The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Sheila never let the kids play out front. She feared that one of them would get snatched or run over. Instead they played in the small backyard, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence and had just enough room for a painted metal swing set, a plastic sandbox in the shape of a turtle, and a blue and white statue of the Blessed Virgin Mother, which the baby referred to as “Mama’s dolly.”

  In October, a toddler in Texas had fallen down a well. For two days, it was the only thing anyone could talk about. Patients in the back of his ambulance who were in much worse shape than Baby Jessica would express their concern for her, ask if he’d heard any updates on the radio. Now Sheila had added this to her long list of worries about the children. James tried to point out that both their boys had been born as big as Butterball turkeys, and wouldn’t be able to fit even one leg inside a hole that size.

  The house itself was small, half the size of the one across town that Sheila had grown up in. Gray vinyl siding. Two bedrooms and an outdated bathroom upstairs. Downstairs, a tiny kitchen, with dark maple-colored cabinets from the sixties that didn’t quite close; a TV room; and a dining room where they never ate. The dining table mostly served as a halfway house for clean laundry, brought up from the basement but not yet folded and put away, stacks of mail, back issues of TV Guide, and a week’s worth of the Herald, which he intended to get around to eventually.

  The house didn’t get much light. Even at noon, with the sun blazing outside, it was dark in every room. But Sheila was a great decorator and had her touches all over the place—stencils of rubber duckies on the bathroom walls, pirate ship wallpaper in the boys’ room. He could do without her prized Cabbage Patch dolls. She had six, lined up on the sideboard in the dining room. Sheila desperately wanted a girl, but he felt strongly that two children were enough.

  He was lucky he had talked her into getting Rocky when they did. She never would have let him get a dog after the kids were born. James walked Rocky every morning, and every night when he wasn’t working. Even while freezing his nuts off, like now, he enjoyed this part of the day more than any other. In nice weather, on his days off, he took the dog to Wollaston Beach and let him run. But in winter, they were both content to walk a few blocks and get the fuck back inside.

  They turned up Holmes Street. There were Christmas lights on some of the two-family houses—Sheila thought the white ones were the classiest, so that’s what he hung. Their neighbors on one side had rainbow-colored lights, and their neighbors on the other had blue. Blue were the tackiest, according to Sheila. In fourteen years of marriage, he had never told her that as a kid he had dreamed of living in a house with blue Christmas lights.

  He grew up about a mile away, on a slightly better block than this one, in a little bungalow where his mother still lived. His in-laws, Linda and Tom, still lived in Sheila’s childhood home too, a big old house right on the ocean in Squantum. Linda and Tom helped out a lot with the kids. They were ten years older than his mother, but they seemed decades younger. They went out on their sailboat every Saturday in summertime, and had friends over for sunset cocktails on the patio. Sometimes, seeing them this way, James thought of his own mother cooped up alone in her house, smoking cigarettes in front of the television set, and had the urge to punch a wall.

  He knew they thought Sheila could’ve done better. Maybe this would bother him more if he didn’t happen to agree. Once, he had overheard Tom say to her, “Should’ve married the lawyer when you had the chance.”

  Joking! Just joking, of course, Sheila said later when he confronted her about it. Sure.

  On the whole, they were good people. But Tom, who had his own contracting business, was always trying to tell him what to do—over the years, he’d offered James work, and money. A month ago, glancing up at a flaky patch on James’s kitchen ceiling, he’d said, “That’s not just cosmetic, Jimmy. What you’ve got there is a leak from the upstairs bathroom. Best not to let it linger too long.” As if James didn’t know it was a goddamn leak. As if he’d just been waiting for someone to tell him, so he could call the plumber right away and fork over a week’s pay.

  Last week Tom had asked, “Do you need some help with the kids’ Christmas presents?” James got offended and quickly answered no, but in truth, he was strapped—they had had to put half the gifts on a credit card they’d probably never pay off, and the other half on layaway.

