A Hole in the Universe

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “You just don’t want to go, right?” she asked.

  “No. No, it’s not that. I do. It’s just my back.” He didn’t want to go, but he also didn’t want to make her mad. He hadn’t seen her since their ride to the beach, and he missed her. They had talked on the phone, but she had been distracted, almost cool to him. He was afraid Jada had told her about climbing into his bed.

  “All right, I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes, then. Just come out when I toot,” she said, and he hobbled around to get ready.

  Here he was now, shivering on a low, flimsy beach chair on the Dearborn Common, listening to a four-piece band playing “Sweet Caroline.”

  It was chilly, but Delores wore a sleeveless blouse. She claimed not to be cold. “All my natural layers,” she said, passing him a plate piled with chicken she’d fried, potato salad, beans, and cornbread. The drumstick was still warm and crispy. Delores was a wonderful cook. His mother had hated cooking, so his father had done most of it. Inexplicably, that had changed after Gordon went away. Dennis said she learned to enjoy cooking, but Gordon couldn’t help thinking his absence had made it more pleasurable, a less onerous task without her three-hundred-pound oafish son underfoot every minute.

  He had eaten practically everything in the picnic basket. Delores had made an apple pie, but it had been too hot to cut and pack, so they would have it afterward at her house. His back ached. He would rather go home when the concert ended, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and there was still the pie. Fireflies flickered in the distance while barefoot little girls danced around the musicians, who for some reason sat playing on folding chairs below the bandstand. Delores kept waving at different people going by. For someone who didn’t even live in Dearborn, she knew a lot of people here, he said. Many were customers, she said, and a lot were Collerton people who had made good and moved to Dearborn.

  “See her?” Delores said with a nod toward the woman walking by. “That’s Dawn Lintz. We went to school with her. She got married the weekend we graduated. Remember? She was so pregnant you could tell even with the graduation robe on.”

  “Oh,” he said. Of course he didn’t remember, but once again he let the flow of her voice carry him along through memories that had little to do with him.

  “She’s been married two times since. Three kids, one with each guy. Her son’s an Olympic gymnast. Well, used to be. He’s a coach now, I think ...”

  It wasn’t so much that he had stopped listening as he was sinking into the comfort of her nearness. Jada couldn’t have said anything, he decided. Delores was just the same as always. There seemed less need to keep up his guard every minute. She probably knew more about him than anyone, yet nothing seemed to bother her.

  “. . . so anyway, that’s what I’m thinking. I know everyone in my family’s going to have a fit—but you know what?”

  “No. I don’t. What?” He had no idea what she meant.

  “I don’t care! How’s that?” She laughed. “They all have their own families. So why shouldn’t I? I mean, all this time I’ve been thinking I’m a failure because I don’t have anyone, because I don’t have a family like they all do. And then I was thinking how hard it must be for you. I mean, here you are, coming back here where everyone knows you, but you don’t let that get in the way. You just keep plugging along, determined to start over and make a life for yourself. I admire that about you. I look at you and I say to myself, The hell with what everyone thinks, just go for it, girl!” She was rummaging through her satchel-size purse that had somehow gotten mayonnaise smeared into the straw weave. She handed him a grainy photo of a somber Chinese child.

  “Mary Catherine,” she said when he asked who it was. “Well, that’s what I’d call her. Now her name’s May Loo. So what do you think?”

  “She’s cute. She’s pretty, but who is she? I mean, why are you changing her name?”

  “Because I’m adopting her. That’s what I’ve been telling you. She’s almost a year old. She’s from the Holy Mother of Christ Mission Orphanage in Kawang. It takes at least six months to go through all the paperwork. And then she’ll be mine.” She rubbed the picture against her chest and sighed. “I haven’t even met her and I love her this much.” Her voice broke and she paused a moment. “I can’t imagine what it’ll be like actually holding this tiny little thing in my arms.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He was confused. She wasn’t married. She didn’t even have a job. He thought of Jada’s pregnant mother, not only unmarried and unemployed, but a drug addict. The world had gone a little more haywire.

