by Nancy Thayer
Jack realized that the father, nearest to him, in the aisle seat, was looking at his face, watching Jack watch the little girl.
“Sorry,” Jack said, embarrassed. “Didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that your little girl is so pretty. She makes me miss my daughter—Lexi—who’s just about your daughter’s age.”
The other father nodded. “I know,” he replied. “I hate business trips. Go away one week, come back, and you’ve missed so much. Jennifer learned to walk while I was gone. Learned to talk while I was gone. Finally I changed jobs so I could stay home more. It doesn’t last, does it? They grow up so fast. Do you have a picture of your daughter?”
Jack pulled a picture of Lexi out of his wallet, and there was Carey Ann too, wearing a red sweater, cuddling Lexi in her arms. The other father was right: this picture had been taken only six months ago, and yet Lexi was different now, bigger and more grown-up.
“Wow,” the father said. “She’s beautiful, your wife. Honey, look at this. Isn’t she beautiful?”
The woman took the picture and studied it. “Yes. And the little girl is too.” She leaned forward around her husband to smile at Jack, keeping her daughter pressed against her breast. “You’re a lucky man,” she said.
They talked some more, in the manner of polite people who find themselves confined in the same small space, until the father suddenly yawned loudly in Jack’s face.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s the motion-sickness pills. They make me drowsy.”
“Don’t believe him,” the mother said, leaning forward again. “It’s Valium. He’s terrified of flying.” She grinned.
Jack smiled back, then returned to his book, which he still could not concentrate on. So it wasn’t so unusual, fathers loving their children, giving up certain things to be with them; look what that father had done. Maybe Jack was a wimp, or a nerd, or even—what was that word they used to hear?—“pussy-whipped,” or, more elegantly put, “uxorious,” but he loved being with his wife and daughter, and he wanted to be with them, and he wanted them to be happy. Maybe fate had randomly put this doting father at his side to show him it was all right to be the way he was, that he was not alone.
And something else was nudging at his thoughts. It was … What?
Jack nodded, suddenly caught up in a realization: well, no wonder the Skragses didn’t want their daughter moving halfway across the continent. She was their only child. They loved her. Of course everyone moved everywhere these days, no grown child would ever think of staying in a place just to be near her parents—in the name of success and accomplishment, it was necessary to move where the job was—but that didn’t make it right, or at least the only thing that was right, the only right way to live. A wash of sympathy and respect swept over Jack, and he understood that Carey Ann’s parents were not control-crazed monsters but just parents who loved their only child.
Jack rented a car at the Kansas City airport and drove out on Route 291 to Liberty, where Carey Ann’s friend Christie had her farm. Jack had forgotten how pretty the land around here was, with its rolling hills and sloping pastures and gleaming streams flashing back the sun’s light. Christie, whom Jack knew only through Carey Ann, was married to a vet and spent her time raising purebred long-haired German shepherds and Appaloosa horses. Their farmhouse and barns were set at the top of a hill next to a ravine where scrub oak, persimmon, cedar, and soft walnut trees sprouted miraculously from crevices in the rocks to race each other upward to the sunlight. Vines of ivy and poison oak and sumac wound around some of the tree trunks, and on this winter day the ravine flickered with light as the wind blew the trees, exposing snake colors, the rocks of the ravine glittering with quartz and fool’s gold, serpentine and shale.
Jack stopped his car in the long gravel driveway and stood for a while just looking down into the ravine, and across the drive, where the pasture sloped away from the outbuildings. From inside the house and behind one of the barns, dogs barked an alarm. He walked toward the house, meaning to knock on the door, and then he saw two riders galloping across the back pasture toward him.
He went around the house and leaned on the white rail fence to watch. Christie was riding a huge Appaloosa Indian-style, without a saddle or bridle, using only a rope to rein, and Carey Ann was on her horse, Jelly Roll. Carey Ann had her hair in braids and was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and when she jumped off her horse and came to throw herself in Jack’s arms, she smelled of sunshine and fresh air and horse sweat and exuberance.
“Jack! Honey! Baby! Darling! Sweetie! I don’t believe this! Oh, God, I love you! Oh, God, you feel so good to me!”
This was Jack’s Carey Ann; this joyous girl. She was all over him, hugging him, kissing him, laughing, crying, talking a mile a minute, and Christie’s Appaloosa danced nervously away, shaking its head and snorting with nervousness at all this action. But Jelly Roll, who had often in her life been greeted exactly the same as Jack was being greeted now, was used to Carey Ann’s ways and began to nibble at the winter-stiff grass.
