by Jonathan Dee
He knew he should just stop there and say something to make her feel validated, something to tide her over until April at least, but he was tired and couldn’t check himself. “You’d like to stick a large shard of steel,” he said, “into the ground in the sideline area between the two children’s athletic fields?”
“Obviously not,” she said. “It would be part of a fenced-off memorial garden there.”
Hands shot up. God damn it, Marty thought, god damn it, I will never get home now. I will miss CSI again. I will never be any good at this politics shit, never ever, I don’t have it in me to learn.
“This is a national tragedy!” Daisy was shouting back at the parents who were shouting at her. Her eyes were red. She was rolling now. “It doesn’t matter where it happened! It happened here too! Do you just not care that we have enemies, who hate us? You think if you forget about them, they’ll go away? Please, the athletic fields! You want to raise your kids to get lacrosse scholarships or to believe in something? Either we’re a part of this country or we aren’t!”
He hated the gavel, but he finally used it; and then, even more brazenly, he proceeded straight to the prayer that had closed every one of these meetings since November, the prayer for the safety of William Nagel, Evvie Nagel’s only son, who’d graduated from Howland Regional High three years ago, who’d been a junior at Berkshire Community College, and who’d dropped out to join the Marines. Nobody was going to bicker after Will’s name had been invoked. Marty felt bad for using it that way, to shame people into shutting up, but enough was enough. A lot of them had children of their own they ought to get home to.
Marty installed furnaces and hot water heaters, a business he’d expanded to include air-conditioning systems about twelve years ago—too soon, in retrospect, or anyway too quickly, which had led to some money problems and some lean years and ultimately the end of his marriage. But that marriage wasn’t a keeper anyway. Probably a good thing, in retrospect, that all the yelling and hard feelings about money had exposed the cracks in that relationship sooner rather than later. Before there were kids. His life might have gone very differently otherwise. In fact Kelly had gotten pregnant at some point during their last few months together, and it got back to him, much later, that she had driven to Pittsfield and aborted it. She never knew he knew about it. Possibly it wasn’t even his.
The expansion had meant opening a second store, in Ashley Falls, but he was in over his head from day one and wound up selling it off for a loss just to service his debt. It left him feeling pretty stupid. And that’s because he was stupid, back then, about certain things. He had a sort of American image of himself as a man of ambition, someone who wasn’t happy unless he was dreaming big, growing, conquering. Conquering what, though? He’d thought it was important to his self-esteem, somehow, to become the Heating and Cooling King of the Berkshires, but when he failed at it he found out that it hadn’t really changed his estimation of himself after all. He was a small-town guy. He made a fine living with the one store, and he didn’t miss the stress of having two and always wondering what your employees were managing to fuck up or steal, what easy sales they were failing to close, in whichever store you weren’t at that day. He liked being able to walk down the street to the Undermountain Café for lunch, and he liked it that if anybody happened to drop by the store while he was still eating, they generally knew where to find him. His life had a lot less negativity in it once Kelly moved out and he no longer had that voice in his head, putting him down for daring to be happy where he was.
And people liked him; that was indisputable. He did not put on airs. He didn’t mind in the least being in the same neighbor’s house at different times in very different capacities, first as the guest of honor at some dinner in his role as First Selectman and then two weeks later wearing waders in a flooded basement. There were worse ways to get to know your constituents. Sometimes if he couldn’t get to sleep he did a local house-tour in his head, or made a mental list of the homes in Howland he’d seen the inside of and those he hadn’t.