  “I’m so happy, Gordon.” She reached over and squeezed his hand. “I’ve never been happier in my whole life. About anything. And it’s all because of you. Because you’re such a good, strong man.”

  He smiled and for a moment, for just a tick of time, wondered if it might be possible.

  He aimed the remote, scanning the channels. Delores’s enormous television got ten times as many as his did.

  “That’s because you’re not on cable.” She put the two slices of apple pie and ice cream on the coffee table, then sat next to him. “You should get it.”

  “Why? All I have to do is come over here and watch it,” he said, mesmerized by the cascade of fleeting images.

  “That’s right.” For the next few minutes they ate in silence.

  “That was delicious,” he said, then realized once again he was finished and she was just starting. “You make the best apple pie.”

  “Thank you, Gordon, but, sad to say, I won’t be making another one for a while.”

  “Why?” He was embarrassed by the alarm in his voice.

  “Because! I have to get healthy!” She picked up the girl’s picture from the table. “I can’t be this big, out-of-shape mother chasing that little bitty thing all over the playground.” She held out her arms. “Look, I’ve already lost ten pounds. The day I made up my mind, that’s when I started.”

  “I thought there was something different,” he said, though it wasn’t a weight loss, he realized, but the calm that seemed to have settled over her, a resignation.

  Delores leaned against him. “Oh Gordon . . .” She sighed and turned, her heavy breasts dragging across his chest as he turned with her. “Is it all right? Do you mind if we’re here?” she asked, her mouth at his ear, now his eyes, his mouth. “You can go home. I’ll stop if you want. I’ll do whatever you want, whatever you say, just tell me. Tell me what to do. . . .”

  How could he? His brain boiled with color and heat. Incapable of thought or speech, he could only grunt and nod in assent and pleasure. She had unbuttoned her blouse. She placed his hand on her breast, then gasped and told him not to squeeze. “Just go easy, easy, easy now,” she whispered, taking his other hand, stroking herself, guiding him lower. Her face blurred through the blinding waves of desire. When he stood up he was naked. They both were, but he couldn’t be sure if he had taken off his clothes or if she had undressed him. Holding her hand, he followed her into her bedroom like a child. Embracing, they fell onto the bed, his entire being lost in longing.

  Gordon’s first want ad attempt had given him the confidence to try four more. The difficulty was explaining away the twenty-five-year gap without actually telling the truth. Petro, the Athens owner, asked only if he knew how to read and write, then hired him on the spot. The Athens Pizza and Sub shop was across the street from Paramount Shoe Manufacturing. Twice a day, at noon and then again with Paramount’s four-thirty shift change, the line stretched out the door. The pizza ovens were manned by Petro, a sweating, bald gentleman whose few English words and phrases shared a common modifier: “Fucking-hot, fucking-ready, fucking-get-out-of-my-way.”

  Gordon’s job was making subs. Chad, a seventeen-year-old Cambodian American who was getting his GED at night, was head sub man. For three days the soft-spoken young man patiently trained, then quizzed Gordon in the various combinations. Each sub’s ingredients were listed on the huge sign behind the counter, so Gordon h
ad only to look up if he forgot, but he was constantly on edge. Chad kept assuring him he was a great sub maker, but Gordon’s problem was his size. He was always in the way, particularly of Petro and his long-handled wooden paddle sliding pizzas in and out of the huge ovens. Gordon was getting faster on his feet, flattening himself against the wall beyond the reach of the turning paddle. The pay was better than the Market. He was working full eight-hour days and could eat as much as he wanted. On the fourth day he was cutting a meatball sub in half when Petro rushed toward the sink with his paddle afire. As Gordon leaned to get out of the way, the big knife sliced his palm. No amount of toweled ice would stop the bleeding. Chad wanted to drive him to the hospital, but he refused. Even Petro said he should fucking go and get stitches, but he couldn’t. Dennis’s warnings about not having insurance had come home to roost. One trip to the emergency room could end up costing hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dollars. Chad drove him home. All that night his hand throbbed with pain. The next day, he tried to work with a glove over the bandaged hand, but the bleeding would start with the slightest pressure, filling the rubber fingers with blood. Chad had to drive him home. The next day, Gordon folded a hand towel over the cut, this time binding it with duct tape. He forced on a glove and went to work. The same thing happened. Again, Chad drove him home, but right before Gordon got out of the car, he told him that Petro said not to come in tomorrow. He had hired someone else.

