Time Off for Good Behavior

by Lani Diane Rich

  “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t sure he had heard it, but I caught a slight nod as he wiped my kitchen counter and threw the sponge into the sink. He poured two mugs of black coffee and pushed one toward me. There was silence for a long time, and just when I was about to pipe in with a wiseass comment, he spoke.

  “My wife died.”

  I looked up at him, but he was staring into his mug.

  “Excuse me?” I said, working a decent amount of indignation into my voice. Internally, I was recoiling at the idea that Id grabbed the business end of a married man. I did have my limits, and breaking up marriages was one of them. I opened my mouth to hurl the appropriate invective at him when he spoke again.

  “Six years ago. She was hit by a car, crossing the street to get the mail.” His voice cracked a bit. I was starting to understand. My heart sank. The indignation disappeared. “She was in a coma for eight weeks.”

  He looked up. His eyes were dry, steely. “I sat by her bedside every day. The doctors asked me to make a decision. They told me there was no hope. It took me eight weeks to believe them, and a day hasn’t gone by when I haven’t regretted it.”

  I could feel heat in my throat, but I said nothing. What could I say? Gee, I’m sorry? Boy, that sucks? The last thing a guy like that needed was my sympathy. Or me, for that matter.

  “I was on my way out from visiting a client when I walked by your room at Hastings General.” Walter took one sip of his coffee, then put the mug down so carefully that it didn’t make a sound. “You were alone.”

  I remained silent. If I spoke, I’d cry. How pathetic I must have seemed in that hospital all by myself. The idea that Walter was some creep hoping to cop a feel off a comatose chick was far less painful than the reality that he was a good guy who had taken pity on me.

  “Her name was Maggie.” I could tell he was looking at me, waiting for me to make eye contact, but I just stared into my coffee mug, wishing it were big enough for me to dive into and drown myself. “I just wanted you to know that I’m not a psycho or a creep. I’m not a freak who can’t get over his wife’s death. I’m just a regular guy who probably made a mistake.”

  What mistake? I wanted to ask. Sitting by my side? Going to lunch with me? Kissing me? All of the above?

  “This isn’t the way my life is supposed to be,” I said, my head jolting up in a “Who said that? Did I say that?” motion.

  Walter shrugged and smiled. Kindly. Pitying me. Again. He reached over and put his hand gently on my cheek. It was warm and soft, and the energy from his palm made my face tingle. “Then change it.”

  And he left.

  Twenty minutes later I left to hit the 7-Eleven, get a cherry Slurpee, and check out the want ads.

  ***

  I grabbed a red pen from the mug on the counter and sat down at the kitchen table with my Slurpee. I circled an ad for a parts supervisor at a local Mazda dealership. I circled another one for a dental hygienist. I even circled an ad trying to sell a 1973 Nova before I realized I wasn’t really paying attention.

  I was thinking about Walter. I was seeing the look on his face when he talked about his wife. I was seeing him sitting by her bed in the hospital. I was imagining how happy they were when they first got married. Like every story with a tragic ending, the beginning and middle become flawless by comparison. In my mind, no two people had ever been happier and no two people had ever suffered a greater tragedy, although I knew that in reality she probably got pissed off at him every Friday when he forgot to take the garbage out, and he probably hated the way she picked her teeth after eating movie popcorn.

  I shook my head and tried to concentrate on the want ads, flipping back to the beginning. My red pen was hovering over the paper, ready to strike at the perfect job, when I saw it.

  Do something meaningful.

  That was it. The entire ad. “Do something meaningful.”

  I sat with my mouth agape. Do something meaningful?

  I felt the anger flame out from my gut. Who the hell did this guy think he was? Do something meaningful? What, like people who are unemployed are all losers? Their lives have no meaning? They have no purpose in the world? That’s exactly what the unemployed need—some friggin’ self-righteous bastard putting something like that in the friggin’ want ads.

  “Do something meaningful,” I muttered to myself as I dialed the sales line for the classified ad department. “I’ll give you meaningful. Bite me. How’s that? Meaningful enough for you?”

