by David Hicks
But as he ate his undercooked hamburger smothered with cheese and beans, he remembered Louise’s voice on the phone and intuited its underlying message: Game over.
And he knew what Rachel would say to his compromise proposal: Game on.
*
It was hard to tell which came first, the headlights turning into the dirt driveway or the cheerful tail-wagging of Noah, the World’s Worst Watchdog. Flynn tugged on a shirt, stepped over the dog, and opened the door. It was Judy Lee.
And that’s when he realized what day it was.
“I waited an hour,” she said as she handed him a six-pack of Yuengling and threw herself onto the wicker couch. “But the good news is, I drank for free. Two guys at the bar, trying to convert me.” She ripped a can from the plastic loops and popped it open. “They backed off,” she said, “after I beat one of them in an arm-wrestle.”
Flynn dropped into the armchair apologizing. It was the first time he had missed their weekly tête-a-tête at Gin’s.
They sat for a while, taking long drafts of beer, petting Noah, and complaining about New Jersey women. When they opened their third cans, Judy Lee told him that Louise had seemed depressed at work; she was confusing the Golden Delicious with the Jonagolds. “She was fine during peach season,” she said. “But now…. What happened with you two?”
Flynn started to rehash their disastrous date and the subsequent phone conversation, but Judy Lee stopped him. “No,” she said, “I mean what happened? The poor girl looks completely lovesick.”
Flynn paused in mid-swig.
“You better do something,” she said, “or they’re going to fire her.” She set down her empty can and got up. “By the way,” she said, “I went back to full-time there. I can’t wait for you to get your shit together.” She looked out the window when she said this, as if searching for the friend she used to be proud of. “I knew it,” she said to the crickets. “I knew you would screw this up.”
*
The next morning, Flynn put on a pot of coffee and made a plan. First he called Mrs. Lieberthal, to apologize for his abuse of her precious hound and ask for his job back. When she assured him that nobody who had done that to one of her babies could ever work for her again, he said he understood, but would nonetheless insist on being compensated for the work he had completed—which, he added, was of the highest quality; she might want to go out there and see for herself. He refrained from telling her that the bleeding hearts by her front entrance would bloom and die, bloom and die, year after year, and when they did, and when her heart opened and closed with them, she would think of him and regret her decision. He refrained as well from telling her that what he had done for her, what he did for all his clients—and this was as much a revelation to him as it may have been to her—was not so much putting her lawn in order as it was implanting Beauty, all around her, along with helping, in his own small way, to keep a dying planet alive. And that was a far better way to make a living than forcing young people to read books they didn’t want to read, and to write essays they didn’t want to write.
He called Rachel next, stabbing at the numbers as if it were a telegraphed message: FLYNN HAWKINS BACK ON HIS FEET STOP. He told her he was coming to get the kids the next morning for his scheduled visitation, and as a favor to her he’d have them back by Saturday evening so they could enjoy the company of their cousins. He said he’d love to negotiate such things with her in an amicable manner and in the spirit of compromise, but it was also important, indeed imperative in the eyes of the Law, that she honor their legal visitation agreement. Therefore if two children named Nathan and Jane were not on her porch by 0900 hours, overnight bags packed and ready to go, he’d see her in Broome County Family Court tout de suite, which was French for Monday morning. Then he hung up on her before she could hang up on him.
He called Louise next. It was a cowardly act, knowing she was at work and wouldn’t answer the phone, but he had some things to say, and if he caught her live he probably wouldn’t be able to say it all.
He waited for the beep, then dove in. He told Louise’s voicemail that when he couldn’t see the kids after his divorce he had gone into a hole so deep he hadn’t fought hard enough for his rights. He told her the primary reason why he had left Sacred Heart was not that he hated the place, as he had told her (although that was certainly true) or that he found the relationships among his colleagues to be so deeply acrimonious there was nothing he could do to remedy it (also true), but that an affianced woman from Alumni Relations had come to his apartment drunk, and after Flynn denied her access and sent her on her way, the woman wrote rapturously about Flynn in her diary, and when her fiancée (a ponytailed Fine Arts professor) read, photocopied, and then pinned pages of said diary to the office doors of Flynn’s colleagues and handed the diary itself to the dean, telling her that the new atheist in the English department was having an affair with his bride-to-be, said dean, the aforementioned Sister Mary Michael, had called Flynn into her office and said she always knew he’d be trouble, and by the way she would not be instituting his recommendations regarding his poorly-performing colleagues and yes, as a matter of fact she did inform them that their new department chair wanted to fire them, so best of luck fostering departmental camaraderie from that point on. (To which Flynn replied via email, “Holy Mother of God, I quit.”) He told Louise he had never, not once, committed himself in both mind and heart to a woman—that every time he had been with Option A, he had daydreamed about Option B, until they eventually switched letters—but now, as Noah was his witness, he was going to grow the hell up and mend his wayward ways. He talked through the sound-pauses of Rachel’s callbacks, and thrice Louise’s voicemail cut him off, but each time he redialed and started up fresh at the beep.