“What are you doing here?” Carey Ann said at last, pulling herself away from Jack enough to give him breath to answer.
“I missed you,” he said simply. “And there are some things I want to talk to you about.”
“Is anything wrong? At the college?”
“No. Not at all. I just … missed you.”
“Oh, Jack,” Carey Ann said, and tears began to streak down her face. “I missed you too. You are the sweetest thing.” She collapsed against him, sobbing, hugging him, kissing his shirt and neck, and he held her, feeling her animal warmth and energy against him, hugging her to him.
“Why don’t you two go on into the house and, uh, get reacquainted,” Christie said from her perch on her horse. She sidled up along Jelly Roll and grabbed her reins. “I’ve got, um, a really important appointment in the barn that will take me exactly one hour. Okay?”
“Oh, thank you, Christie!” Carey Ann said, and hurried Jack toward the house. “Do you want some lunch, Jack? No? Good!” she said, pushing him down the hall past the kitchen to the guest room, where her things were. She peeled off her jeans and sweatshirt, revealing underpants of cotton with strawberries on them. Those panties and her slenderness, her braids, her face free of makeup, streaked with tears, made her seem terribly frail and very young, even childish, but she did not act childish. She began tearing Jack’s clothes off him because he was moving too slowly for her; then she pulled him to the bed. She didn’t want touching or fondling or messing around, she wanted him in her, and when he entered, he felt both their bodies tighten with the shock of connection. True, he was the axis on which her life turned, but she was the globe around him, the world around him, and without her he was lost in a void, with his life blowing emptily by.
Christie invited Jack to stay with Carey Ann at the farm overnight and Jack gratefully accepted. He wasn’t quite ready to confront Carey Ann’s parents. He wasn’t sure just what he wanted to confront them with. But the next morning, the Hamiltons drove back into Kansas City, and while Carey Ann was at her parents’ with Lexi, Jack paid a call on Clayton French, his good friend and head of the English department at the university.
“Well, Jack, ol’ buddy,” Clayton said after hearing his friend out, “nothing would please me more than to offer you a position here. But it doesn’t work like that, you know. Next year for sure we have no openings on the faculty. The year after that, maybe. We’ve got an arrogant young dude from California who just might move back out there if the rest of the faculty don’t kill him first. It’s perfectly possible his position will be available, but not for a year, and then there would be all the formalities, advertising the position, you know how it goes.”
“Mmm,” Jack said. “I understand. I knew this was a long shot. I was just thinking of making some changes and hoping some things might … oh, sort of just fall into place for me.”
“Kind of change you’re talking about doesn’t usually happen that fortuitously,” Clayton s
aid. “Specially not in the academic world. Hey, you know I could always give you some freshman-English sections. Not glamorous, and hard work, and you’d have to be part-time, no benefits, no tenure, but you’d have some money coming in.”
“Part-time freshman English,” Jack said ruefully, smiling.
Clayton held out his hands, palms up, in response. “What can I say? But you could probably line that sort of thing up at the other colleges around here. It would probably do to put bread on the table.”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I mean, I’m grateful for anything you can do, Clayton. I’m just thinking aloud right now. I’m sort of feeling my way along. What it is, is that I can’t stomach the thought of being dependent on Carey Ann’s parents for anything.”
“I know, I understand that. But don’t you think it’s kind of a selfish attitude on your part, Jack? I mean, they’ve got all that money, and what they really want to do with it is make their daughter’s life nice. That doesn’t mean you’d be a freeloader in their eyes.”
“I know,” Jack said. “I guess. Oh, I don’t know.”
“Let’s go have lunch and a beer,” Clayton said, clapping his friend on the shoulder.
That afternoon, back at the Skragses’ house, Jack sat on the carpeted family-room floor with Lexi, putting together a large wooden puzzle of the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. His daughter had been delirious to see him again, but that first rapture had passed and now she more or less ignored him, assuming he’d be there forever, helping her get the puzzle right. She smelled of baby powder and shampoo. Carey Ann came into the room and knelt down next to them.
“Mmmm,” she said, wrapping her arms around Jack. “This is heaven, having you with us.”
Lexi eyed her parents suspiciously, perhaps considering whether to be jealous of their attention to each other, but turned. back to the puzzle.
