If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  The counselor frowned and straightened some papers on his desk. He referenced the policy again, said that he’d need to see the documentation. He said he had never had this situation before, and even if she was married, Irene might need to leave the school. He would have to check with the board. In his admitting that he was not sure what to do, Kathleen saw an opening.

  “We’ll go to the safe deposit box today,” she said, knowing she was only bargaining for a little more time.

  When he excused them, they walked out into the narrow hallway, waxed tiles and rows of grubby lockers.

  “If he would have asked me … ” Irene started to say, and Kathleen put her arms around her where they stood, flanked by the lessons happening behind closed doors, squeaking shoes in the nearby gymnasium, and the smell of dust, until the bell rang and the other kids spilled out around them.

  * * *

  Her mother was mending socks at the kitchen table, and her father was staring at pounds of ground beef, calculating how many patties to make. It was only the five of them now. Once they had been almost twice as many, and out of habit he had thawed too much. He asked Kathleen to chop an onion. It always made him cry. Her work in the hospital kitchen had given her some expertise with a knife, and she sliced quickly after washing her hands. She helped her father form the patties and walked with him to the grill. The light above her mother in the kitchen glowed yellow. She could hear her other brothers in the house. Mikey had just started sleeping again in the room he had once shared with Sammy.

  One thing that Kathleen remembered about Sammy was that he liked to barbeque, because he liked to be outside. He was not good at it, he was not precise, but he enjoyed especially being under the fall leaves, just when the first bite of cold made the air smell amber, face against the heat of the charcoal, and the stainless tongs flashing.

  She had not talked with her parents about what she would do after graduation. She knew she could go full time in the kitchen, and as awful as the work sounded, she did like having her own money. All of her sisters had moved right on from their father’s home into someone else’s, to the home of another man, to a shared apartment with a girlfriend; Darlene, even, had gone to live with her then fiancé’s parents. Kathleen did not know if this was the expectation or just how it had worked out.

  Her father was scraping the grill, and even this small motion showed the muscles at his back and across his neck. He was handsome. He had never hit any of them, but Kathleen thought that if he had, it would have surely hurt. Once her mother threatened her with a belt, but she never wore a belt, and by the time she found one, her anger had quelled, and Kathleen’s punishment was to organize the hall closet and the closet she shared with her sisters. She spent the rest of her summer afternoon going through old shoeboxes and re-hanging crooked, mostly worn-out shirts and shaking the dust off their winter coats and checking the pockets for change. She found thirty-five cents, a stick of gum, and a handful of crumpled cigarette butts. She also found an attachment that had gone missing from the vacuum, but no belts, and when she closed the closet doors, she liked the clean feeling, everything neat and contained, so she took the sponge from the kitchen and scrubbed at the brown marks around the doorknobs that had built up from being touched by so many hands. In school, she had learned that finger grease was from the eccrine glands, but she did not remember what the real purpose was.

  When her father put the burgers on the grill, there was a sound like a can opening, a hiss. She thought to ask him about staying on after graduation. He was nudging the meat with the spatula and kicking at a piece of snow. It had been sunny that day, and there was some low cloud cover that had come up at dusk, so the air was warm for the season, but the ground was still frozen in the places that had stayed shaded.

  Maybe she would not stay. Maybe she would talk to the counselor about taking early graduation so she could get on full time before the baby came. Maybe they could find a converted garage or a mother-in-law somewhere, and Kathleen could get a job on a night shift so she could be home during the day when Irene was at school. Being poor did not scare her, and she knew it did not scare Irene either.

  What scared her was slipping. Her sisters had slipped from the house into lives that did not seem that much different to Kathleen. Sammy had slipped on the ice, and away from them. Her father turned all of the burgers and asked her to go inside and set the table, and she did. She put the plates out on the worn tablecloth, sliced a tray of pale wintertime tomatoes, and took a new jar of mustard from the pantry.

  On the basketball team, she had liked the idea of them all as moving parts. At first, they ran their plays poorly, but when they started to get it down, the moves felt sure and fluid. At work, sometimes all the kitchen ladies synced into a perfect rhythm of grating and stewing and plating, the clatter of crockery and cutting boards being flipped was percussive against the stainless steel countertops, as order after order was loaded up onto the delivery carts, smoothly and quickly.

  She wanted this sureness, this feeling of doing things right. As her brothers and her parents sat down at the table, she understood why her sisters had left. The chance to change. The chance to have their own table, something that belonged to them. Like when she had lied to the school counselor about Sammy’s betrothed, the chance to take the story and bend it as much as the facts would allow—not always to a happy ending, but a better one.

  Chapter Twenty

  Melanie

  Summer, 2007

  Monday at work after Kyle’s funeral, Melanie was shy. She was not sure what to say to Alex. She had spent the rest of the weekend vaguely shocked she had let him into her house. This was not a good thing, she reminded herself; she was breaking her own rules about What Happens In… Stays In… It did not have to be Las Vegas to be a good idea.