  “I’m sorry. It’s not fair,” the young man said softly.

  “No. Well, I know. It’s hard, but I understand. He’s got a business to run.”

  “But it was his fault!” Chad said.

  “What does that matter?”

  “It matters a lot!”

  “No, it doesn’t. Not really.”

  “Well, it does. In this country it does,” he said with the passionate certainty of hard-earned patriotism.

  Delores was horrified. She bound his hand so tightly with gauze and adhesive tape that his fingertips turned blue. “You need stitches.” She snipped away the tape and bandaged it again. “It won’t cost as much as you think. I’ll give you the money.”

  “No!”

  “All right, I’ll lend you the money.”

  “I don’t have a job. As it is I’m a month behind on my bills.”

  “Stop being so damn proud. If I needed money, I wouldn’t have any problem asking you.”

  “The problem would be me not having any.”

  “But if you had it, you would if I asked. Right?”

  “Well, yes. If I had it. And you needed it,” he said uneasily, seeing the hurt flicker in her eyes, then vanish as quickly. She was as generous in forgiveness as in everything else. He envied her that, if for no other reason than the actual pain and sense of loss he felt when he had to share or give.

  The last time they made love she had told him that she loved him. He didn’t know if he loved her, because he didn’t know what love was. If it was an ecstasy that stayed with him every minute of every day, then it surely wasn’t love. What he felt most with Delores was contentment. He didn’t have to consider every word before he spoke. When she called he was glad to hear her voice. Now when the doorbell rang his chest didn’t tighten with dread. But when he was alone he hardly ever thought of her. Love, he suspected, was the ache that came with thoughts of Jilly Cross.

  “Does Dennis know you cut your hand?”

  “No. He doesn’t even know I got fired from the Market.”

  “Gordon!”

  “I figured I’d tell him as soon as I found a new job.”

  “You have to tell him. You can’t start keeping things from him.”

  “Why? He doesn’t tell me everything he does,” he said, startled by this mix of anger and guilt. Talking about the affair made him feel disloyal to his brother, Lisa, and Jilly, and resentful. He had been drawn into their private lives before he’d had a chance to settle into his own. The affair lay between him and Dennis like an invisible wall. He didn’t know what to do but felt sure he should be doing something.

  “Dennis just wants to help. He wants to be close to you, Gordon, that’s all. Every trip up there he’d always be saying how wonderful it was going to be when you could all finally be a family again.”

  “Dr. Loomis knows you’re here,” the receptionist said. “It shouldn’t be too much longer. He said to go wait in his office.”

  “I can wait here,” he said before she could get up. “This is fine. I’ll just sit here and wait.” The last thing he wanted was to disrupt the office routine, but he was desperate. He had to borrow fifty dollars. The electric company’s second notice had thrown him into a panic. It was bad enough eating at Delores’s almost every night this past week, but it was humiliating to show up empty-handed.

  The only job he’d been able to get was with a moving company. Thinking his palm had healed, he had worked two days only to have the cut reopen. Blood dripped onto the white-tiled foyer of a house, horrifying the new home owner. “What if he’s got AIDS?” she fumed, pointing down at Gordon. He was on his knees, scrubbing the stained grout and trying to keep paper towels rolled around his hand.

