Clean Breaks

by Ruby Lang

  “I can’t believe you’re taking his side.”

  “I’m not. I meant me. We’ve arrived, and we didn’t need you to check your phone for directions.”

  Helen pulled into a long, circular drive and shut off the ignition. They’d arrived at the yoga center.

  Sarah sat in the car for a second. “Oh come on, you have to admit you got a little, tiny bit lost,” she called after Helen’s departing figure.

  Helen flipped her the bird.

  Sarah had to agree grudgingly that a day of spa and yoga on these serene, green grounds seemed like a good choice. They passed a gleaming rock garden and a fragrant patch of herbs filled with enthusiastic bees and butterflies. A quietly ebullient young woman showed them a sunlit studio and a massage room. She spoke about snail extract facial masks, and they had an animated conversation about juicing.

  “I like it,” Sarah said when they got back to the car, “but do you think it might be a little pricey? Especially if we invite Petra’s mom, her sister, her sister’s partner, and Joanie. Would they pay their own way?”

  “I don’t know. I think we’re going to have to check up on this stuff. This is the first wedding-type thing I’ve ever had to plan. At least Petra isn’t having bridesmaids, so we don’t have to spring for dresses. We just basically have to show up. I want to do something that Petra will love, though. She refs all of our fights, lets us sleep on her couch. She holds us together.”

  “That’s a pretty thankless role. We should have started thinking about this months ago.”

  “We were busy.”

  Sarah was silent. She had been sick.

  “Are you worried about money?” Helen asked.

  “Well, I’m still working enough to cover ob/gyn malpractice insurance and student loans and, you know, my kale habit.”

  Barely.

  Helen didn’t say much as she pulled back onto the freeway.

  “For so much of my life, I’ve been so focused. Completing med school. Getting through my residency. Going into practice. So, I guess I needed a breather. But I feel like I dropped the ball—on my patients, on my friendships, on the things that matter.”

  “Sarah.”

  “But at the same time, I can’t seem to make myself start again or be the same way again. It’s like something in me has frozen up. Usually I can talk myself through a setback. When I didn’t match to the hospital I applied for, when I didn’t get the rotation I wanted, I worked hard with what I was given—I reorganized myself and thrived. But this time, this . . . illness had almost nothing to do with me—it’s not even really a setback, right? I got sick, and it wasn’t about my diet, and it wasn’t about exercise or sleep or stress or how damn hard I worked. It wasn’t about anything I could control—”

  “Or anything you could blame yourself for, Sarah. Isn’t that really the issue?”

  Sarah slumped in her seat. Did Jake really deserve her anger? He had been nervous. It was his first time with her—with anyone after his wife. And yet, in his clumsy, misguided way, he had been trying to comfort her and tell her that he was there for her. And she had yelled at him. He had been trying so hard to be a good person, and she had run off because—because his care and immediate acceptance was frightening to her.

  Sarah scrubbed her face with her hands. “We have got to stop having earnest conversations in the car.”

  “Believe me, it’s better this way. If one of us is driving, we can’t look each other deep in the eyes.”

  “Just for that, I’m going to eat the Pop-Tarts you have stashed in the glove compartment.”

  “Knowing how you feel about simple carbs, eating Pop-Tarts would be as much a punishment for you as for me.”

  Sarah slumped in the seat. “Fuck off.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jake was used to fielding nerve-wracking after-hours phone calls. But the one he was listening to right now was making him pinch his forehead in frustration.

  His father, the Reverend Telly Li.

  His father wasn’t terrifying. He was slight and serious looking. His glasses were always a little askew. He always had an absent-minded smile. Most of the time, he looked eager—eager to please, to tell people what was on his mind, to just be in the room.

  But as a voice over the telephone, the Reverend Doctor Telly Li was a lot more disconcerting.

  “The conference is Tuesday through Friday. I know it’s short notice, but I wanted to see how you are doing.”