“There!” she said triumphantly, fitting a wooden head on top of a wooden body.
“Good girl, Lexi!” Carey Ann said. “Now, where does this piece go?”
“I’ve been thinking,” Jack said. “I’ve been thinking that maybe we all should move back to Kansas City.”
Carey Ann looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. We should move back here. That way you could be close to your parents and friends and Jelly Roll …”
“But what about you?”
“Well, I talked to Clayton today. He said he could give me some sections of freshman English, and I could probably pick up some others around at the local colleges—”
“Jack, you’d go crazy,” Carey Ann said. “I can’t ask that kind of sacrifice from you.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be that bad,” Jack began, but Carey Ann interrupted him.
She rose from her sitting position onto her knees and, putting her hands on his shoulders while he sat cross-legged in front of her, said, “Jack. Don’t. Don’t even begin, okay? I mean, I know you want to make me happy. I know your heart’s in the right place. But we’ve gone over all of this before, a hundred times. It’s just not fair of you to get my hopes up again.”
“Carey Ann—” Jack began, but then Mr. Skrags walked in.
“Hello, there, everyone!” he said heartily, and Carey Ann jumped away from her husband as rapidly as if she were a teenager caught making out with her boyfriend.
“Hi, Daddy!”
Mr. Skrags was a large man who wore cowboy boots and string ties. This gave him the appearance of being just a down-home old boy, friendly and easygoing, but Jack knew what kind of near-genius dynamo thundered along inside the man.
“Good to see you again. Glad you could find the time to come out,” Mr. Skrags said, shaking Jack’s hand. He bent over and kissed his daughter on the cheek, then picked up his grandchild and threw her up in the air a few times. He seemed to have endless strength and energy. He had thick silver hair and sparkling blue eyes—Carey Ann had gotten her blond good looks from him. He looked like what he was, a handsome and powerful man. He didn’t even have a potbelly. Jack wished he could look like him. He wished he didn’t see his father-in-law as his enemy.
“Um … sir? I wonder if I could speak to you a moment. Um, alone,” Jack said. Jack’s parents had told Carey Ann to call them by their first names, but Carey Ann’s had offered no such intimacy.
“Of course, of course,” Mr. Skrags agreed readily, without a trace of surprise at the request. “Girls, will you excuse us?”
The “girls” left the room. Jack got up off the rug.
“How about a drink, Jack? Scotch? Bourbon?”
“Bourbon’s fine,” Jack said, only because he knew that was Mr. Skrags’s drink. Jack hated bourbon, thought it was too sweet, but he wanted to score any points he could.
“Sit down, sit down,” Mr. Skrags said, handing Jack a heavy glass and sinking into a wing chair. With his free hand he indicated, with a generous, majestic gesture, the opposite chair. The king in his castle.
Jack took a sip of his bourbon. He cleared his throat. He took a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking, sir, about moving back to Kansas City after this semester’s up.” There, Jack thought, I’ve completed an entire sentence. Mr. Skrags’s expression did not change—nor did it give anything away. Jack had hoped his announcement might at least bring a smile to the older man’s face. Jack plunged forward. “I know how much Carey Ann means to you, and, well, now that I have a daughter I guess I can understand more clearly just how much you miss Carey Ann and how much she misses you, and also how nice it would be if you and Mrs. Skrags could watch Alexandra grow up, and I know how much it would mean to Carey Ann to be near her family and friends.” Still no response from the old goat, even though Jack paused, waiting, sipping his bourbon. “So. Well. I’ve been talking to Clayton French, the head of the English department here at UMKC, and he said that although he couldn’t promise me a position on the faculty he could probably dredge up some freshman-English sections, and I could probably get some from some other colleges, and so I’d make enough to keep the wolf from the door.… I haven’t exactly thought this all out, but I’m sure we could sell the house in Vermont and use that money to make a down payment here, and … well, we’d get along. We’d manage.” Jack felt himself winding down like a top, spinning more and more slowly, ready to topple over on his side from lack of energy. “So. So … I just thought you might like to know.”
Jack waited. He took another drink of bourbon, which was beginning to taste pretty good. Mr. Skrags had such relentless eyes.
“Why, Carey Ann told me she was getting pretty happy up there,” Mr. Skrags said. “Told me things were working out. Said she’d made some good friends and was enjoying her courses.”
“Well, yes, that’s true enough,” Jack replied. “But I know she’d be happier here. She’s said any number of times she feels more at home here, and she’s always talking about how much she misses Christie and Jelly Roll—and you and Mrs. Skrags.”