  He must have felt the same way, because the whole day he did not swing by her office or email her anything. She thought she saw the slope of his head for a minute by the server room, but when she turned the corner, there was no one.

  The last thing on her calendar was an all-office meeting. By the time she got to the conference room all of the chairs were taken, and so she leaned against the wall just outside and wrinkled her nose at the administrative assistant, who incorrectly dialed the number for the telephone bridge three times in a row, until finally one of the developers took the speaker phone, shaped like a star with its five points of sound, from her and tapped out the digits in perfect precision.

  “Do you think it’s going to be bad?” asked the person next to her, and she turned to him, Alex, jammed into the other side of the doorframe.

  “No,” she said. “There are no snacks. Usually when it’s bad there are snacks.” She said this with authority, though she could not tell if he believed her or not.

  They listened to a recap of the quarterly earnings call from the publicly traded parent, and then they learned their business unit was dramatically underperforming. Not to worry, said the voice from corporate—she thought it might be her boss but she had not caught his name—there would be some cost-cutting measures that would get them right back on track.

  Melanie looked around at the room.

  “Are we on mute?” someone whispered, and the developer who had dialed the numbers shook his head and stabbed the red button.

  “Now, yes,” he said, but no one had anything to say after that.

  The voice asked for questions, but there were no questions. The voice implored; he really wanted them to ask some questions. He covered the targeted 20 percent budget reductions, explained that all nonessential travel would be suspended, and assured them that he understood most of them would do more for the company than to simply abide by these minimums.

  The call ended, and the employees filed back to their desks. At her laptop, Melanie waited for the follow up email that would give her the details of the reductions.

  * * *

  When the
company had first been acquired, she had met with a local contract auditor from the legal firm Chicago headquarters had hired. Her name was Jenny, and she had said she was only looking at individual department budgets, mostly for mathematical errors, so they could be sure about establishing a baseline.

  Her hands were beautiful, Melanie noticed, with her ring finger circled by a studded platinum band and the other digits slim and unadorned.

  “You know, I’ve been out of the workforce for a while,” she said, by way of explaining, Melanie thought, why a woman who was at least mid-thirties had been sent to do what was essentially a beginner’s job. “My kids are four and six.”

  “Oh, those are such fun ages,” Melanie said, which is what she usually said about people’s children, no matter how old they were.

  Jenny had smiled and agreed that they were fun. She said her husband was extremely busy with work, and she thought she would try it again, to get out of the house. She said she was on the wrong side of the mommy wars, with a light and nervous laugh, because she thought it was harder to work full time.

  “Still, I think this is going to stay temporary,” she said, looking to the side. “Okay, shall we get to it?”

  After their meeting, Jenny said her report would reflect that she had found no issues with calculation, and that the distribution of funds was sound.

  Her hair was very fluffy and curled around her face.

  Yet, even though there was nothing to flag, Jenny said, she estimated the parent company would still ask for at least a one third reduction. Then, Melanie had shaken hands with Jenny—she liked her, despite why she was there—and chatted with her on the way to the exit. For a moment she thought of asking her to coffee sometime, but figured it might be seen as a conflict of interest, and she opened the glass door into the cold of late winter, and then went back to her office and shopped online for something to wear to the holiday party.

  It had been almost a year and a half since then, so she figured she should have expected this next round of cuts. At 5:10 p.m., there was still no message, so she started working again on her report of the industrial marketplace. She wrote phrases like sales velocity and HVAC ecosystem without irony or pause. She had never imagined herself as someone who thought the way she thought now, in percentages and acronyms, pitching, more than actually figuring anything out. At 5:20 p.m., there was still no message, and she wondered for a minute if her budget had been zeroed out. She had actually always been very careful, with detail given down to the penny and inflations built in so she could come in under her number consistently, because that was the kind of fake successes she had learned were noticed. She logged into the company travel account and saw that none of her upcoming trips had been flagged for review. That was good, she thought. Or maybe corporate was just being slow. She watered her potted palm tree from a glass of water that had been sitting on her desk the entire day that she had not quite managed to drink, and she switched off the repti-lights. At 5:35 p.m. her BlackBerry buzzed. She anticipated that it was finally the budget email, but it was Alex.

  Subject: I’m still in the office. You?

  Instead of replying, she walked across the thin, dirty carpet, past the conference room and the kitchen, past the servers whining even though it had not been a hot day.

  “Hey,” she said, through the open door.

  “Hi,” he said. “Did you get a budget email?”

  “No,” she said. “You?”

  “I don’t have a budget,” he said. The overhead lights of his office were blaring, but she could see his laptop was packed up and that he was finished working.

  He did not say anything about the funeral, but he asked her if she would like to come have a drink. She trailed him in her car to a suburban neighborhood that was generally in the middle of where they both lived. When they arrived, she parked several spaces away from him because it seemed presumptuous to get too close.