  Sheila thought the boys could learn to do without sometimes, but he said no, especially not at Christmas. James could still remember when he was eight and spotted a J. C. Higgins bike for sale at Sears when his mother took him shopping for back-to-school clothes. He wanted it bad, dreamed of it for months, but it cost $39.95 and he knew his mother didn’t have the money, so he never once mentioned it. He told some department-store Santa in downtown Boston, just in case, but he knew the bike wouldn’t be there on Christmas morning. Instead, he got a toy tractor that sparked, made for a much younger kid. James pretended to love the thing for his mother’s sake, laying it on thick, even bringing the tractor to bed with him at night. When he thought about it now, it wasn’t the fact of not getting the bike that upset him. It was his own awareness that he shouldn’t even wish for a present like that. He wanted his boys to wish. It wasn’t their fault that he was so lousy with money you’d think he was making a concerted effort to be broke.

  They bought the house at the worst possible moment, right after Parker was born. A few years earlier, it might have cost half as much, but by the time they had the money for a down payment, inflation was at its worst, home prices had skyrocketed all over the country, and the best interest rate they could get was 14 percent. Their first year in the house, when money was so tight they were eating cereal for supper, they discovered mold all over the basement. James was an idiot kid about these things—they’d gotten the place inspected, done everything right, so it shocked him that it was his responsibility to fix it.

  This was the dream: to have a house of your own, to fill it with furniture and paint the shutters whatever color you chose. But a fine-looking house could conceal so many horrors. It seemed they spent half their lives just trying to hold it together. Since the mold incident, there was some new problem every few months: The gutters needed to be fixed. The chimney got clogged. Parker cracked the porcelain sink in the kitchen and the whole counter had to be replaced. A tree fell through the garage roof during Hurricane Gloria.

  Sheila’s parents had loaned them the money for the mold removal. She said they probably didn’t expect to be paid back, but James couldn’t stand being indebted to his father-in-law. He saved enough cash to repay Tom by putting a lot of other things on a credit card—groceries and furniture and gasoline and clothing for the baby, everything he could. After a lifetime of scrimping, the way his mother had, it felt exhilarating to find this new approach to their expenses. They weren’t totally out of control; they didn’t go to Florida on the Visa, or buy a pool table for the basement, the way a lot of their friends did. They only used the card when they needed it. But increasingly that seemed to be all the time.

  In ’84, when he lost his job with the fire department in Lynn and was out of work for a year, they just kept spending like they normally would, putting everything on the plastic. They refinanced the house. He tried to make up for it by letting Dave Connelly talk him into betting what little cash he did have at the track, and on a few Pats games. Dave assured him it was easy money, and for a while they just kept coming out ahead. But in the end James lost it all. When his mother got sick, her savings vanished within six months. They had had to cover some of her medical bills. They still helped her out sometimes, even though they couldn’t afford to. He knew it was his own fault, all the debt they’d racked up. Bad decisions combined with shitty luck. At first, they had only done it to survive, to help themselves out of a hole. He didn’t understand that he was just digging them deeper until it was too late.

  They had stopped answering the phone in the evenings. It was usually a creditor. Pressure hung in t
he air around them, knowing how much they still owed and how unlikely they’d be to pay it back anytime soon. Twice that fall the electricity had been shut off. They told the kids that they were playing a wilderness game—candles at the dinner table, bedtime stories read under a flashlight. Of course, after that Parker wanted them to live in darkness every night.

  When they fought, it was usually about money. Sheila did all right; the nursing shortage meant that Boston hospitals were paying a fortune, recruiting women from as far away as Ireland. But his salary was a joke. He would have given anything for it to be the reverse, even though they would have ended up with the same amount of money.

  They said horrible things to one another, unforgivable things, but they always forgave. He felt like he knew her completely, better than anyone else, but once in a while she’d say something that made him wonder if he had somehow misinterpreted his own life. She said he wasn’t the man she had married anymore, that he was too sad, too angry. She called him violent, though he hadn’t been in a fight for sixteen years. She said that didn’t matter, that a person could be violent without ever throwing a punch.