  “Hastings Daily Reporter, this is Jennifer. Can I interest you in a personals ad, four lines for four dollars for the first week?”

  “No. But thanks. Hey, look, there’s an ad in this week’s employment pages, and I want to know who placed it.” The red pen cap clenched in my teeth marred my speech. I spit it out. It bounced across the kitchen counter and landed in the sink.

  “It doesn’t say in the ad? Usually, the business will put their number in the ad?” Jennifer was one of those southern belles who pronounced her sentences like they were questions. I imagined her with curly red hair all pulled back in an adorable little ponytail that looked good no matter how quickly she had to jump up out of bed in the morning, and decided to hate her on principle.

  “Yeah. I know. But this doesn’t have a number. It just says, ‘Do something meaningful.’” I sipped loudly on my Slurpee. “That’s in the employment pages?”

  “Yes, it is, and I’d like to lodge a complaint.”

  “A complaint? Why? It sounds kind of nice to me.”

  “Well, you have a job, don’t you, Jennifer?” She paused. Point taken. “Is there anyone there I can complain to? Do you have a supervisor or something? Can you track down the sorry bastard who placed that ad and beat him senseless for me?”

  “Well... no. Yes. And no. But I don’t think complaining to my supervisor would help much? There’s really not much we can do; once an ad is placed, it’s placed? If it helps, I think that ad was meant for the personals? There’s a person who does that every now and again, places a nice message in the personals, you know, just to be inspirational? I think it’s kind of nice?”

  I could feel my teeth grinding with every lilt at the end of her sentences. I tapped my red pen against the counter. “Fine. Then, can I place an ad?”

  “Personals. Four lines for four dollars for the first week.”

  “Okay. Do this for me. ‘Dear Meaningful: Who the hell do you think you are? Wanda wants to know. 555-8936.’”

  I could hear Jennifer typing. She read the message back to me. “Now, we’re gonna need your credit card?”

  “Fine,” I said, grabbing my purse.

  “That’ll be a total of fifty-six dollars?”

  I stopped rifling through my purse. “Fifty-six dollars? What was that four-dollar crap you just quoted me?”

  “Oh, that’s four dollars for the first week? With a three-week minimum? Each additional week is twenty-six dollars?”

  “For crying out loud, you people have no shame.”

  “Do you have that credit card?”

  “Not for fifty-six dollars, I don’t.”

  She sighed. “Okay, tell you what? I’ll shave it down to two lines, use a smaller font and such, we’ll run it for two weeks, I can do it for... twenty-two dollars?”

  I stared at the ad. Do something meaningful. Was I furious enough at this bastard to charge twenty-two dollars to a card with an interest rate of prime plus 5 percent? Did I really want him to call me just so I could ream him a new one? Was I really such an angry, petty person as to waste my time on relatively fruitless pursuits?

  Absolutely. “Ready for that card number, Jennifer?”

  ***

  The thing about sitting home being unemployed was that I was horribly bored and yet too depressed to do anything. I should have been out volunteering my time to the homeless, or the foodless, or the shameless. Something. Instead, I sat on the sofa with the remote control making imprints in my flesh, flipping between eight million varieties
of crappy cable programming, playing them loudly to drown out the phantom music that hovered overhead, waiting for an opportunity to strike.

  This isn’t how my life is supposed to be. I cringed every time I heard myself say it, shuddered at the memory of the look on Walters face. He felt sorry for me. There was only one thing I hated more than being the object of someone’s pity, and I was too consumed with self-loathing to even remember what that was.

  I would have gotten up and called the Mazda dealership, wooed them into hiring me with my “Go get ’em” grin, but the very thought of selling a replacement side-view mirror for a hundred and seventeen dollars only depressed me more. So I continued my interim occupation as a cable commando. It was me, Lucy, Ricky, Cousteau, and that guy with the sweaters hawking Amazing Crap You Just Can’t Live Without.

