“Banjos, man. I hear banjos.”
“Look, Nikki, this isn’t the backwoods. It’s been really cool to meet Alex and get to know her and her husband. Their lives are so rich. And their marriage. I loved how—what is it?—they take care of each other but can also stand back. Admire what the other person’s doing or saying. To let them figure stuff out. And Liz, too. You should see her house. With her marriage it seems like—”
“Holy shit. So you are sowing your oats.”
“I’m not, in fact.”
“You must get a little rise out of—”
“Nikki, please. Cut it! I’m trying to say I appreciate how patient you were with me, and I’m sorry that for all those years I couldn’t work out what was wrong with me and I couldn’t…” He looks up at the stars.
“Fuck me proper?”
“So you’re not going to let me say this.”
“Hasn’t the chance for saying things expired? Like when you agreed I should move out.”
“Or maybe a little before that,” he says, “like when you started sleeping with Tony.”
“I was begging you to tell me not to. Tell me to stop looking for my own place. Begging you to take some fucking control of the situation. I mean, it’s amazing, Cole. You run a million-dollar business with eight employees you boss kindly but very firmly. You fire guys for shoddy work or having a beer at lunch. I’ve heard you bring subcontractors and suppliers to their knees when they dick you around. Your authority and competence and skill make Greenworks a success that anyone would envy. And you constructed a life you thought would immunize you and me and Daniel from any trace of your fucked-up childhood, but the problem is that you can’t be immune and all buttoned up and also be intimate with your wife. Never mind the sex. How do you think you can be in a relationship if you’re afraid of passion and intensity? Afraid of becoming your goddamn father? There’s a difference between letting go of control and losing control. Not to put too fine a point on it, but letting go’s mandatory for having an orgasm. For good sex, period. That’s why it’s called reckless abandon.”
“When did you figure all of this out?”
“I’ve been in therapy.”
He’s embarrassed by what she’s divulging. “With who?”
“You don’t know her.”
“Oh.” He’s still embarrassed. “Anyway, we were intimate, and we didn’t just stop making love.”
“You were a wonderful husband, Cole. I always felt loved and cared for. But then you got spooked by conflict and stopped…I don’t know how to say it. You stopped melting into me. Always stayed a little on guard, like you didn’t dare let yourself go. It’s why I hated our hot tub. You could release yourself to a vat of chlorinated water, but not to me. Not to my body. I was jealous of it. How do you think I felt when you’d come back from a massage and say what an amazing relief it was to have somebody else’s hands all over you for an hour? Yes, we did have sex sometimes. But the fact that you could swing it once a month just made me feel worse. It would be one thing if you’d got your balls shot off in a war or something. But knowing it was only the fraught complexities of desire that kept you from me…well, I’ve told you before, it hurt my feelings.”
“Really fun catching up.”
“That’s a deflection.”
“That’s your therapist talking.”
“Another deflection.”
“I don’t see the benefit of a lecture about my inadequacies while Tony has his gloriously unfraught prick inside you.”
“Nice one.” He thinks she might hang up, but then she says, “So why did you call?”
“Because I’m at Old Newgate Prison. I thought we might, you know, intimately connect over the long-ago suffering of convicts. Like we used to.”
“Oh, nostalgia.”
“I didn’t realize the prisoners made nails,” he says. “On a signboard here by the entrance it lists all the different jobs.”
“Probably the same nails you had to hammer out of the old lath.”
“Prison nails. Ha! Forced labor at both ends. But that was Ian’s job.”
A fat possum, with little ones clutching onto its fur, lumbers along the top of the prison wall, disappearing into the guard tower.
“Isn’t it late there?” Nikki says.
“Almost midnight.”
“And you’re out being a tourist?”
“The car broke down.”
“Oh, no. Are you okay?”
The possum squeezes out through the hole in the bricks. She’s left her litter behind in the nest and trudges back along the wall into the darkness. “It’s so quiet here,” he says. “Really peaceful.”