  The bar was dim and smelled like old cigarettes. Alex ordered beers for them both, and the clack of balls from a game of pool was like awkward punctuation. Her hair felt a little greasy and her clothes rumpled, but she ignored this and concentrated on the brittle sound of plastic against plastic, and sometimes the chalky smoosh of a stick’s tip.

  They had a table midway between the curve of the bar and the door. As Melanie wondered if someone they knew might walk in, she took a long pull of her beer, and she heard a pool player break. The beer was hoppy and cold, the pressure against the cue ball sharp.

  She asked Alex what was going on with him, and he said that he just wanted to see her. She considered his sheepish look in this strip mall bar, and she remembered again the way he had thrown his jacket down over the peanut shells back in San Antonio. There were a lot of things she wanted to ask him, about his life, his spouse, but she did not say anything for a long time. She noticed how the felt on the pool table was worn, showing board underneath. The lamps swayed, multicolored and strong on their chains. She felt a little woozy, but she wriggled her chair around the edge of the table so that their knees were touching, and she flagged the waiter down for another beer.

  “I thought it was strange they didn’t say anything about Kyle on the call,” she said.

  “What would they say?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe, Sorry? They must be sorry; they’re going to have to pay his life insurance.”

  “There are eight thousand employees at corporate,” he said. “People die there every day. It’s part of their cost of doing business.”

  “That’s depressing,” she said.

  The light in the bar was murky, and the place was filling up, more people were hanging around the tables, some of them starting to make bets.

  When Melanie had first started working at the company, it was just another job in a line of jobs. She was young enough that she did not have a true sense of loyalty to an employer, but she was old enough that she tried not to bounce around too much because she thought it looked bad. It was not the life she had imagined when she was growing up, tethered to a smartphone and constantly purging her small condo to make room for anything new, but she thought it was working out all right.

  She remembered, in her final year of high school, getting the college admissions notices. Her father had said he would pay for her to go anywhere, but she chose to stay close to home, because of her mother, she had thought then, but she understood later it was because of herself. She was scared to go too far, because even then she had seen how even a little distance could bust people apart. Now, because work had taken her out of Colorado, she thought a lot about how life would be different in different cities. What if she had moved to New York, L.A., or Chicago? Denver had been easy to stay in, big enough that she could move out of the suburbs to a more urban neighborhood when she left her mother’s apartment, making life feel different for a while, though there was still the familiar view of the brief downtown skyline and the mountains poking at the clouds in the distance. She lived close to both of her parents, and occasionally, if the weather was nice or the wind was not blowing too hard, she would take a long bike ride to her mother’s.

  She looked at Alex and gave him a half-smile. Something dropped in the bar’s kitchen, a clattering of glass and steel, laughter. The right advice would be to stop seeing him outside of work, and she told him so.

  “I’m not happy at home,” he said. “You know that.”

  There was more laugher, the sound of plates being stacked, and he had a look she had seen before, but not on him. They didn’t have much in common besides what had happened after the peanut shells and their shared work email domain, but if the timing were different, maybe they could figure things out together. Maybe his wife was another right person in the wrong moment. How to account for that, she did not know.

  After they had paid the bill, he walked her to her car, with his arm at her waist, and she liked the way his hand felt
, resting at the band of her pants. For a moment, her father flashed in her head, and it was the first time that she had thought it: she was just like the women her father had been drawn to, women who he stayed out late with, plied with a vision of life that was less complicated—no kid and no years of marriage with all the hurts and resentments and disappointments to bog them down, just a smooth sail of after-hours cocktails and the courage that comes from being away from home. It was not the women’s fault, she was sure of this. Her father, like Alex, had to make his own path. They were the ones with the most to lose, while people like her would float.

  In the parking lot, at the door to her car, he pulled her close so that their chests were pressing.

  “I really am not happy at home,” he said, reminding her, and she wondered if her father had talked like this to a relative stranger, saying to her what he could not say to his wife.

  “I know,” she said, but did not pull away.

  When he kissed her, she could not stop thinking of her mother on the stepstool, pulling the philodendron vines from the ceiling, cursing and crying. The half-emptied rooms of the house, the ashen pile they had left in the entryway.

  Melanie took a step back, though she felt how her body had warmed to him without her wanting it to. She liked the way he felt, the way he tasted. She liked the way he was open to her, and she had drunk just enough beer that she felt inclined to fold into him, to not be practical. Still, she said she should go.

  Alex was watching her and clasping at her hand. She knew he was thinking that he was ready to give up his life, not for her, particularly, but in general, and she wondered how she could convince him that he was wrong. He might get better sex for a few weeks or even months, but he would still be lonely, and at night he would pad around in his slippers, wondering why it was so quiet, wondering why there was no one to talk to. It would be difficult to move on. It would be difficult to commit again. Or, at least that was how her father had been. When Melanie went to stay with him, he was always restless once the sun went down, overfilling his cocktail glass and pacing.