for happy hour, keeping up the practice even after Flynn abandoned the farmer’s market gig and dropped down to part-time in order to start his own weekend business. He typically passed the time at Gin’s telling stories of his pathetic love life—like the time his hair had caught fire in a married woman’s bed, or the time he attempted cunnilingus in a woman’s bathtub and nearly drowned, or the night he showed up at the wrong house for a date and sat on a stranger’s porch for a half hour before the police showed up. As soon as he was done, Judy Lee would bring up the name of an old high-school friend of hers named Louise, who was now working at the Orchards in place of Flynn. When he suggested he was probably too old for any friend of hers, Judy Lee said in case he hadn’t noticed, there weren’t a lot of decent men of any age in northeast PA, at least not many who weren’t still living with their mothers and drinking a case of PBR per day.

  And apparently she’d been telling Louise, I’ve got this friend; he’s a gardener, but don’t go by that—he used to be a professor, PhD and everything. Louise told him as much after he finally returned to the booth at the Halfway Café, wolfed down most of his food, watched the girls finish off a second slice of shoo-fly pie, and widened his eyes at Judy Lee as she went off to use the restroom after first giving Flynn a look: Here’s your chance, stud.

  “She’s been going on and on about this handsome friend of hers,” is what Louise said.

  “Well, now you know the truth,” Flynn said, pointing to his droopy eyes and keeping his lips together when he smiled. “This is as good as it gets, right here.”

  Louise fingered a drop of milkshake from the bottom of her straw. “I’ve seen worse,” she said. And then she laughed again, and again Flynn saw poppies—an entire field of them.

  Flynn’s rented house was on a dirt road in the middle of a hemlock pine forest in Nicholson, Pennsylvania, and there was no lawn to speak of. He had signed a year-long lease when Rand, the owner, moved to Idaho, but after ten months Rand had emailed Flynn to say he loved it out there and might never come back—and Flynn wrote back to say that was just fine with him. The enclosed front porch, which Flynn had dubbed the Contemplation of Life Room, featured a spider plant with fourteen offspring, a picture of his kids on the trail at Lackawanna State Park, a white wicker couch and table, a tweed armchair, and an end table with two photographs: one of his mother when she was a young woman, arm-in-arm with his father, the other of Nathan and Janey in Batman and Robin costumes. After coming home from his meet-and-greet at the café, Flynn had let Noah outside, dumped the contents of his to-go container into the dog bowl, cracked open a cold Rolling Rock, and checked his messages. The first was from Rachel, pre-emptively cancelling his visitation with the kids that weekend due to an unexpected visit from her sister. The second was from Judy Lee, promising information of immeasurable value.

  He decided to sit on the Rachel callback; no good would come of that exchange. He called Judy Lee instead, after drawing a hot bath. It had been a long day.

  “Nice to meetcha?” she said as soon as she picked up. “You big dork.”

  That’s what Flynn had said to Louise upon leaving the café. Considering his rattled condition, it could have been a lot worse.

  “So whatdja think?” she said.

  “I don’t know, JL,” Flynn said as he set Janey’s Sponge Bob Bath Time Soap Paints on the floor, settled into the hot water, and put his feet up on the rim, one by the Bob the Builder bath mitt and the other by the Ariel doll that changed colors when it got wet. “She’s way out of my league.” As he said this, Noah came upstairs and nosed his way into the bathroom, lapped up some tub water by Flynn’s knee, and then lay down, a lump of mac-and-cheese still clinging to his upper lip.

  After Judy Lee divulged the substance of the conversation she had with Louise in the diner while he was doing god-knows-what-for-forever in the bathroom, Flynn said that while he had never had a successful relationship with a woman, and while he surely needed to take steps in the right direction, a girl like Louise was probably more leap than step.

  “She’s from Wilkes-Barre!” Judy Lee said. “You have a PhD! Do you have any idea what a catch that makes you?”

  “One’s point of origin is irrelevant,” Flynn said, as barking erupted from outside (that would be Buddy, the Golden Retriever from Tom’s farm, down the road) and Noah heaved himself up to see wha
t all the commotion was about. (The last time Buddy had come by he was dragging a bloodied deer leg, and the two dogs had gone down to the creek to share in the feast.) “Same for one’s terminal degree,” Flynn added, for he had known many an insouciant and insipid professor, and had long understood the achievement of his doctorate to be more a matter of persistence than of genius. Outside, Noah’s bark joined in with Buddy’s, which probably meant bear in the woods. “She does, however, have a great laugh.”

  “I’ll text you her number,” Judy Lee said.

  Don’t bother, Flynn almost said, but he heard his friend’s anticipated disappointment clear through all the barking. “Exquisite fingers, too,” he said. God, the woman was gorgeous. But it was an old habit of Flynn’s to immediately see himself as unworthy of such beauty, to predict the flaws such a woman would find in him and take himself out of the equation right from the get-go.

  “Her last boyfriend was a businessman,” Judy Lee said, which only made things worse, as Flynn pictured a clean-cut young man in a navy-blue suit. “A real dickhead,” Judy Lee said. “She’s looking for someone more down-to-earth.”

  Flynn blew out a breath, then remembered his resolution to rethink who he was and how he behaved. After all, hadn’t he just drastically changed on the outside, from an academic who wore tweed jackets to a man who loved nothing better than to mix sheep manure and peat with his bare hands? He was surely changing on the inside as well. And if that was the case, perhaps he would be attractive to a woman like Louise.

  “Well,” he said, “you can’t get much downer-to-earth than I am right now.”

  After they hung up, Flynn took a swig of beer and slid deeper into the tub. His arms looked strong and tan against the enamel—swarthy, even. He had never been so fit and healthy in all his life. Every day he had taken home fresh fruit and veggies from the Orchard, so for four months that’s all he had eaten; and working outside every day had re-animated muscles from their atrophied state. He hoped he had looked good to Louise. Nobody that lovely had ever given him a second look, not with such blue-gray eyes anyway, and on the drive home he had convinced himself he hadn’t a prayer, but according to Judy Lee, Louise had been “quite excited” afterwards. “She said you have a nice smile,” she told Flynn. “She said you have ‘soft eyes’, whatever that means.” At the time, he couldn’t formulate a response, but now, as he sat up to look at his reflection in the bathtub faucet, he supposed that yes, you could say they were soft.