Then, Flynn Hawkins went back to work. In one dawn-to-dusk day he took care of the weekly mow-and-trims he had missed during his three-day sabbatical, then drove over to Kinko’s, printed up a stack of flyers, ventured back out to the Land of SUVs, and tucked the flyers into about a hundred screen doors. When he got home, there were six messages waiting for him on his landline: three from Rachel, reminding him that, among other things, he could go to hell; one from a woman who found his flyer on her door and was “definitely interested” in implanting Beauty all around her; one from Judy Lee, ordering him to cease and desist the marathon Louise voicemails as they were only making matters worse; and the last from Louise herself, thanking him for his “extremely informative” messages and asking for some time to think.
Tempted to sit on all the above while imbibing a cold one (he actually went as far as opening a bottle and digging through the couch cushions to find the remote), Flynn instead remembered his resolutions, clapped his hands together (startling Noah), and drove to Lochen’s, where he found a Thinking About You card, then wrote a note in which he told Louise he was thinking about her thinking about him, and mailed it off to her at the Orchards address. Back home, he found the guardian ad litem’s business card, called her, and solicited her aid enforcing his scheduled visitation that weekend. Finally, he called Judy Lee and lit into her: if she didn’t want him to continue boring her to tears every Thursday pining for Ms. Just-About-Right, he said, then she’d better back the hell off and let him make an ass of himself with her blonde BFF. Upon which Judy Lee lit right back, predicting that if Louise were stupid enough to give him a second chance, one of them would sure as shit end up breaking the heart of the other, as both their track records thus far had been nothing short of cataclysmic. Then she hung up on him, but with a pathetic slap of her flip-phone versus the dramatic slam of Flynn’s landline.
*
Three weeks later, following not one but two court-supported visitations with the kids (eating blueberry pancakes for dinner, watching old Lauren Bacall movies, enjoying canoe rides in the creek, playing catch with Nathan on Tom’s Lane, and teaching Janey how to ride a bike without training wheels, all of which wiped out Noah for
days afterwards)—and following not one but two new job contracts on Gravel Pond Road (on the opposite side of the golf course from the Lieberthals), Louise called. Out of the blue. Exactly three days after Flynn had a Thursday beer by his lonesome at Gin’s Tavern, abandoned all hope regarding Our Lady of the Long Fingers, and found a new therapist—who, at their first meeting, handed Flynn a well-stocked pillow, told him to imagine it as someone he was angry with, and, when he asked Flynn who it was that he was suddenly punching, tears coursing down his face, seemed unsurprised when it was neither his ex-wife nor Judy Lee nor his mother, but his dearly departed dad.
It was Sunday, and it was raining, the kind of rain that turned afternoon into evening, and he had just returned from dropping off the kids. After taking some time to think things over, Louise said, she had finally broken things off with Jeremy—not for Flynn’s sake, mind you, but because the relationship was clearly not working. “But know this,” she said when Flynn expressed his guarded pleasure at this turn of events, “I’m mostly responsible for the failure of that relationship. What I’m saying is, I’m no angel. I drank too much in my twenties. I’ve been engaged twice and twice I broke it off. I worry about absolutely everything. My father calls me ‘The Obstinate One,’ and my mother thinks I’m far too wide in the hips for one who hasn’t borne children. My roots are already gray, my dog shits on my carpet because I failed our animal-training class, I’m living with my parents again, and I’m making a giant bowl of nachos for dinner tonight. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Flynn snapped his fingers at Noah, who was scratching at the door, desperate to pee. If he asked Louise to hold on while he opened it, the dog would sniff the rain and stay inside anyway.
“If there’s one thing I’ve figured out,” he said, “it’s that our supposed failings are what make us lovable.”
“I need a while,” Louise said, her voice softening, “but if you still want to spend some time together, I insist, it must be as friends.”
*
And so it came to pass that Flynn and Louise went bowling.
Before: Flynn decided it would be a “clean date.” But then he got the jitters, so he slugged down a beer, and afterwards he opened another, just to wash down a bag of sea-salt-and-vinegar chips. Baby steps.
During: He did his utmost to stick to their agreement. He took her to Idle Hours near Dickson City, the cleanest bowling alley in the area. He high-fived her when she notched a spare, and stared at her exquisitely-shaped derriere only when she couldn’t see him doing so—and such is the beauty of bowling that he could get away with this almost twenty times per game. He talked a lot about Nathan and Janey, but refrained from mentioning their mother—except once, and that was only to say that she was doing a top-notch job as primary caregiver, which was the God’s-honest truth.
After: He kept two hands on the wheel, and upon pulling over at the curb at her parents’ house, he fully intended to scoot out, run around the back and open her door, but as he started to exit she laid a hand on his arm, closed her eyes, and put back her head—which made Flynn wish he had cleaned the headrests that afternoon and not just the dash, seats, and floor pads.