  He felt like shit after they argued, and so did she. But the smallest thing could get them started. His in-laws prided themselves on never going to bed angry—they had written this down under the heading “Golden Rule of Marriage!” in a card they gave Sheila on their wedding day. But how the hell could two people make that promise? It made James wonder if Tom and Linda had never faced any kind of hardship, or if they just didn’t care that much about one another to begin with.

  They tried not to argue in front of the boys. Everyone said that was the worst thing parents could do. But it wasn’t exactly like they planned their fights in advance—Every Wednesday at seven, let’s rip each other’s guts out while the kids are at Little League! Their worst fights usually took him by surprise, often coming after a moment of calm: a great family dinner, or a trip to the movies.

  She had been pissed for weeks that he agreed to work Christmas Eve, but he thought they both knew it was settled. His boss had offered to pay double, and he couldn’t turn that down.

  Then, a few days back, they were having a nice Sunday breakfast. She had made bacon and eggs and they were laughing about something or another, when all of a sudden, out of the clear blue, she brought it up again. She felt angry that he’d leave them on a holiday like that. He couldn’t believe she didn’t understand why he had to do it, or how little he wanted to.

  “These are supposed to be the happy years,” she said. “Why do they feel so shitty?”

  “I don’t know, honey, why don’t you tell me? I’m sure it’s all my fault.”

  “Oh yeah, go ahead and play the victim. You do it so well.”

  “I learned from the best.”

  James didn’t realize they were screaming at each other until Parker put his hands over his ears and said, “Please, you guys. I don’t know whose side I’m supposed to be on.”

  That had just about killed him.

  If he had it to do over again, he would have put his foot down on naming the kid Parker. James had wanted to name him Bird, as in Larry, who scored the most points of any Celtic in 1980, the year his first son was born. Sheila said the mere suggestion of that would be grounds for divorce in some women’s books. He let her have her way, since she had been through hell trying to get pregnant. Sheila miscarried six times before Parker came along. They had been married seven years by then, and everyone had started to look at them funny, as if there were no earthly reason to be married if you weren’t going to have kids.

  Now, inexplicably, in what seemed like a minute, Parker was seven years old. The baby, Danny, was already two.

  James stopped outside Pat Flaherty’s house while the dog sniffed at a patch of grass poking through the snow. There were no Christmas lights on the bushes, and no cars parked out front. Pat’s wife had left him one Sunday after dinner, announcing her affair with the local parish priest as she served the apple pie. Dave Connelly said she had taken the poor bastard to the cleaners.

  “She’d have to, if she’ll be living off a priest’s salary now,” James had joked, but he was thinking of Sheila, of whether she might someday just up and go, too. At eighteen, he had gotten her name tattooed on his right arm. They got married when they were twenty-one. Sometimes, especially lately, he wondered if she’d make the same choice again today.

  A new FOR SALE BY OWNER sign hung on Pat Flaherty’s lawn. James didn’t know where he had gone—was Pat staying at his mother’s in Wollaston? Thirty-four years old and having to start from scratch? The thought of it was depressing as hell.

  He’d hear all the details soon enough. His buddies from high school were as gossipy as a bunch of old ladies. Connelly, O’Neil, and Big Boy were all married with kids. He watched Pats games with them at someone’s house every few weeks, or sometimes at Dee Dee’s bar while his mom sat with the boys. There were a few guys in town from the old days who he avoided: troublemakers, drunks, who still broke the law and got into fights like they were seventeen years old. And then there were the ones who had gone to college, who he saw only once a year, the night before Thanksgiving, when everyone from their North Quincy High days went to Dee Dee’s and got shitfaced. He burned with embarrassment when he had to tell yet another one of them that yes, he still lived in town. He had always talked such a big game about his plans.

