The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  The rain beats at the windows and makes gray, moving shadows on the inside of the car. He glances at her, then looks back at the road.

  “Honey?” she says. The broken note in her voice almost makes him wince.

  He says, “Don’t, it’s all right.” He’s sitting there looking through the twin half-circles of water the wipers make.

  She sniffles again.

  “Shannon,” he says. “I didn’t mean any of it.” But his own voice sounds false to him, a note higher, and it dawns on him that he’s hoarse from shouting. He thinks of the weekend mornings they’ve lain in bed, happy and warm, luxuriating in each other. It feels like something in the distant past to him. And then he remembers being awakened by the roar of the neighbor’s power mower, the feeling of superiority he had entertained about such a man, someone obsessed with a lawn. He’s thinking of the man now, that one whose wife sees whatever she sees when she looks at him, and perhaps she looks at him with love.

  Shannon is trying to gain control of herself, sobbing and coughing. The light changes, but no one’s behind him, and so he moves over in the seat and puts his arms around her. A strand of her hair tickles his jaw, a little discomfort he’s faintly aware of. He sits very still, saying nothing, while in the corner of his vision the light turns yellow, then red again. She’s holding on to him, and she seems to nestle slightly. When the light turns back to green, she gently pulls away from him.

  “We better go,” she says, wiping her eyes.

  He sits straight, presses the accelerator pedal carefully, like a much older man. He wishes he were someone else, wishes something would change, and then is filled with a shivering sense of the meaning of such thoughts. He’s driving on in the rain, and they are silent for a time. They’re almost home.

  “I’m just so tired,” Shannon says finally.

  “It’s all right,” he tells her.

  “Sweet,” she says.

  The fight’s over. They’ve made up. She reaches across and gives his forearm a little affectionate squeeze. He takes her hand and squeezes back. Then he has both hands on the wheel again. Their apartment house is in sight now, down the street to the left. He turns to look at her, his wife, here in the shadowed and watery light, and then he quickly looks back at the road. It comes to him like a kind of fright that in the little idle moment of his gaze some part of him was marking the unpleasant downturn of her mouth, the chiseled, too-sharp curve of her jaw—the whole, disheveled, vaguely tattered look of her—as though he were a stranger, someone unable to imagine what anyone, another man, other men, someone like himself, could see in her to love.

  LUCK

  I came back in no time with the burgers, and when he reached into the bag I smelled it on him. I didn’t say anything. He got his burger and opened it, talking goofy like he does. “Best car ever made was the Studebaker, Baker.”

  “Right, Dwight,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  He sat on the stairs and I sat in the window seat of this place. We’d got the walls and the first coat of trim. There was a lot of touch-up to do, and if he was going to start drinking, it wasn’t going to get done. Outside, we still had the porch railing. It was a big wraparound porch. Two days’ work at least, with both of us pushing it.

  “Dad,” I said.

  He was chewing, shaking his head. He liked the hamburger. All his life, I think he enjoyed things more than other people. “Man,” he said.

  It was getting dark. We still had to finish the trim in the dining room—the chair railing. “Well,” I said. I was watching his eyes.

  “You know,” he said. “I do good work. Don’t I do good work?”

  “The finest,” I said.

  He smiled. “And you help me.”

  I concentrated on my food. I could’ve maybe figured I’d made a mistake until now. But this was the way he talked whenever he was on the stuff. I started looking around casually for where he could hide it.

  “You’re a good son,” he said.

  I might’ve nodded. I was eating that hamburger and trying not to show anything to him.

  “Twenty years ago I painted my first house,” he said. “Helped a friend one summer. I told you this. Never dreamed I’d have a son to help me. You ought to be in college, son. But I’m just as glad you’re here.”

  It was like he might start crying.

  “Best get back to work,” I said.

  He was sitting there thinking. I knew what he was seeing in his mind. “Your mother sure can pick them,” he said. “I don’t know what she saw in me.”

  I stood. I had what was left of my burger in my hand. I put it in the bag and went over to the paint can.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I said, “Hey.”

  “I said I don’t know what she saw in me.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  “Good thing you look like her,” he said.

  “Right, Dwight,” I said.

  “That’s the truth, Ruth,” he said. He was still sitting there.

  “You want me to do the second coat in here?” I said.

  “Naw. Get the dining room.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  “Hey,” he said. “What if I take you and your mother out to dinner tonight?”

  “That’d be all right,” I told him.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re on.”

  “Great,” I said. It was getting dark. We’d been eating burgers.

  “You think she’ll feel like going out?” he said.

  “Got me,” I said.

  “She’s been staying in the house too much. Working too hard. There’s no need for her to put so much time in every day. Right?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And you’ve been working hard.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “You think we did a good job here so far?” He stood up and looked around at everything.