The heating and cooling business brought in decent money—he lived alone, the house was paid off, he didn’t have expensive tastes or hobbies—but you never knew for sure the pace at which that money was going to come, and that’s where the modest $22K salary the town paid him really came in handy. It was pitched to him initially as a half-time job, but he had it down to where it usually took up much less of his day than that. Though he had an office in the Town Hall, he found it easier to organize his time if he kept all of his work in one place, so a lot of the Howland government’s pending business could usually be found on the metal desk in the rear of his store, which was only about half a mile from Town Hall anyway. Beyond five or six somewhat tongue-in-cheek ceremonial duties a year, the job mainly required balancing a small, pretty simple budget, most of it revenue that flowed down to them from state or fed and was already earmarked to be spent in certain ways. There was some property tax collection too, which had sometimes led to incidents, but not for years. Marty was aware enough to see that some relatively hard times were coming—the economy was just bad everywhere, and the housing market locally was certain to take a bath. But there was always a waxing and waning to these things. The city money, the summer money, moved in and out like the tide over the course of ten or fifteen years, but it never receded entirely. You just had to be patient. In the meantime the electorate both trusted him and failed to take him all that seriously, which was just the way he liked it.
—
“Your sister called” was the only message on Gerry Firth’s desk when he got in at about 9:30, “about” being his own estimation of 9:48. He was hoping for some other messages, work-related messages, to help justify the fact that he was quote-unquote late. He’d gotten into a kind of negative loop at work lately: the worse things were going for him commission-wise, the more tenuous his position felt, the more compulsively he screwed up in meaningless little passive-aggressive ways like failing to get to his desk on time. Of course, there was a scenario in which showing up late might turn out to be a shrewd office-political ploy, because if a buyer called while he was out, instead of going straight into his ear the message would have to be taken by the receptionist, Alina, and Alina would have to write it down and walk across the office to put it on Gerry’s desk, and anybody who knew the first thing about Alina knew that she could never perform such a task without describing out loud to everyone in earshot what she was doing. Which would make Gerry look good to his colleagues and his boss. But that only worked if calls actually came in, calls that weren’t from his sister Candace bugging him again about going out to visit their parents and fixing their fucking storm windows while he was out there, like he had nothing better to do, like his own time and labor were worth zero.
He tried to look busy immediately; when he could, he raised his gaze to Alina, who was waiting for it and gave only a little conspiratorial frown in return. Kimbrough, their boss, didn’t say anything to him but there was no way he hadn’t seen Gerry come in late; the whole office was the size of a two-car garage, with five desks wedged into it, so there was no way for anybody to avoid seeing anything. The rule about being at your desk by nine thirty was moronic anyway, classic Kimbrough. Giving you a pointless rule to follow and then getting off on making you follow it. Meanwhile home values continued to tank, and their all being behind their desks at dawn, like a bunch of blazer-wearing farmers, wouldn’t have done a thing to address that. The whole South Berkshire housing market was about to get good and fucked, like everywhere else in the country, only worse because around here so many of the homes were second ones, luxuries. All of their jobs were basically hanging by a thread, which would give Gerry some small vindictive comfort when he was inevitably the first to get let go.
Two hours crawled by somehow and then his phone rang—his desk phone, not his cell. He made himself wait for a second ring before lifting the receiver. But it was his sister again. “Did you get my message before?” she sai
d.
“No,” Gerry said, turning his back to Kimbrough’s desk. “The girl here is terrible. But I’ve told you, why not call my cell?”
“I did. I have. So look, can you make it out to Mom and Dad’s this weekend or what? You can’t believe how cold it is in that house, and if the business with the windows goes on much longer, Dad is going to try to get up on the ladder. I would take care of it myself, like I take care of every other damn thing for them, but it’s a kind of work I can’t do, you know that. That’s why God burdened me with brothers.”
“Yeah, well, speaking of, why don’t you ask Mark to go over there and fix whatever needs fixing?” He caught a reflection in the window and turned to see Alina putting on her coat to go to lunch, not looking at him or at anyone, as if lunch were already where she was. She had an unusual ass. There wasn’t that sort of hourglass-style pinching-in at the waist, so when she was standing up, her ass looked kind of like a shelf.
“I tried. He’s got some big job. Claims he’s working weekends till it’s done. For one of his neighbors, he says, some rich dude from New York.”