“And what about you, son? How do you like it there, at that school? That was the important thing—the crucial thing, as I recall—that you had a fire in you to teach at that school.”
Jesus, the old man was hard, Jack thought. He wasn’t going to give Jack an inch. “I like it a lot,” he answered, frantically reassuring himself that Mr. Skrags, all-powerful as he was, couldn’t possibly know what had happened between Jack and Daphne. Was Mr. Skrags trying to turn Jack’s generous change of mind into a sign of failure? “Things are going very well for me there. I’ve had a large enrollment in all my classes.”
Mr. Skrags shook his head. “I think it’s a big mistake to make a career change of such magnitude just because of an unhappy wife.” He looked dour.
Well, fuck it, then. We’ll just stay back east and you can never see your precious daughter again! Jack remained silent, helpless.
“I thought you were hankering to write a novel,” Mr. Skrags went on. “I thought Carey Ann told me the two things you wanted were to teach at Westh
ampton College and write a novel.”
“That’s right,” Jack said. “That’s correct. But—”
“But you’ve got a family to support. I know. Well, son, I’ve told you, I’d be more than willing to support you and your family for two or three years while you wrote your novel. You know I’ve got more than enough money for all of us.”
Why did he have to make such a generous offer with such an ugly, mean look? Frustrated, Jack said nothing.
“Seems to me,” Mr. Skrags went on, “if you were living in Kansas City, working on a novel, you’d be happy, and Carey Ann’d be happy, and everyone would have what he wanted.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jack said. “I mean, there’s the matter of respect. I’d hate for Carey Ann or you to not respect me because I was living off your money.”
“Maybe it’s more a matter of confidence,” Mr. Skrags said.
“What?”
“Maybe you’re not so sure you could write a really good novel. If I thought I could write a decent novel, why, then, I’d know I was deserving of respect, never mind whose money I took to write it.”
“I know I could write a good novel,” Jack said indignantly.
“Then you should reconsider my offer to help you and Carey Ann out a little bit for the next few years while you work on it. That’s the only way all this moving-around stuff makes any sense to me.”
Jack’s head was full, as if his thoughts were swaying back and forth, bumping into each other. The bourbon, of course, but also Mr. Skrags, who was pinning Jack down like a worm on a hook with his piercing, steely blue-eyed stare so that everything in Jack was trying to wiggle free.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “It’s very kind of you to make the offer, sir, and I’ll think about it.”
“Good. You do that,” Mr. Skrags said. “Now, let’s go find the girls.”
That night was New Year’s Eve and at nine Jack and Carey Ann and her parents left a sleeping Lexi with Beulah and went to the country club for dinner and the party. Two live bands set up, one at each wing of the club; one played jazz and nothing newer than Sinatra; the other played the latest rock. Jack hadn’t danced for a long time, and he loved moving to the music, feeling the music move in him until something stirred, then boiled, then burst free. The women wore glittering jewelry with evening gowns and exposed more skin in one night than Jack would see in a year back east. Carey Ann was wearing a strapless pink satin thing that flew out around her legs as she danced, and her hair, which she had had done in a formalized coiffure for the evening, had come undone and down, and streaked and flashed out around her head like a wild woman’s. What would the college faculty think of Carey Ann now as she hammed it up, flicking her body to “Sledgehammer”? What would they think of him as he slid backward, trying to do the moonwalk? Waiters passed through the crowd distributing flutes of champagne. It was almost midnight. Now both bands played “Auld Lang Syne,” and then the bells and noisemakers razzed through the air, and Carey Ann grabbed Jack and kissed him hotly, while a marvelous thing happened. From above, someone released a net of what Jack at first thought was confetti, and some of it was colored paper, but there were flower petals in the mixture, and soon, while everyone stood yelling and clapping and kissing and toasting, their shoulders and hair and the floor they stood on were sprinkled with the fragrant, vivid leaves of poinsettias and roses and carnations. “Ooooh!” the crowd called out. “Aaaah!” The lights dimmed then, and the band played a slow song, and Jack took his wife in his arms. Now, he thought, now it should come to me with a lightning bolt of clarity, the decision about my life, whether to take the old fart’s offer and write, or to stay in Westhampton and teach, or move here and teach and not write—now the answer should strike me. But the answer did not strike him, and he entered the new year undecided.