  I did the same. I saw that over the kitchen cabinets, where he’d been painting when I left to get the burgers, it was going to need a lot of touching up. There were places he’d missed. He’d been hurrying it. You couldn’t mistake a thing like that. Back before he was too bad, when I was small, he used to take me through the houses when he was finished with them, and he would point out where other painters cut corners and he didn’t. He’d show me the places where he’d taken the extra step and done it right. He was teaching me. Do a thing, boy, you do it right the first time. You take pride in what you do. He drummed it into me. You go that extra mile. You take pains. People remember good work. People remember excellence. And when I worked with him summers and he was okay, he’d do a thing, put the last touch on something, and he’d stand back and look at it, proud as hell. “New money,” he’d say.

  And I’d say, “New money.”

  You could hear the satisfaction in the way he breathed, looking at what he’d done.

  That was when he was okay.

  “Little touch-up over the sink,” he said to me now.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Well. I better get off to the bank before they close the drive-in window.”

  “The bank,” I said.

  He didn’t look at me. “The bank, Frank.”

  I just stared at him. For a long time we were like that, you know. Staring at each other from opposite sides of the room, with the tarpaulin and the paint cans between us like we were listening for some sound.

  “How’m I going to take you guys out to eat without some money, honey?” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  “You go ahead and finish what you can in the dining room.”

  I nodded.

  “We straight?”

  “Straight,” I said.

  It was what we always said when he’d had to discipline me, and he’d come in afterward and explain the punishment. We’d been saying it like a joke between us since I was sixteen.

  “Sure?” he said.

  “Very, Jerry,” I said.


  He put his hand out with the thumbs-up sign. “I’ll be back, Jack.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I watched him get out of his coveralls, because I thought it might fall out of one of the pockets. He laid them across the kitchen counter, then smoothed his hair back with both hands and looked at me. “Don’t bust yourself,” he said. “We did enough for one day.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I knew what would happen now. He went into the bathroom, and flushed the toilet. When he came out he went to the door and got himself through it quick, calling back to me that he’d be five minutes. I stood by the front window and watched him get into the truck. He wouldn’t be back tonight. He wouldn’t be back for days maybe. A week. Then we’d get the call. We’d go get him. He’d be in the hospital again, going through the treatment. This is all stuff you know. You don’t need me to paint the picture.

  I went back into the dining room. There was a lot of work to do. These people were supposed to occupy in two days, and it wasn’t going to get finished now. No way. But I started on it just the same. I was sick, thinking of what tonight was going to be like. Everything she’d gone through over the years. And the thing was, there didn’t seem to be anything in particular that triggered it. When she met him, she told me, he was a kid who liked a drink. She did, too. He’d get plowed and sometimes she’d get plowed with him. But they were always okay afterward and she couldn’t say when it had happened that he didn’t stop. She’ll tell you now she doesn’t know where it went over the line and the stuff got ahold of him. You have to know that he was never the kind that got mean or violent, either. That was the thing. You could walk away from somebody who knocked you around. The worst he ever did was disappear, and he did that often enough for me to know it was happening again. But when he started, it was always that he loved everybody. He’d cry and be sad and incredibly gentle. And when he was sober again he was always very sorry. Sometimes he was good for months at a time, and when he was, you couldn’t find anybody better as a companion and a friend. You could trust him with your life.

  Which was why I let him go like I did, knowing what he was up to. I didn’t for the life of me have the heart not to trust him one more time.

  Anyway, I was going to paint all night. I was going to get it done. I figured after a while, when we didn’t show up, she’d come looking for us, and she’d know. She’d pull up and see the truck gone and all the lights burning. I didn’t want to have to look at her when she knew again, but there wasn’t anything for it.

  I worked maybe an hour. I got into the work, into the rhythm of the whole task. We had the blaster there, but the tapes were all his: Beatles and the Stones. Aretha Franklin. It’s something like rock ‘n’ roll, anyway. There’s guitars and drums. It sounds enough like what I like, so I never complain. But I was just working in the quiet, and so I heard the truck pull in. I can’t say what that did to me. He had gone to the bank, like he said. I mean, that’s what I thought. I heard the engine quit, the door open and close. I worked on. I wanted him to find me working. Then I thought I’d give him something, and I got over to the blaster real fast and put the Beatles on. The Beatles were all over that house. Revolution. I was going at it in the dining room, moving myself to the music, and when I turned to smile at him I saw the guy who was having this place built, the owner. Big, heavy, bearded guy, looking like somebody with not much patience. I’d seen him walking around the lot when we first knew we were going to have the job and it was nothing more than a hole in the ground.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He was standing in the doorway, looking at me. I went over and turned the music off. He’d walked on into the family room. “You do nice work,” he said. He was looking at the mantel. There were several places I could see that needed a touch. “Is it dry?” he said.

  “Not quite yet,” I said.

  “Listen,” he said. “Are you going to finish in two days?”

  I nodded. I felt awful.

  “You do work fast,” he said. “I was in here yesterday and none of this was done yet.”