  I was a few days into my self-pity wallow when the phone rang. I answered it instantly, not caring who it was. Even if it was George, it would at least keep me from ordering a Rocket Chef.

  Her voice was frail. Tired. Wispy. “Hi, I’m calling about your ad.”

  I hit the mute on the remote and shut up Sweater Guy.

  “My ad?” I scanned my brain for anything relating to placing an ad and came up dry. Albert was hell on short-term memory.

  “Yeah. Um... I’m Laura.”

  Laura. She sounded quiet. And a little sad. My mind raced. My ad, my ad...

  My ad.

  My indignation raged anew for a brief moment as I remembered the offense. “That was you?” I asked, hardly believing it. She didn’t sound like the self-righteous type. As a matter of fact, she sounded like someone who was desperate for any human contact that might prevent her from ordering a Rocket Chef from the Amazing Sweater Guy.

  “I’m sorry?” she said. Sounded like a question. Just like Jennifer. Friggin’ southern belles. But it worked. My anger deflated. That was all I wanted, a simple apology.

  And that’s what I got.

  “Look, don’t worry about it. Just think about it before you do something like that again, okay?”

  I hung up and tossed the phone into the corner with my pile of dirty laundry and turned the sound back on the television. Amazing Sweater Guy was gone, replaced by someone selling spray-on hair color, and the world was once again proven perilous for idiots with disposable cash.

  ***

  I’m in a rowboat with three babies and a pig, none of which are mine, but all of which are looking to me to do something. I’m wearing my prom dress and a pair of really cute, strappy black shoes. I’m rowing, trying to save the lot of us, but despite the fact that we’re about ten feet from land, I can’t get us there. I try to reach the oar out and sink it into the beach and drag us in, but the boat stays where it is. The pig starts to bite one of the babies, and then the lot of them disappears. In their place sits Bruce Willis. Well, if you want to be technical, David Addison, Bruce’s character from Moonlighting. There has never been nor shall there ever be a man, fictitious or otherwise, as luscious as David Addison.

  Suddenly, I’m not so anxious to get out of the boat.

  “Get out,” Dave says.

  “How?” I whine.

  Dave rolls his eyes. He seems angry. I’m annoyed. All I want is a little Motown and some dream time shimmy, and Addison is giving me attitude.

  “Step out of the boat. Your feet will get wet, but you’ll survive.”

  I look at the beach. It’s pretty, all palm trees and golden sand. But no one’s there. It looks lonely. I turn back to Dave.

  “What am I going to do when I get there?”

  He smiles at me. Now, that’s the Addison I know and love. He takes my hand in his. I sigh. I know I’ll be hearing some Temptations soon. I lean forward, smiling and waiting for a kiss from a fictional man, which, as everyone knows, are the best kind.

  Suddenly, the boat tips over and I’m flat on my ass in a foot of water with various marine nastiness slurping around my ankles. Dave stands in the boat, arms crossed in front of him, stern face glaring down at me. Now he’s starting to look more like my dad.

  “This isn’t how my life was supposed to be,” I say, sounding as pathetic as I feel.

  “Then change it,” he says, and disappears, taking the boat with him, leaving me alone wading in oceanic gunk and wondering how I will ever replace my cute, strappy black shoes.

  My alarm went off, roaring at me with AM talk radio. I sat up in bed and looked around. My Exercycle was invisible beneath a mound of laundry. More dirty clothes gathered in clumps, which had taken over my bedroom and were casting greedy glances toward the hallway. The edge of the plate I’d eaten pizza off of last week was peeking out at me from behind the veil of the navy-blue sheets that hung over the side of my bed. My toothbrush was on the carpet next to my closet, lying beside an empty bottle of Albert.

  “So this is what rock bottom looks like,” I grumbled as I got out of bed.

  I started with the windows, pulling the shades up and yanking them all open as far as they would go. The fresh air was a start, but there were only three windows in the whole place, so I had to leave the door wide open to get any sort of cross-breeze. I put a red bandanna over my hair and slipped a Motown CD in the stereo, letting the Supremes tell me how it is.