Gerry, who had a good memory for property transfers, realized she was describing Philip Hadi; thinking of his brother in proximity to that kind of money made everything seem even more unfair. “Whatever his priorities are, I guess,” he said. “Protecting your elderly parents from the elements or felching some billionaire.”
That got a laugh out of Candace, at least. “He’d probably custom-order some reclaimed storm windows from Newport or something anyway, and they wouldn’t get here until next winter.” He knew she was only pretending to side with him against Mark to get him to do what she wanted. Why was she so into that family-obligation shit anyway? They both knew their dad would probably prefer a broken storm window he could complain about to one that worked fine. “But the other thing is, they ask me about you,” she went on. “I don’t know what to tell them. Just go spend a few hours with them and get it over with for a while. It’s been too long. Suck it up, boy.”
“They always ask me about Lindsey,” he said.
There was a pause while his sister tried to think of what to say. “They worry about you” was what she settled on.
“Well, it’s been two years, they should let it go. Okay fine, I’ll go up Saturday. Okay? Gotta bounce, I have another call.” He hung up. He was still facing Alina’s abandoned chair. He hadn’t done a great job of making that look like it wasn’t a personal call.
He busied himself for a few minutes longer, reading through some recent listings he already knew by heart; as his eyes ran over them, another part of his brain was engaged with the mystery of why he found it so hard to get to work on time. It’s not like nine thirty was so early. He knew it was self-destructive. He knew it was probably some Freudian expression of the fact that he hated his job, except that his problem with punctuality was chronic and extended to appointments he didn’t hate at all, appointments he actually looked forward to, like right now. It was already 12:05. He got up, took his down jacket off the back of his chair (it never fit right anymore, over that stupid fucking blazer they had to wear), and started for the door, smiling pacifically at Kimbrough, who took that moment to tilt his chair back into Gerry’s path with his fingers laced behind his head. “Lunch already?” Kimbrough said. “Well, I can’t say I blame you. After all, you did come in early today. Oh no wait.”
“Not lunch,” Gerry said. “A showing.”
“Good for you. Which place?”
“225 Valley Road.”
“That dog?” Kimbrough sat back up and let his feet touch the floor. “Better you than me. Still, break a leg and whatnot.”
“Will do,” said Gerry, and went out to his car. The house at 225 Valley Road was indeed a famous dog. It needed foundation work and was an eyesore to begin with, painted brown with red trim; but the real issue was the owner, a cheap ancient Yankee who’d moved in with his daughter in Maine. He didn’t hassle them, particularly, about the house sitting empty and drawing no offers, but he refused to spend one dollar to make the place more presentable and wouldn’t come down on the asking price either. You couldn’t talk to people like that. Which is why Gerry never talked to him. Thus the house had sat there, fully staged, for fourteen months now. He turned into the driveway, the shoots in its cracked asphalt just greening, and parked behind a red Mazda. He went around to the back door and pushed it open with two fingers. On the kitchen table by the drawn curtains were two Subway wrappers, one still rolled up and full and the other splayed open, little sesame seeds and bits of shredded lettuce spilling out of it.
“You’re late,” Alina said from the chair. “I ate.”
“Of course I’m late,” he said. “Kimbrough held me up.”
“Well, my lunch hour’s almost gone now,” she said, her petulance half-real. “I don’t think you’re going to have time to eat.”
“I’ve told you,” he said, hanging his coat on the door hinge, throwing the accursed blazer on the tiled floor, “I like it when you start without me.” And he stood across the room and held her gaze, smiling, until she understood what he wanted.