  “Yes, sir,” I told him.

  “Looks good,” he said. He was moving around the room now, appreciating everything. It was good work. We had done real good work together for this part of it.

  When we got to the living room, which was the most finished, I said, “My dad’s the one who painted in here.”

  “He does nice work,” the guy said. “Very nice.”

  “Yes,” I said. “My dad always says—you know. Do a job with pride.” If I started crying, I thought, I might hit him. I never felt that way before. If he noticed something wrong anywhere, I just wasn’t sure what would happen.

  “It shows,” he said, smiling at me. “The pride shows.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You must be very proud of your dad.”

  I looked at him. For a second I wasn’t sure what he knew.

  “What’s it like, working with your father?”

  “It’s great,” I said.

  “Well,” he turned and appreciated the room. “You don’t find quality work these days. It’s refreshing to find it.”

  “If you don’t do a job right,” I said. I just wanted him to get out of there before something happened. I was breathing hard. I had this awful tightness in my throat, like I was a kid and I’d got caught doing something wrong.

  “These days,” he said. “You give a kid an inch and he takes a mile, you know? Does your father trust you?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was watching the way his hands moved near his mouth. Something was on his nerves, and it made me nervous.

  “You work like hell to give them something and a lot of them just throw it in your face. You know—drugs. Disobedience. Insolence, really. Hell, defiance. I think—working like this, with your father. I think that’s a good thing. I wish I did something that my son could do with me, you know?”

  I just nodded.

  “You can’t ask a kid to help you sell stocks in the summer. It’s not a thing you can do together.”

  “No,” I said.

  “When I was your age, you know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be a carpenter. I sometimes wish I’d done it.”

  “Never too late,” I told him.

  “I wouldn’t know.” He was thinking hard about something, looking off. Then he said, “I guess you communicate pretty well.”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “You and your father.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah.” I couldn’t look at him.

  “Must—must be nice.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “You’re about my son’s age, aren’t you? Finished high school a couple years ago?”

  “Year ago,” I said.

  He nodded. “It’s nice to see such respect for a father.”

  I didn’t know what he wanted me to say to this.

  He was quiet a long time, standing there looking at the room. “Well,” he said finally. “Tell your dad I think he does very handsome work.”

  “I will,” I told him.

  “It sure looks nice,” he said.

  “Hard work,” I said.

  He smiled. “New money.”

  “Right,” I said. “New money.” I couldn’t believe it.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing. My father says that—new money.”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t know where that comes from.”

  “It comes from my father,” I said.

  He was thinking about something else. “Right,” he said. “Well.”

  “That’s the only place I ever heard it,” I told him.

  He looked at me with this expression like he might ask me for a favor. It was almost hangdog. “I hope you both realize what you have.”

  I said, “Oh, right.”

  Then we stood there looking at the room. It seemed like a long time.

  “I’ll let you get back to work,” he said, and I headed away from him. “It�
�s a nice job,” he said. “An excellent job.”

  “People notice good work,” I said. I was just mouthing it now.

  “Your dad teach you that?”

  “That’s it,” I told him. I thought something might break in my chest. I just wanted to know why he wouldn’t get out of there and let me get on with the job. “That’s what I learned,” I said. And for half a second I could see it in his face, what he was thinking: how, between the two of us—the man with the money to buy a big house like this, with its wraparound porch and its ten-acre lot and the intercom in the walls and three fireplaces and all the nice stuff that was going to be moved into it soon—how, between that man and me, I was the lucky one.

  EQUITY

  for Marjorie Allen

  When she’d sold the house in Charlottesville and given away or sold most of the furniture, Edith Allenby bought a condominium in Tampa, but after the first year she seldom stayed there. She claimed she missed the snow in Virginia, and she didn’t have to say she missed her three daughters, Allison, Ellen, and Carol.

  For the last few years the pattern had been that she would visit them each in turn, staying a month or two, and then moving on to the next house. She had interrupted the pattern at various times when she considered that one daughter needed her more than the others, or when in her mind there was too much tension in a house for the added pressure of having a visitor. And since the middle daughter, Ellen, had recently undergone a painful divorce—after three children and in the third trimester of a late pregnancy-Edith had stayed for the better part of a year with her. She’d been present for the birth of the child, whose conception had been one of the breaking points in Ellen’s marriage, her husband being unwilling or unable to take on the responsibility of another child so late in life. Edith was often on the telephone to the sisters during those months, and she told the youngest daughter, Carol, who lived in Washington, that coaching Lamaze was better than presiding over divorces and nervous troubles—meaning, of course, Carol’s breakdown. Carol had reached the stage where she could call it that herself, and almost interrupted Edith to tell her so. Edith went on: “I’ve been through Allison’s divorce, and your little—thing. And now Ellen’s divorce, and I’ve coached Lamaze. How about that? Aren’t I quite the doctor?”