  Unspoken was the fact that they hadn’t seen each other since Jake’s divorce was finalized. The reverend was dismayed, to say the least. The thought of dealing with his father now—now especially because of the split, and because of Sarah—made him tense. Jake made a note to get an extra set of sheets. And a new pillow.

  Mulder gave a sharp bark.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s my dog.”

  A pause. “You have a dog now?”

  And there it was. Slightly mistrustful.

  Jake didn’t take the bait. “Her name is Mulder. You’ll meet her Tuesday, I guess.”

  “Wednesday night, actually. I’m just surprised that you are taking on extra responsibility for a pet now that you’re alone. You have to walk a dog.”

  “Yes, I may have heard something about that.”

  “Your job is sometimes time consuming. You have emergencies.”

  “There will always be emergencies in life. Besides, I have a walker and a house with a yard now.”

  A pause.

  “That’s true,” the reverend said slowly.

  At least he didn’t say something about swing sets and children. When Jake was still married, the reverend had pestered him to move to a house with a garden and lawn and spoke to Ilse about grandkids. But now it seemed he was going to let it pass. And to his credit, the reverend had given up on trying to get Jake and Ilse back together. For a while, his father had emailed and talked and sent newspaper clippings and email forwards on how to save a marriage. He’d even driven down suddenly, intent on giving them a sex talk.

  Luckily Ilse had not been there.

  Well, at least there wasn’t much to clean up, Jake thought, looking around at his nearly empty house.

  The reverend’s arrival was going to put a crimp in his plans to woo Sarah. Or not woo Sarah and just be cool and get to know her like a stranger would. She had at least texted him back yesterday, accepting his apology, but the reverend’s presence would be a painful reminder for her of all the things they had and hadn’t been to each other.

  • • •

  The reverend arrived on Wednesday night, as promised, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and polished shoes. His hair was a little grayer, and his glasses seemed greasy. He didn’t chatter as much as he usually did, but otherwise, things seemed much the same as they had been for the last twenty or so years. The reverend was consistent—he had been almost strenuously consistent even after Jake’s mother died after a short battle with breast cancer when Jake was nine.

  It was late enough that they both went to bed fairly soon after his arrival.

  Instead of ceding his slightly bigger bedroom to his father, Jake showed him the guest room. Not that his father cared. Without preamble, the reverend sat on the edge of the bed. Maybe he began to pray.

  His father always looked vulnerable. Jake had forgotten that. Another thing that hadn’t changed.

  Jake closed the door and left his father to his murmurings.

  Jake’s Thursday started early, early in the morning with a phone call from his school. One of the special education students had been reported missing by her foster family. She had been in class on Wednesday.

  It turned out that the student had gotten into a car accident and was afraid to face her foster parents. She had spent the night at a friend’s house. But halfway through the night, she realized she didn’t feel well, so she’d gone to the emergency department. She was still in the waiting room when they tracked her down.
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  In the past, Jake had sometimes wondered as he shuttled to and from hospitals if he’d run into Sarah there. But he wasn’t lucky this time.

  By the time Jake had finished visiting the student and talking to the foster parents, the girl’s teachers, doctors, and CPS, it was late. His father was still out. Oddly enough, the table held a box of donuts from Voodoo. Jake could well imagine an ecclesiastical conference that included a stop at a hipster pastry shop. Had they stood in line wearing their collars? He peeked inside. His father had ordered a donut with chocolate frosting and a vanilla pentagram. Jake stuffed it into his mouth immediately. He hadn’t had lunch, after all.

  Halfway through the third (and probably last) bite, he realized his dog was not begging for donuts—because she was nowhere to be found.

  He checked the backyard. Nothing. The basement door was shut tight, and there was no one down there. His bedroom was empty, the hastily thrown-back covers from this morning still half-hanging off his bed. He remembered the disarray that sleeping with Sarah had left. And now, here he was sharing quarters with a person who had preached a pointed sermon about wayward teens and the evils of premarital sex not three days after Sarah had been caught with that boy.