—
When there was a crisis, a tragedy, you wanted it to change you—or not change, but reveal you, show you who you really were when all the usual bullshit worries were stripped away. Show you your true, best self. And that had happened to Karen, for a while, anyway. On the day it seemed to everyone like the world might be ending, she bore the added fear that her husband—her handsome, sweet, feckless, stupid, thoughtless, naïve fuckup of a husband—was dead, caught in the middle of a terrorist attack of all ridiculous things, in a strange place where he knew no one, alone in some crowd, never coming back home. And for all her complex feelings toward him, for all the ambivalence and the difficult, tangled nature of her thoughts about their future, on that day, under that threat, her whole being had reoriented as simply as a compass needle toward one thought: Please, God, let him be safe and alive. Let him come home to his family.
She even thought at one point that she might be having a religious awakening. She could see in retrospect that she’d overreacted, although if she was overreacting then so was pretty much everyone else in the world, and if everyone reacted the same way, that meant it wasn’t an overreaction, right? No one wanted to live in fear all the time; still, when the fear was gone she wanted its epiphany, its de-complication of herself, to last. But life just crept back in. You wanted to be changed, but change was very hard, so hard that even one of the major events in the history of the entire world was ultimately no match for the pettiness and impatience inside you, the mundane frustrations that ruled your average day, the tiny, aggravating reflexes that at some indeterminate point had just made your life what it was doomed to be.
Mark had no head for finance. His gifts were artistic, or at any rate had to do with beauty, with craft. Yet he fancied himself some deep thinker. He wanted to make a killing. His business, his actual business, could have been performing so much better. But instead of doing practical things, he was back to reading books at night about how to attain great wealth through a positive attitude. And this after his foray into online investing, which had pretty near destroyed them. His gullibility, which was really a form of sweetness, was a huge part of what had attracted her to him in the first place, back when they were young and dumb and flirting in various Berkshire bars, with their whole lives in front of them. Now that exact same quality, or her perception of it, had pickled into something that made her wonder seriously if she might be going crazy.
“When was the last time you checked in with that lawyer?” she said to him. He was lying on the floor playing Slaps with Haley. He was a little better at it than a man his age probably should have been.
“What lawyer?” he said.
“In New York City. That guy.”
“Oh yeah. Back in March, I think? No news.”
“What does that mean, no news?”
“The wheels of justice turn slowly, is I
guess what it means.”
“Don’t you think you should maybe take a less passive attitude about it? It’s a lot of money.”
“The way I figure it,” Mark said, “the lawyers are in the business of making money. In this case, he only makes money if the suit goes forward and is successful. So why wouldn’t he already be doing everything he could think of?”
“Yeah, Mommy,” Haley said, and giggled.
“We did my deposition by webcam. He doesn’t need me to bug him. He’s got bosses to do that. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to tell him to do differently anyway.”
Haley can’t see it, Karen thought. She was going through a period where she was very close to him. The two of them had their little society, defined in large part by their rolling their eyes at Mommy. But she would grow up and figure him out. Then maybe Mommy would start to get some of the vindicating sympathy she deserved.
She felt no sense of control over her life; she could control the weeks, maybe, but not the years. He read his cockamamie books about success in bed at night while she lay awake beside him thinking about their proximity to failure, and somehow he didn’t even feel the panic radiating from her. Her job at Mullins Day School was boring and menial but she couldn’t quit—it would be like pulling her finger out of a dike. Karen could really only influence the direction of their lives, she felt, by influencing him. Which was both easy and hard. You could get him to do what you wanted, however resentfully, on a given day, but there seemed no way to change the course of the man he was.
—
There was no good reason Gerry couldn’t just take Alina to his place for their lunch hours. He lived alone. His house was closer to the office—close enough that there was the risk of some other co-worker happening by and recognizing Alina’s Mazda in the driveway; but no way could that be considered riskier than their basically using as a motel room a home currently listed for sale by their employer, an offense so inventive it would have ended both their jobs on the spot, not to mention, very likely, her marriage. It was all pretty raw and perverse, which he liked, not because he was into taking chances but because he was way into the idea that he could convince her to take them. That part was intoxicating. Anyway, there was something about his house, apparently, that women in general seemed not to care for.