  James heard a clanging sound behind him now and turned to see Doris Mulcahey dragging two metal trash cans to the curb.

  “Lemme help you,” he said, crossing the street toward her.

  “I’m okay,” she said cautiously. She squinted in the dim morning light. “Is that Jimmy McKeen?”

  He hated the sound of his own name. In school, they called him Jimmy. When he started working, he tried to go by James. Some people respected this—his partner, Maurice, and Sheila, when she remembered to. But his mother and brother and old friends and everyone else all kept calling him Jimmy, and there was nothing he could do to stop them.

  “Hi, Mrs. Mulcahey.”

  She had been on a bowling team with his mother for years. Hardly any of those bitches had visited her since she got sick, and this made him hate every last one of them.

  “How’s your mum feeling?” she said.

  He nodded. “Pretty good.”

  “She’s a tough cookie, God love her. Tell her I say Merry Christmas. I’ve been meaning to pay her a visit.”

  “Sure will.”

  “And your boys? Are they getting excited for tomorrow?”

  “They’ve been counting down the days since Halloween,” he said. He dug his toe into the sidewalk. He felt like a kid, eager to escape her.

  But then she whispered, as if there were anyone there to hear it, “How’s poor Sheila?”

  So she knew. All of North Quincy probably did.

  “She’s fine,” he said, making each word as small and tight as he could, as if to indicate that there would be no further conversation.

  “You ready to turn back, bud?” he said to the dog. Rocky looked up at him with those big, brown eyes that could melt you. “Yeah, you want your breakfast. Me too. Take care, Mrs. Mulcahey.”

  “Merry Christmas, Jimmy.”

  They walked the five minutes home in silence. James could see his breath. Whenever he thought about what had happened, he felt as if he were wound so tight that he was just half an inch away from brutality—like if someone were to accidentally brush up against him or call him a name, he might rip the guy’s head right off his body, then stand there and watch him die.

  A month ago, Sheila got mugged coming back from the grocery store. Some cowardly fucker with a knife took everything she had: her watch, her wedding band and engagement ring, her pocketbook, even the goddamn diaper bag. When he got home an hour later, James found her sobbing at the kitchen table while the kids were in the other room with the TV turned up loud. He had heard the TV first, made a joke about it before he saw her face.

 
The baby saw it all. Two years old and he’d had to watch some piece of shit hold a knife to his mother’s throat. The guy had choked her. Two days after it happened, dark bruises appeared all over her neck. Seeing them, James went into the bathroom and cried into his hands.

  It was his fault. Her car was in the shop, and he was supposed to get home at eight a.m. sharp to drive to the market before she had to leave for work at nine. But he was late. His partner Maurice came down with something, so James sent him home, saying he’d take care of the cleanup for the day. It took twice as long as usual—there had been a construction accident in Kendall Square, and there was blood splatter all over the back of the ambulance. Leaving it there would mean a steep fine, which he couldn’t afford. So he scrubbed as fast as he could, feeling the minutes tick by, knowing from experience that she’d be pissed.

  Sheila had waited until eight-fifteen and then decided that she couldn’t wait any longer. She needed to pack something for Parker’s lunch and get milk for Danny. She took the baby out and left Parker home alone for the first time. Worried about him, she rushed through her shopping and took a shortcut back through an alley off of Hancock Street, and that’s where the prick came up from behind and grabbed her so hard he knocked the wind out of her.

  James called the brother of a buddy of his, who was with the police department. The guy sent a couple of officers over to the house to take a statement, but James could tell it was mostly just a formality, an attempt to make them feel as if they had some control over the situation. When the cops left, he went into a rage, telling Sheila exactly what he’d do to that kid once he found him—it wouldn’t be enough to torture him. You had to hit the bastard where it hurt; tie him to a chair, and then stab his grandmother, his mother, his children, to death, right in front of him. Let him watch them suffer, let him know real fear. Then let him live with it for the rest of his life.