  Now, of course, Jake knew that the whole thing had been a tempest in a teapot. But everything Sarah did—that he did—back then had been magnified and scrutinized because they were so visible even when they just wanted to shrink into the background. Sarah was vilified even though earlier that same year, the basketball team had decorated their lockers with condoms, and Sheryl What’s-her-name had gotten pregnant. Blowjobs in the bleachers, wild parties in the woods—he couldn’t remember the names of classmates who’d happily participated in all that fairly normal teenaged stuff. But Sarah had been caught with her shirt off once, and it had stuck. The community had slut-shamed her—even the tiny Asian population of Laketon and her parents. It was almost ridiculous, especially now that he saw it in the context of his training and because he worked with kids who had to grapple with much harsher realities. But the instance had repercussions, good and bad, for Sarah’s life.

  He heard the door open and the click, click of Mulder’s paws on the bare hallway floor. “Oh, you’re back,” his dad said—guiltily?—when Jake took the leash from his dad’s hand.

  The reverend looked a little sweaty under his shirt, and Mulder had loped off to the kitchen to slurp up some water.

  “You were at the park?” Jake asked, frowning.

  “You have chocolate in your beard,” his dad said, avoiding the question.

  “I wasn’t expecting you back till later. You usually go out to dinner with your colleagues and all that. Catch up on God stuff, gossip about the latest theology scandals, you know.”

  “Mmm.”

  The reverend shrugged and passed Jake to shut himself in the bathroom. There was a grass stain on his short-sleeved dress shirt.

  Mulder passed out in a corner of the kitchen. Judging from her happy sleep and the dry leaves in her coat, she’d been playing outdoors for a while.

  Jake was getting an odd feeling about his dad’s visit.

  “I could make dinner,” Jake called.

  Jake wasn’t really in the mood to probe his dad’s behavior, but the reverend wasn’t a romp-in-the-park-and-roll-around-to-get-grass-stains kind of guy. Jake’s instincts were on alert.

  “Let’s go out to eat! Let’s try something different!” the reverend said.

  His dad never wanted to go out for food. The reverend’s position as a preacher in a tiny church in a rural region with only a small population of Chinese people hadn’t been enough to support him and a family, so his father also worked as a bookkeeper. Money had sometimes been tight. They never ate out.

  “Dad, is there really a conference?”

  “There really is a conference.” A pause. “I just didn’t attend.”

  Jake took a breath—and decided to change the subject. His family counseling professor would have disapproved. “What do you feel like eating?” he said, getting out his phone.

  “I don’t know! Something different!”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  His dad threw up his hands. “Something interesting and exciting! This is a big city!”

  Jake shook his head.

  They went to a Korean taco stand, and then they got crème brûlée flavored cotton candy, which, despite his father’s alarming new carnival-like sense of whimsy, was probably too ambitious. They both ended up abandoning it. His father saw a juice truck, though, and enthusiastically ordered the biggest, greenest juice he could find. He was now sitting on a park bench, sipping it eagerly and talking to one of the tattooed hipsters sitting next to him about the durability of Doc Martens boots.

  Kale juice reminded Jake of Sarah. The sheets reminded him of Sarah. If he wasn’t careful, pretty soon he’d think the birds were chirping her name. Greg would have called him a wuss for pining for a woman he’d slept with once—for pining after a girl since high school, since junior high, since long before that really.

  Greg could be an asshole. But he was back with his girlfriend and happier than ever.

  “I’ve seen Sarah Soon in town a few times,” he said to his dad.

  He didn’t know why he brought it up, especially because, he realized with a painful throb, he wasn’t sure that she had forgiven him, despite the text. But there was an unexpectedly deep vein of yearning in him lately, and he just couldn’t stop excavating more and more of it.

  “Sarah. Sarah Soon? How is she?”