  The apartment was passably clean by noon, and I was hearing it through the grapevine when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I screamed and whirled around, banging the CD player off the kitchen counter. My heart jumped out of my body and hightailed it out the door, bouncing down the stairs and jumping over the fire hydrant on its way to someplace sane. The rest of me stood with my hand over the hollow space in my chest, trying to regain my breath as Walter Briggs looked down at me, his face soft with amusement.

  “Sorry,” he said. He didn’t look terribly sorry to me. “I knocked. Your music was too loud. I could have been a psychopath, you know.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Who says you’re not?”

  He saw my eyebrow and raised me a grin. “Only time will tell.”

  We held each other’s eyes for a moment. My heart leaped back into my chest and did a wild tap dance for a few beats before I dropped my eyes, losing the game of romantic chicken.

  “The place looks good. Definitely smells better.” He turned back and grinned at me. “Wish I could say the same for you.”

  “Bite me, Briggs.” And my mother thought that charm school money had been wasted. I walked over to the fridge and pulled out a pitcher of freshly made iced tea. “Want some?”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “Is there alcohol in it?”

  “No. I’m on the wagon for the moment.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He grinned and my heart gave another little tap. Ba-doo-boom-chaaaa. I busied myself pouring two glasses of tea and leaned over the counter in my best pseudo-seductive stance, then caught a glance of my reflection, wearing an old Huey Lewis concert T-shirt and black sweats, in the mirror by the front door. I also caught a whiff of Lysol and Scotch. I leaned back. There would be no seduction today, pseudo or otherwise.

  “What brings you here?” I asked. “Am I being sued?”

  “Not unless you know something I don’t.” He pulled an envelope out of his coat pocket and placed it on the counter. “Actually, I’m making a delivery”

  I gave him a curious look and opened the envelope. In it was a check made out to me for ten thousand dollars, signed by Edgar Dowd. I sucked in more air than my lungs could handle and dropped the check back on the counter, taking a few steps back. Walter laughed. “It’s a check, not a snake.”

  “How...?” I looked up at him. “How did you...?”

  He held up his hands. “Don’t blame me. You’re the one who mentioned my name to Blaine, or so the story goes.”

  I nodded and recalled stabbing Walter’s name onto a sticky note for Blaine. “Yeah. That was me.”

  “Well, Blaine mentioned it to his dad, and Edgar Dowd came busting into my office this morning, talking about countersuits and getting me disbarred, et cetera,
et cetera.” Walter rolled his eyes, but he looked more amused than annoyed.

  I took a sip of my iced tea. “How’d you end up with a check?”

  Walter chuckled. “Beats the hell out of me. I just let him rave until he ran out of gas, and he dumped it on my desk before he left. We didn’t sign any paperwork, but cashing it would indicate acceptance of a settlement. Since you said you weren’t planning to sue, it looks like a win-win to me.”

  “Are you kidding?” I picked up the check and stared at it. It felt strange in my hand. It was just a piece of paper, but it had weight. I felt jumbled, confused, off balance. Things like this didn’t happen to me. I was never the recipient of good fortune unlooked for. Everything I’d received up to this day I’d gotten off stupid choices and a great smile, and most of it had been well deserved or hard-earned, respectively. I put the check down. It was making me dizzy.

  Or maybe I was dizzy in the presence of the guy who delivered it. I looked up at Walter and felt my throat clench as my smile grew, and I knew that I was in what my mother would describe as deep doo-doo.

  Walter looked up and caught me staring at him. He met my gaze, smiling back. We were silent for a few moments while I fought with myself over what to say and eventually said the very worst thing possible.

  “I’m sorry about your wife.”

  His smile dropped. His jaw tightened. His eyes withdrew. “I’d rather not talk about that.”

  I held up my hands. “Look, I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know...”

  “It was a long time ago.” He avoided eye contact, and I had to fight the instinct to reach out and touch him. And then the phantom music began. I closed my eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Walter’s voice blew gently away against the force of the music. Crescendo approaching... so close...

  Gone.