  “What about my kids? My baby’s crawling now.”

  The foreman’s boot nudged him. “You got AIDS?”

  “No.”

  The foreman gave him cab fare and sent him home until “the damn thing heals.”

  Determined to get the job back, he did everything with one hand. Twelve fifty an hour was good money, and the men had liked him. There hadn’t been anything he couldn’t lift. He sniffed at his hand again. It still ached, and this morning there had been a funny odor from the bandage. The surgical tape and gauze were expensive, so he had been changing the dressing only every few days.

  “The chairs in the doctor’s office are a lot more comfortable than those.”

  “Oh, I’m comfortable. These chairs are fine.” He patted the wooden arms. “They’re very good, very comfortable.”

  “Well . . .” She sighed. “He should be right out.” She returned to her keyboard.

  He kept glancing over the magazine at her. Maybe Dennis had broken up with Jilly and this was his new girlfriend. Older, she wasn’t nearly as pretty as Jilly or as classy. She was chewing gum with her front teeth. Her hair was brassy and ragged, not soft and perfectly neat as Jilly’s. An odd pang of jealousy rose in his chest. Why did he feel so agitated? Did he want his brother to still be seeing Jilly? The door opened. An older man arrived and sat across from him. Moments later a nurse led out a gray-haired woman whose mouth was stuffed with bloody gauze packs. The man got up and put his arm around her, asking if she was all right as they left.

  “Gordo.”

  He followed Dennis into his office. The furniture was massive, with dark, burled surfaces inlaid with bands of golden wood. The blinds were closed and the lampshades were black. Gordon had to squint to see his brother on the other side of the desk. Knowing Dennis’s pride in possessions, he praised the handsome office, taking particular note of the large gilt-framed oil painting above the credenza. It was a portrait of a white-haired gentleman in a black suit and stand-up shirt collar. “I feel like I know him. He looks so familiar,” Gordon said, angling his head for a better perspective.

  “Well, he should. That’s Clancy Meldrin.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Our great-grandfather. Mom’s grandfather.”

  Gordon was amazed at the resemblance. The man was an elderly version of Dennis. His mother used to brag how Clancy Meldrin had owned hundreds of acres in Ireland until an Englishman cheated him out of it. Gordon asked where he had gotten the painting. It looked old, but he didn’t remember ever seeing it around the house. Dennis said he’d had it painted. From what? Gordon asked. An old photo or something?

  “From life!” Dennis laughed. “Pretty good, huh?” He had posed, telling the artist to imagine him as an old man a hundred years ago in Ireland, a man of culture and learning despite having lost everything. Gordon’s eyes moved
between the portrait above and the one below, saddened by the ghostly double image. For the first time in his life, he was embarrassed for his brother.

  He abbreviated his reasons for coming. He had lost his job at the Market but had found another one. He held up his bandaged hand with a quick mention of the slicing blade, rush hour, Petro’s flaming paddle. Not to worry, though, because he had this other job now, but first the cut had to heal. “They’ll take me back. I just have to get it so it won’t keep splitting open.”

  Dennis asked to see it. Gordon peeled back the tape. Recoiling a little, Dennis said it was infected. Yes, Gordon admitted. He’d figured it was, from the redness and the smell these last few days. He needed stitches and antibiotics right away, Dennis said.

  But that wasn’t even why he was here, Gordon said quickly. He needed fifty dollars to pay his electric bill. A loan, of course. As soon as the moving company sent his check, he’d pay Dennis back.

  “Look,” Dennis said. He bent over the desk, scribbling angrily. “This is ridiculous. When are you going to start listening to me? What makes you think you have all the answers?”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “You don’t? You could’ve fooled me, Gordo.” He ripped the check from the pad and slapped it onto the desk.

  “I can’t cash a check. I had to close out my account. That’s not going to work,” he said, pointing.