For a long while they listen to each other breathing, and he wants to say how much he used to love listening to the rhythm of her breath beside him in bed. How much he misses it. And her voice, too. Nothing gratified him like hearing his wife singing in the next room on a sunny Sunday.
But through the thick black woods that swallow the road, flashing yellow lights grow brighter and brighter with the deepening howl of an engine. “Goodnight, Nikki,” he says, “sleep tight. Here comes my tow.”
* * *
—
“You are délicieux,” Phil says, spearing the last bite of crepe with his fork. It’s only seven o’clock, but the kitchen didn’t cool off overnight and the morning’s already heating up. They’re all three bare-chested, wearing nothing but gym shorts—Phil sitting at the head of the table, Daniel tipping crepe batter in the pan, and Cole texting Ben about joist fasteners for the Laurelhurst job.
“That thing is art,” Daniel says.
Cole looks up from his phone. “What thing?”
He flips the crepe and catches it in the pan. “That work of art at your elbow.”
It hasn’t moved from the counter for these weeks. The forged-iron nails had filled a liquor box flush to the top; they’d corroded impermeably together over the years, so when Phil tore the cardboard away, what remained was a near-perfect cube of countless small square-shank nails—some still oil-black against the red and orange and powdery-brown flames of rust.
“Put that on a pedestal made from your chestnut,” Daniel says, “and watch it change lives.” He slides a crepe onto a plate.
When Cole studies it now, he can’t think of anything but wretched men in leg irons hammering the heads flat, the same nails holding fast the lath in this house for two centuries until he and his father ripped out the plaster, and Ian pounding enough of them into a wheelbarrow to fill at least this one box, where for twenty-five years they hardened into this hundred-pound barbed-iron block. He supposes Daniel is right. The block is brutally beautiful, so perfectly formed, each twisted and curved nail showing the hammerings of the convict who shaped it.
He sprinkles cinnamon sugar on the crepe, rolls it up, and eats half in one bite. “Amazing,” he says, and Daniel winks at him. And then they hear the motorbike. Through the window, Cole sees LK shoot out between the nets on the tractor road and drop the kickstand at the back of the yard. He lets himself inside the chicken wire and opens the henhouse door. A couple chicks venture cautiously into the light, but then he upends a plastic bag: food scraps hit the dirt and squawking baby birds stampede through the door, flapping their wings, pecking and tackling one another.
Daniel rushes upstairs for his work clothes. “Great day for a drive,” Phil calls.
“Little Kirk’s taking him in this morning.” He hasn’t yet told his father about the car, and to avoid doing so now he steps out the back door and meets LK where he’s closing the chicken-wire gate.
“What’s their calcium source?” he asks.
“Oyster shell,” Cole says. “Plus what’s mixed in the grain.”
LK rubs his chin, purses his lips. “That oughta do ’er.”
Daniel runs out from the house an
d LK squeezes off the old helmet and tosses it to him.
“No, no,” Daniel says. “You wear it.”
“My bike, my rules,” LK tells him. “If my brain hits the dirt, no big loss, relatively speaking. But you’re a smart dude. Now put your nut in that shell.”
Daniel hesitates, then slips the helmet on and straddles the seat behind him. Cole holds out his fist, and Daniel bumps him. He’s excited to be on the bike but plays it cool, so Cole does too. Normal kid, he’d tell Nikki, normal stuff.
“You make it all the way to Boulger on tobacco roads?” Cole asks.
“Technically, occifer, there might be a couple miles of pavement.” LK fires it up. “Don’t worry. I take good care of my friends.” Pulling Daniel’s arms around his torso, he says, “Hold on tight. None of this macho shit.” Two quick revs, then he clunks it into gear and spins up a tail of loose dirt, taking off toward the nets.
LK’s assurances aside, Nikki would kill him if she knew he was letting Daniel tool around on a motorcycle.