  His father said it rather doubtfully, as if he were expecting news that Jake had found her sleeping in a trash can. Or maybe that was Jake’s own defensive projection. He found himself saying, “She is amazing. She’s done great things with her life, just like I knew she would. She’s only gotten stronger and stronger.”

  His father laughed. “She was pretty strong-willed to begin with, as I recall.”

  It probably wasn’t a compliment. Or maybe it was. Sarah would have seen it as one.

  He considered his eager, awkward, outgoing father. In a way, he was deeply conservative—but that word was wrong. It was too simple, too evocative of pursed-lip white men and ladies wearing suits and hats. There was something joyless about the word. Jake’s dad wasn’t joyless. There had been hard years after Jake’s mom died. His dad had come to the States from Taiwan to go to Union Theological College on a scholarship. He was a fixture in Laketon. He was friends with the other two church heads—the frowning Catholic priest, the jolly Baptist minister—and when all three went to the bar together, people usually tried to come up a punch line about them.

  In the pulpit, his dad was clear, organized, and forceful. Jake’s gradual loss of faith had also been a loss of his sense of his father as a man to be admired and followed. In the last five years, he had stopped believing and going to church. And until Jake’s divorce, his father had convinced himself that Jake was going through a phase.

  He wasn’t. Although now, apparently the reverend was experiencing his own struggles. “There have been some changes in my life, son,” his father said. “Ever since you left, probably. But it came to a head when you and Ilse—well, at least that’s when I recognized it. I know, I know, your divorce doesn’t affect me directly,” he said when Jake started to speak, “but I got the sense of where did the time go? And I looked up and I was in this town and our church was getting smaller, and for the first time in a long time, I asked myself why I was still in Laketon trying to hold this congregation together. I prayed to God for answers and I didn’t find any.”

  His dad sighed. “There was a conference today. And there’s more tomorrow. And I was ready to go and I just didn’t. I drove around Portland. I went to Powell’s and hid for a while.”

  “Are you having a spiritual crisis, Dad?”

  “That’s an interesting question. No. At least I don’t think so. But I am recognizing that I feel powerless in a way I haven’t since your mother died. Or maybe I�
�ve been that way since your mother died and I didn’t know it because I didn’t . . . well, I just didn’t give myself the time. Also, I’m thinking about getting remarried,” he added.

  “Wait. What? How? How is that the logical conclusion to those sets of sentences?”

  His father shrugged, and Jake found the anger that he’d been holding in check bubble up. This is not the time. When he was younger, Jake functioned as his father’s cleanup crew—finishing the dishes that his dad left in the sink, turning out all the lights in the house, making sure his dad ate. After all that had happened lately, Jake didn’t want his father to lean on him. But there he was.

  “After your mom died, I wish I could say I found great consolation in the Bible. But I found great consolation in you.”

  Jake shook his head.

  “That sounds unhealthy, but it was how I coped. Maybe it is, as you say, a spiritual crisis, because I didn’t seek comfort in God. I always did better talking with people than I did with theology. I’m sorry, Jacob. I shouldn’t be burdening you with this.”

  “Who is this person you want to marry?”

  “Her name is Judy. She’s a pediatrician in Kennewick, originally from China. She’s a bit younger. She wants babies, of course.”

  Jake nodded and tried to absorb the information.

  “We haven’t really had a discussion about the future,” his father added. “But she must be expecting a wedding and children because we are dating—I know it’s not how you kids do this nowadays. When young people date, they just go out and there is no guarantee that it will lead to marriage. But I’m old fashioned and I’m alone. And now you’re alone, too. Except maybe you are dating Sarah?”

  Of course his dad had pierced right through to it.

  “I’d like to. If she’ll have me.”

  He and his father had both been half-lying to each other and themselves for so long, and now all of those thoughts were so knotted and messy that Jake couldn’t even distinguish his own or his father’s feelings—whether it was that he felt sorry for Jake’s solitude or doubtful that Sarah would ever settle down, Jake wasn’t sure.