“This was nice,” she said with a sigh, and Flynn sat back as well. “Bowling is good,” she said.
She said Judy Lee had been quite the grump of late, even going so far as ordering Louise not to go out with Flynn ever again. “And at first I agreed,” she said. “But then I thought, there’s none of us that’s perfect, right?”
Flynn sighed, and checked his impulse to reach for her long fingers. His life thus far had been about a hundred weed-infested acres from perfect, but the point, it seemed to him now, was not to bemoan or curse his fate but to weed diligently, fertilize organically, water regularly, and trust the sunshine to do the rest. While he was thinking this, Louise said, “Well then,” and slid a little closer to him. And as she turned toward him, her lips parted, that’s when Flynn, who would have considered an airy kiss on the cheek an unexpected step in the right direction, understood that all bets were suddenly off, that they were about to do a tad more than that right there in the cab of his old Ram, at the end of their allegedly friendly date. He closed his eyes (his heart suddenly spilling out), took a deep breath (the scent of bowling-shoe deodorizer clashing with the lavender of her perfume), and felt his callused hand enveloped by the nice long fingers of the fair-haired young woman who was, tis true, no angel, but who could still, in a manner of speaking, be the answer to all his prayers.
THE PENNSYLVANIA BRIDGE
Locate me in the garden, pulling weeds. It’s June 16, 2013. I am forty. The sun is blazing.
Janey’s kneeling at the edge of the woods, looking for bugs. Nathan’s down by the creek, in his swimming trunks and flip-flops.
This is my life now.
Nathan grabs hold of the long rope I tied to the tree branch, backs up a few steps, lifts his feet, and sails out over the creek, yodeling like a cross between Tarzan and Peewee Herman. When he drops into the cold water, he screams and thrashes his arms, then looks up to see if I was watching. “Dad! Get in here!”
I smile and wave. It looks like fun. When did I decide that life was no longer fun?
I wave at him. “Too cold!”
I take a break to call Louise. We’ve been seeing each other on the occasional weeknight, when I make the hour-long drive to Wilkes-Barre, and on weekends when I don’t have the kids. Sometimes I don’t know until Friday whether or not I have them, on account of my perpetually temperamental ex-wife. But Louise has been patient about this, so far.
When Janey hears me talking on the phone she comes over, holding an old sour-cream container she found in the recycling bin. She yanks on my shorts DaddyDaddyDaddy until finally I excuse myself to Louise and tell her I’ll call her right back.
I put my hand on my hip and look down at my daughter. “What.”
She cracks open the lid and I see orange salamanders inside. She looks up at me.
I wipe my forehead with the end of my tee shirt. “No,” I say, and she frowns. “Honey, their home is the woods. How do you think they feel right now, trapped in there like that?”
She shakes her head; she’s already considered this. “Look,” she says and points to the holes she’s punched in the plastic, the grass she has placed inside.
“I used to have posters of nature in my office,” I say, “but I was still in an office.”
I turn my attention back to the garden. The potato patch has been infested by some kind of bindweed, which I have privately named “Rachelweed.” I don’t know how to get rid of it without using something like Roundup, which is against my principles. I decide to be attentive and persistent: I’ll never fully eradicate it, but I can make damn sure it doesn’t dominate.
From down below, Nathan screams “Cowabunga!” and launches out again. He screams again when he hits the water, but it sounds a little deeper, more adolescent. He’ll turn eleven in a few months. Janey looks down the hill, like she might want to give it a try, but there’s no way—she hates the cold water.
I hit “redial” and put the phone to my ear. I shouldn’t have cut off the call; I should have simply told Janey to wait until I was off the phone. Priorities. One loved one at a time.
“You’re a big girl now,” I tell her. (This isn’t true, of course; she’s only six.) “I know you’ll make the right decision.”
The next morning, a Sunday, I wake them up the way my mother used to when I was a kid, by frying up some bacon and letting the smell drift upstairs. I hear Janey’s footsteps first. She loves big breakfasts, especially when they involve pancakes, especially in shapes: a crescent moon, an owl, a starfish. But when she comes downstairs, she’s holding the sour-cream container and her whole face is red. She’s beyond crying. She’s bawling. Her eyes are so big that it takes a while for the tears to well up, exit the lids, and fall to the ground.
She holds up the container. All the salamanders are dead.
*
The next weekend, Rachel has planned a getaway with Sam, her boyfriend, so I have the kids again. I apologize to Louise (she’s said she doesn’t want to interfere “in any way whatsoever” with my visitation weekends) and pick up Nathan and Janey in Binghamton, an hour north. When we get back, Nathan runs inside, digs into his overnight bag, and pulls out a red cape, from a magician’s costume I’ve never seen. He cloaks himself in it and runs up the stairs. When I come up a little later, I see him standing in the corner, perfectly still, encased by the cape. He unveils himself—“Ha-ha!”—and brandishes a plastic knife.