He can still hear the whine of the motor in the distance when he steps up on the back porch, where his father, fists on hips, is blocking the doorway. “Where the hell’s my car?”
“It’s in town at the—”
“You sold it!”
“Ha. That’s a good one. Not exactly a high-value—”
“Go buy it back!”
Touching his father’s shoulder to get by him, he says, “Look, last night—”
“Hands off my person!”
He has such violence in his eyes that Cole steps away. “It broke down last night. I had it towed to the Texaco.”
“Bullshit!”
“I’ll call them at eight and you can listen in.”
“You! You’re cheating me. You’re saying…twisted words!”
“I’d like another crepe,” Cole says. “Want one?”
Phil shakes his head emphatically, like a child. He’s confused, and Cole finally admits to himself that his mind’s definitely on the fritz—something not explained away by an empty belly, a sweltering afternoon, or a sleepless night. It’s not going to be a matter of just stocking the kitchen, replacing washers in the sinks and shower, paying a lawn service in advance through the summer and fall. His father needs blood tests, a brain scan. He probably needs regular care. Dripping faucets and a houseful of burned-out bulbs are not the issue here.
“Well, I’m going to cook myself another.” He doesn’t reach forward but inclines his head toward the doorway, and Phil steps out of his path. He turns on the flame and knifes butter in the pan and scrapes the last of the batter from the mixing bowl. As the edges sizzle, he loosens them with the spatula and the crepe seems to hover on the heat rising off the steel. He considers flipping it in the air but instead turns it over with the spatula, then slides it onto his plate and sets it behind him on the table. The last time he made a crepe was at this stove, passing the plate to Ian, who promptly zigzagged it with Hershey’s syrup, then to Kelly for a blast of whipped cream. “Ooh la la!” or “Formidable!” their mother would exclaim as they set the plate in front of her.
He runs water into the bowl and turns to the table to chow down, but his father, sitting in his mother’s place, is eating the crepe. Cole laughs. “How is it?”
Phil stops chewing, his face drops, and he places the last bite down on the rim of the plate. His eyes dart around the kitchen—a drowning man searching for a buoy. But then he reaches for his own chair, empty beside him at the head of the table, and grabs hold of the arm. “Great day for a drive,” he announces again.
“It’s gonna be a warm one,” Cole says. “Let’s give the chicks some cold water this afternoon.” He squirts dish soap in the rag, scrubs the sticky plates and forks. “We used to like maple syrup on crepes, remember?” he says, and when he reaches for the pan, he’s startled by his father standing there at his shoulder.
“Not in the water!” he commands. “Just wipe it out with a paper towel. René himself instructed me on that.” Phil holds the black pan in front of his face like a mirror, staring into it, and his voice softens. “I had to go all the way to Glastonbury for that pan. René’s French Kitchen. He had a nice store. Quality stuff for customers who were serious about good cooking. Like a highly specialized restaurant supply. None of the pretentiousness of Marks & Tilly, those foofy aprons and pillow shams and potpourri. God, the reek of it still sours my mood.”
And just like that, his father’s perfectly lucid.
“Maple syrup and banana is how you liked them,” Phil says. And he’s right. “Ian loved the chocolate syrup,” he remembers. “Kelly was cinnamon sugar with whatever berries we might’ve had. I went for the red currant jelly.” He laughs. “Truth be told, I liked that jelly on anything.”
Phil wipes out the pan and sets it on the stove. “Thanks for doing the washing up. Always good to have a clean kitchen.” He clasps Cole on the shoulder. “Hard to think clearly with dirty dishes piled up.”
As Cole is getting dressed, Phil digs into the piano piece, notes rattling through the house, spilling out open windows and through cracks under the doors. He grabs his laptop and shoulder bag. Even if a clean kitchen has wiped the clutter from his father’s mind, Cole has to figure out what needs to be done for him.
In the keeping room he pantomimes that he’s going out for a while, then mounts his old bicycle and coasts down to the road, and even once he’s long out of earshot, the music’s haunting melody is still playing in his head.
Phil’s car is tucked in where the tow truck left it last night, next to a green Charger with a bashed-in front end. The mechanic looks up from under the hood of a Toyota when he steps into the bay. “I’m Cole Callahan. I called earlier about the Bonneville.”
With thick red hair and a goatee, he’s about Cole’s age, a navy tattoo on his forearm and a pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. If he grew up in East Granby, Cole would’ve known him, a couple grades up or down. “Haven’t looked at it yet.”
“I figured,” Cole says, “but I was passing by. Just wanted to put a name with a face. I appreciate you fitting it in.” He likes the sweet oil-and-grease-and-Gojo smell of a garage, and also likes to look someone in the eye when work and trust are involved.
“Shouldn’t be later than noon.” The man twists off a distributor cap. “I wrote down your number.”
“Thanks. And hey, is there a place in town that has wi-fi? You know, that I could use.”
He snaps a spark-plug socket onto his ratchet. “I’d have to say no to that one.”
“The grinder shop, maybe?”
“They barely got a working toilet.”
Cole laughs. “All right,” he says, backing out into the sun. “I’ll check with you later. Thanks again.”
As he turns, the mechanic calls to him. “Try the library. They’ve got computers and all that.”
Cole walks the bike over to the compressor and blasts some air in the tires, then pedals along the stone wall past grave markers, the names of the dead worn illegible from the centuries.
The colonial brick library was the town’s original school. He swings into the lot and finds that it’s closed three days a week—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—and keeps rolling, standing on the pedals to get up the rise, and his sweat comes on hard.
Approaching the house, he cocks his head and listens for the piano. Nothing. Inside, he moves quietly through the rooms until he finds his father asleep in the wing chair. He fills a glass of water at the kitchen sink and drinks it down. Nikki, he thinks. She could search for a few things, so he calls her and she picks right up.
“I guess you got rescued okay by the big white truck.”
“Nice guy,” Cole says. “He was dispatched from Hartford, which is why it took so long.”
“Triple A,” she says, nothing more—a friendly volley in their lo
ng-running disagreement over the value of their membership fee. Cole has always argued it’s a waste of money, that if they break down driving together he’ll take care of it, and if she breaks down alone she only needs to call him, and that furthermore, AAA’s a conservative organization that lobbies Congress for more roads, cheap gas, and weakened regulation of the auto industry. But Nikki says Cole needs to stop acting like he’s solely responsible for fixing every situation, and that she feels safer with the card in her wallet, so every year he writes another check.
“You’re right,” he says, and she knows what he means.
“Everything good with Daniel?”
“Great.” He thinks about the motorbike this morning. “I want to ask you a favor, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Can you Google how you can tell if you have Alzheimer’s?”
“So you’re finally past the denial stage.”
“Hilarious. Not me. It’s my father.”
“Seriously? Oh, no.”
“Yeah. He’s really in and out of it.”
“Just a second. I’m right here at my desk.” Her keyboard starts clicking. “Okay,” she says. “Top ten signs.” As she reads them aloud, Cole mentally checks the boxes.
“Well, this sort of sucks,” he says. “I think he got a perfect score.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, if ‘cow juice’ for ‘milk’ counts as ‘problems with words.’ ”
“At least partial credit. And bonus points for charm.”
“Damn,” he says. “Well, can you look up some other stuff for me?” And when he hangs up he has phone numbers for a geriatrician and a neurologist in Hartford and an 800 number for the VA. Once he gets the car back, he’ll go online himself.
He tiptoes into the parlor—the wing chair’s empty. “Dad?” he calls up from the bottom of the stairs, and there’s no reply. Then, from the keeping room, he looks out the window and spots his father doubled over beside the chicken coop. He doesn’t panic but hustles out the kitchen door and across the yard to where Phil’s hunched down, sitting on a cinder block by the henhouse door.
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